Stephen Colbert has a funny bit he’s been doing for a long while about his only “black friend.” He had one, but they had a falling out (the friend attended an anti-war protest), which led Colbert to encourage black people in his audience to contact him, auditioning for the role of being his new<\/i> black friend.<\/p>\n
It’s all very amusing, of course, because people don’t actually think this way, or at a minimum, they’re not supposed to. Colbert’s joke suggests he has some kind of semi-formal quota system in place — he’s conscious enough to know that he wants a racially-diverse set of friends (if he had no black friends, he’d presumably be racist), but for Colbert, one black friend should do the trick.<\/p>\n
For all the times that I’ve laughed at Colbert’s bit, it never occurred to me that the right-wing blowhards he is mocking actually agree<\/i><\/a> with Colbert’s conservative persona when it comes to race and their personal relationships.<\/p>\n On the February 5 edition of his CNN Headline News program, Glenn Beck explained to White Guilt (HarperCollins, May 2006) author Shelby Steele why he thinks he — Beck — doesn’t “have a lot of African-American friends”: “I think part of it is because I’m afraid that I would be in an open conversation, and I would say something that somebody would take wrong, and then it would be a nightmare.”<\/p>\n Additionally, on the February 5 edition of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, in a conversation about President Bush’s description of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) as “articulate,” host Bill O’Reilly told Temple University education professor Marc Lamont Hill: “Instead of black and white Americans coming together, white Americans are terrified. They’re terrified. Now we can’t even say you’re articulate? We can’t even give you guys compliments because they may be taken as condescension?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n