Yes, we’ve finally reached the point where even the word “black” in any context is racist. ESPN host Stephen A. Smith indicated in a tweet that Black Friday is racist, and that didn’t come with any crazy explanation about white privilege, systemic racism, or slavery. He just thinks it racist because of the name. In a world where everything is racist, it stands to reason that even colors would make the list.
Black Friday is of course the day after Thanksgiving where retailers hold riot-inducing sales to help balance the books by the end of the year. Here’s Wikipedia with an explanation behind the name:
As the phrase gained national attention in the early 1980s, merchants objecting to the use of a derisive term to refer to one of the most important shopping days of the year suggested an alternative derivation: that retailers traditionally operated at a financial loss for most of the year (January through November) and made their profit during the holiday season, beginning on the day after Thanksgiving.[8] When this was recorded in the financial records, once-common accounting practices would use red ink to show negative amounts and black ink to show positive amounts. Black Friday, under this theory, is the beginning of the period when retailers would no longer be “in the red”, instead taking in the year’s profits.
Now’s here’s Stephen A. Smith with his problem concerning the day:
Awful lot of stuff to talk about on @FirstTake today, and you know I can’t wait. But I promise: one of the subjects WON’T be “Why is Today called ‘Black Friday.’? That has always irked me, but I won’t bring it up! See y’all at top of hour on ESPN.
— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) November 24, 2017
“Awful lot of stuff to talk about on @FirstTake today, and you know I can’t wait. But I promise: one of the subjects WON’T be “Why is Today called ‘Black Friday.’? That has always irked me, but I won’t bring it up! See y’all at top of hour on ESPN,” wrote Smith.
So Black Friday irks a black guy who thinks everything is racist? Obviously, this is as racist as to him as no NFL team signing Colin Kaepernick. In other words, it is racist too.
There are Internet conspiracy theories that Black Friday was named so because the Friday after Thanksgiving was the day that African slaves were bought and sold. This is preposterous, has been throughly debunked, and has no basis in history. The first formal observation of a “Day of Thanks” came from Abraham Lincoln near the end of the Civil War, when slavery was outlawed. How can you have a tradition of slave trading on the day after Thanksgiving when one ended before the other started?
That however is not Smith’s problem. He is “irked” by the day after Thanksgiving because it has “black” in the name. It is the color distinction that makes him think it is racist. I could see (not really) if it somehow had negative connotations like black death, black lung, blackout, etc…but black ink and Black Friday are positive things.
In reality, it sounds like a day to celebrate black people. It’s not called “I Hate Black(s) Friday” just Black Friday. Does Stephen A. Smith also have a problem with Black History Month or Black Bike Week? What about Black Twitter?
If it becomes this hard to find any racism, maybe we really are a post-racial society. This is some Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson bullshit race hustling. Maybe Smith should check out how irrelevant those two con artists are and adjust his faux racial outrage accordingly.
via Downtrend.com
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