Is WGCI Parody Song More Than Just Humor?

By Chuck Sudo in News on Jun 10, 2011 9:27PM

WGCI's "Morning Riot" has been playing a parody song called "Chris Bosh is Gay." Sung to the tune of "YMCA," the song on the surface seems like a sincere attempt at satire at the expense of the Miami Heat power forward, likely for the benefit of 'GCI's listening audience and the remaining Bulls fans in Chicago wwho haven't put the Game 5 collapse in the Eastern Conference Finals behind them.

It would be easy to just chalk this up as a pathetic attempt at satire. But with Bulls center Joakim Noah's use of an anti-gay slur at a Heat fan during those same Eastern Conference Finals, Los Angeles Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant fined $100,000 earlier in the season for using the same epithet at an official and comedian Tracy Morgan catching flak for saying that he would kill his son if he was gay and that President Obama should stop defending LGBT kids, there's an opportunity here to look deeper.

Anti-gay sentiment is everywhere, there's no denying that. But there have been numerous words written about how the African American community is slower to embrace the larger LGBT community than other demographics. Sun-Times columnists Mary Mitchell and Stella Foster have used the subject of the "down low brother" and of acceptance of gays in the black community. Former NBC 5 and current CNN anchor Don Lemon, who recently came out, spoke to the New York Times of being a "double minority:"

"It's quite different for an African-American male. It's about the worst thing you can be in black culture. You're taught you have to be a man; you have to be masculine. In the black community they think you can pray the gay away."

About.com Race Relations correspondent Nadra Kareem Nittle took offense to what she believed was Lemon's painting an entire community with a broad stroke.

I couldn't help but to cringe at his portrayal of African Americans in the above statement. All too often the media labels blacks as homophobes with no real proof that they harbor more anti-gay sentiment than others. Still, this stereotype persists, no more so than after Election Day 2008.

As the nation celebrated the election of its first black president, the gay community was horrified to learn that California had voted in support of Proposition 8, which effectively banned gay marriage in the Golden State. Which group was to blame for the proposition's passing? According to initial news reports--African Americans. But the reports that 7 out of 10 black voters supported a gay marriage ban proved to be flat out false. In January 2009, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that an analysis of exit polls found that 58 percent of black voters supported Prop. 8 and not 70 percent, as several mainstream media outlets first reported.

But that doesn't mean the sentiment doesn't exist. Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor for TheAtlantic.com, tried to get at the heart of African American's opposition to gay marriage in 2008 and reaped the whirlwind in response.

I don't mean to say that black insecurity over marriage and gender roles, justifies the opposition. But it explains a lot of it. It's not right that gays--black and white--should bear the brunt of this. But the New York Draft riots were wrong on a similar level--what had we ever done to the Irish? In Phillip Dray's book, At The Hands of Person's Unknown, he recounts the direct ties between lynchings, and white women starting to work outside the home. Basically, Southern working class and poor white men fearing an erosion of economic power, took out their rage on innocent blacks. It does me no good to not understand that. The maddening, inescapable fact is that anger's targets aren't fair--it's usually kick-the-dogism writ large. But anger can be rationally confronted and defused. Pain can be healed.

What Tony Sculfield and his morning crew are doing is nothing worse than what numerous white shock jocks have done, and continue to do, over the years. Again, this may be nothing more than an easy attempt at parody. So could, for all we know, Morgan's remarks. Tracy Morgan has managed to so blur the lines between caricature and reality that it's possible only he knows if what he was saying was genuine or an attempt to rile. BUt it's also very easy to use the word "faggot" as a diss to one's manhood, without thinking of the deeper ramifications.

Either way, both WGCI and Morgan got our attention.