UnNews:GMA anchor commits inexcusable race gaffe
| UnFair and UnBalanced | ✪ | UnNews | ✪ | Saturday, December 21, 2024, 18:16:59 (UTC) |
| GMA anchor commits inexcusable race gaffe | 
|
23 August 2016
HOLLYWOOD, California -- Amy Robach, a host of ABC-TV's Good Morning America, ignited a firestorm of criticism for using the term "colored people." By the end of the day, she apologized to a traumatized nation. "I mistakenly said ‘colored people’ instead of ‘people of color,’" she insisted, which would have been very different.
Robach had been talking about Hollywood's tendency to stereotype actors for certain roles, and praised the casting of a dark-skinned woman as Mary Jane in the planned sequel to Spider-Man, who happens to be white, after the inexplicable shunning of such actors for the role of Alexander Hamilton in the recent theater show of the same name. Robach's remark came on the heels of more inflammatory rhetoric by Donald Trump, who offended an audience by telling it that decades of nearly unanimous support for the Democratic Party had produced no results.
Robach seemed unaware that African American is the preferred term with which to talk about Negroes, even those in Jamaica and India. This replaced the disfavored term "colored people" in the 1960s, after tedious conversations about how white folks are also colored, though their color is white; also transitional phases involving the use of "Black" to describe brown and tan people, and subsequent phases using the terms "Bro," "Homie," and "Hey, you over there." In fact, though people of color are just like us, they are uniquely unable to tolerate unpleasant ideas and descriptions, and require a world of euphemisms and careful speaking. Robach is university-educated and knows or should know that there is an increasing set of words that are inherently hurtful, such as "American," "achievement," and "Get a job!"
Robach's gaffe induced storms of criticism, fiercer than any since Ross Perot addressed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as "you people" — and everyone knows what he meant. Robach was also criticized by the United Negro College Fund. These institutions are not guilty of racism, because they are run by people of color, who cannot be racist, because they have no true political power. Only the Presidency.
Sources[edit]
- Lauren Foreman "GMA host: ‘Colored people’ remark ‘was a mistake’". Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 22, 2016