Michael Harriot: Snarking While Black

One of the more curious phenomena in the age of social justice is that the person above you on the victim pyramid gets to snark down with impunity. The person below can’t challenge, question, and surely not snark, at a person more vulnerable and marginalized than her. That would be hateful, racist, sexist, whatever. No matter that the “victim” is a lying sack of shit, blithering idiot or flaming nutjob. They’re oppressed, so shut the fuck up.

Somehow, Sarah Braasch became his obsession.

A white woman who made headlines for summoning plantation overseers police officers after she was threatened by an aggressively napping black woman has now taken up the mantle for criminal justice reform, criticizing law enforcement officials for being “hostile” and for refusing to release bodycam footage of the—

Hold up. Let me finish laughing and I’ll start over.

How hip. How cool. How snarky. He’s laughing, as if his laughing means anything to anyone. Or does it, because he’s entitled to snark his butt off at this “white woman” because he’s black.

Braasch has been trying desperately to obtain the release of video from the Yale police department. What a white woman thing to do, get the evidence. And Harriot goes to town on this whitey white thing.

After the incident made national news, the aspiring fugitive slave catcher painted herself as the victim of a vast negro conspiracy whose delicate white femininity was “destroyed by the Yale administration, the press and the global internet rage mob.” Oh, Roxane Gay was in on it, too.

If Roxane Gay was on it, does that not end all questions? I mean, it’s Roxane Gay. And seeking video of the incident in order to show what happened is about “delicate white femininity” as it gets for seeking the police video. After all, if she’s an “aspiring fugitive slave catcher,” what else could it be?

Braasch eventually founded and became the lone member of the Sarah Lives Matter movement. According to the New Haven Register, on Monday, the self-appointed Rosa Parks of police callers testified at a Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission hearing, challenging the Yale Police Department to release the police footage of the incident because she claimed it would totally exonerate her. But Braasch’s may-I-speak-to-your-manager trick didn’t work; the police would only agree to let Braasch view the footage in their office.

“I just feel that the videos exonerate me and I feel that they expose Yale’s gross malfeasance,” Braasch said after the hearing. “I’ve been vilified on a global scale as somebody akin to a genocidal villain and I’ll never be able to get a job again.”

On the one hand, if she has been wrongly maligned, falsely branded a racist, the video would show what in fact happened. But who wants do everything in her power to get the video to show what transpired when you can just snark while black?

In the police shootings of Emantic “E.J.” BradfordWillie McCoy, and Laquan McDonald, authorities have allowed family members to watch the bodycam footage in private while intentionally withholding video evidence from the public. I bet Sarah was furious at the prospect of being treated like a common negro. When she saw the video that proved she was had no malicious intent, I bet she—

Wait. What?

She didn’t watch the video?

Had Harriot spent a little less time coming up with such effective bon mots as “I bet Sarah was furious at the prospect of being treated like a common negro,” and tried his darndest to think, it might have occurred to him that the difference was that the families of young black men killed by cops weren’t present for their murder, and watching the video was their first opportunity to personally see what happened.

In contrast, Sarah Braasch was present, already knew what happened, and so watching the video by herself, without its release, served no purpose, unlike the case of Laquan McDonald. The only point of obtaining the video is to release it publicly to address the fury directed at Braasch because of the mob’s leap to outrage when the woke invariably assumed it could only be some racist white woman who would be disturbed by “napping while black.”

But even though Braasch hasn’t seen the video, she contends that she feels like it would exonerate her, adding that the “supervising officer who came late to the scene…was very hostile to me…He began berating me and I found his behavior to be very hostile…I was the harasser instead of the person being harassed.”

Was Braasch the harasser or the harassed? She certainly has her belief about the propriety of her actions, because she was there. You know who wasn’t there? MIchael Harriot, not that his complete absence of knowledge gets in the way of his promiscuous snark.

Since the incident, Sarah said she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and constant harassment. Or, as some experts might call her condition:

Justice.

Sick burn, dude. And there will be no woke mob ripping this nasty man to shreds for his denigration of a woman who seeks nothing more than the dreaded racist evidence of a video.

Had anyone written such a vapid screed about a black woman desperately seeking evidence to show what happened, there would be outrage galore, as well there should be. Not because it involved someone black, or someone female, but because every person wrongly maligned should be able to present the evidence that they were not the evil person the mob believed them to be.

But Michael Harriot doesn’t need to entertain the possibility that maybe he’s wrong. He doesn’t need to face facts or indulge in that bourgeois exercise of thinking. He can snark his ass off, hurl ad hominems at will, because nobody can touch this black man fighting against racism.

Who would be so awful as to point out that Harriot is utterly full of shit, relying on snark and insipid slurs to compensate for the fact that he’s a blithering idiot? After all, when a writer is black, and the subject is racism, he can get away with being a completely moronic asshole, and there’s nothing anyone can say about it.

18 thoughts on “Michael Harriot: Snarking While Black

    1. Skink

      “But dad, it’s Smokey!”

      “Live from Daryl’s House” was T.V. worth watching. Thanks, GD– I might get nothing done today.

      1. Guitardave

        Good stuff no doubt. …and a big R.I.P. to T-Bone Woulk…truly a players player/producer/sandwich-maker.

        1. Skink

          Hopefully, he’s spent the last few years strummin’ with my old early-morning drinkin’ pal, Jaco. If he wandered the Swamp with me, he might not have been beaten to death by an asshole.

  1. Dan

    What an asshole. I guess I should be grateful for one thing, though–his style of writing has made it blindingly obvious that he has nothing worthwhile to say, so no reason to waste time reading anything else he writes.

    1. SHG Post author

      One of the foremost failings of social justice ideology is that the “oppressor” can’t challenge the “oppressed,” which gives this shit-for-brains the right to spew his snarky idiocy with impunity, since anyone who calls out his bullshit must be racist. This is irrational and unsustainable, and stands a damn good chance of becoming enforceable when the woke take over.

  2. Skink

    “Or, as some experts might call her condition:

    Justice.”

    Who are these “experts?” Certainly not this dolt. He writes this cabbage-headed crap with repetition. He’s a sitcom that repeats the same lame story. He’d be meaningless if put through the rigor of thinking, but there are other dolts, useful to only him, who read his junk and say, “yup, racist.”

  3. B. McLeod

    Before much time has passed, Harriot will find himself accused of groping, stare-raping, or otherwise disrespecting some woman’s safe spaces. When the #MeToo and #TimesUp hate mobs go after his ignorant ass, all of this shit he just spewed will be rammed home as proof of his open and belligerent misogyny. At that moment, he might like to Cuba Gooding Jr. some available video, just in case the incident(s) alleged might be disproven by that video, but the hate mobs will be in a position to remind him that he doesn’t believe in that sort of thing.

  4. Miles

    Had anyone else written this, it would seem unfathomable that feminists wouldn’t completely lose their shit:

    she will continue to cry profusely on YouTube until her dripping mascara poisons the entire country’s water table.

    But since it’s a black guy and she’s accused of racism, this is totally fine? Unreal.

  5. John V. Burger

    This is frickin’ brilliant:

    “One of the more curious phenomena in the age of social justice is that the person above you on the victim pyramid gets to snark down with impunity. The person below can’t challenge, question, and surely not snark, at a person more vulnerable and marginalized than her.”

    jvb

  6. John V. Burger

    I read Harriott’s piece. Yeah, it’s poorly written and full of bullshit and purportedly funny barbs at this woman. He derides her for having the temerity to call police on someone sleeping in an open area and then for seeking release of any police body cam footage. He ridicules her for “trying to expose the truth.” Then, he tells her she should just go away, dismissing her claims that she has been attacked by the Woke Mob.

    Apparently, he didn’t bother to scroll through the comments to his screed. They are enlightening. If the comments are anything like what she is receiving, then she is the victim of the Woke Mob. These people don’t know her or what happened but they accuse her all the same. If this is the future when Elizabeth Warren is President, we are in for a long, nasty road.

    jvb

    1. SHG Post author

      A surprising number condemn her for her makeup, which totally proves she was wrong. A woke presidency holds enormous promise for the future of such insightful folks.

  7. Walter

    I think this post misses the point a bit. Sarah Braasch called the police on someone who had every right to be there and take a nap. Given how often police shoot, assault, or arrest black people without cause, Lolade Siyonbola, Harriot, and many others see this as unnecessarily escalating the situation with the threat of violence. Braasch actions also appear to be part of a larger pattern: white people call the police on black people in predominately white spaces without cause. However, when someone calls the police on a black person minding their own business, there are no real reprecussions for this threat of violence. Collective shaming is an effort to discourage this. Certainly if no one had called the police on a child playing in the park with a toy, Tamar Rice might be alive today.
    As for the video? Siyonbola already made public a cell phone video of her interaction with Braasch and the police, so I’m unclear what the bodycam videos will add. The central issue, calling the police on a napping person, remains uncontested. Certainly I agree with Harriot that without seeing them, Braasch can’t know they contain whatever exonerating details she imagines.
    Finally, the claim that no one is allowed to criticize Harriot because he’s black, seems a bit odd in a blog post criticizing him with a direct link to the author’s contact information. My point is that ‘woke mobs’ tend to have very little power.

    1. SHG Post author

      Deconstructing this nonsense isn’t worth the time and should be sufficiently obvious that it’s unnecessary. So for what it’s worth, I’ve posted your comment. It is unadulterated idiocy.

    2. Miles

      Harriot is just a disgusting racist, sexist tool, which doesn’t seem to bother in the slightest. Had any white man written what that scumbag wrote, would you be sucking his dick? I think not.

      You, on the other hand, are the useful idiot the racists and sexists of the world rely on, believing any idiocy they spout and lacking any capability of rational thought.

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