Racist A**hole Trolls Touré So, Of Course, Touré Must Apologize

MSNBC host and cultural critic Touré is under fire this Memorial Day Weekend for, as down-the-middle website Mediaite puts it, “Chalk(ing) Up Holocaust Survival to ‘The Power of Whiteness’” in a Twitter exchange with an alleged descendant of Holocaust survivors. The right-wing blogosphere is up in arms over what “Black Nazi” Touré said, and if he really said that, maybe they’d have a point. It’s what these websites aren’t saying, though, that’s particularly telling.

Influential conservative website The Right Scoop characterized Touré’s remark as “Touré Thinks Being In A Concentration Camp Is NBD For Whitey,” Gateway Pundit said the “racist, anti–Semitic comment” came from “Black Nazi” Touré, while National Review Online described Touré’s exchange this way:

Early Saturday morning, the MSNBC host/hyperventilating philosopher Touré again enlightened the world. Facing a tweeter who mentioned that his parents had survived the Holocaust and then found the American dream, Touré responded, “The power of whiteness.”

Wow, what a horrible person that Touré is, if he really did engage in the “trivialization of 6 million Jews killed for being Jewish,” as NRO goes on to say. What’s missing from all of this outrage are a few key points, like what Touré actually said, and to whom he actually said it. Here’s the exchange in question:

The power of whiteness: RT @hope_and_chains: My family survived a concentration camp, came to the US w/ nothing, LEGALLY, and made it work.

— Touré (@Toure) May 23, 2014

The first thing you might notice is that none of these conservative sites bothered to include the cleverly meta-racist name on the guy’s Twitter feed and blog (Mediaite did mention it in passing). The banner on the DatsRacis.com site even goes it one better, blaring “Yo, Dat’s Racis’!!”

If you look at that Twitter feed, aside from racist garbage like this (or this since-deleted retweet), or classy shots at First Lady Michelle Obama that aren’t at all racist, you’ll find that Dat’s Racis’ grandfather was a POW who was imprisoned at Dachau. It’s impossible to say this for sure, but I doubt very much that anyone who survived imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp ever did so in the hopes that their descendants might one day harness the experience to try and score a cheap point on a racist Twitter feed. That bit of family history never comes up once on Dat’s Racis’ blog, despite some other fairly detailed info on his ancestors, but he launches it like a spitball to slag Touré in a Twitter fight. Trivialization, indeed…READ MORE

By: Tommy Christopher

Tommy Christopher is The Daily Banter's White House Correspondent and Political Analyst. He's been a political reporter and liberal commentator since 2007, and has covered the White House since the beginning of the Obama administration, first for PoliticsDaily, and then for Mediaite. Christopher is a frequent guest on a variety of television, radio, and online programs, and was the villain in the documentaries The Audacity of Democracy and Hating Breitbart. He's also That Guy Who Live-Tweeted His Own Heart Attack, and the only person to have ever received public apologies from both Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.