During times of sadness, there is always someone who will go out of their way to make you smile. But not even Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart could joke during his opening for the “Daily Show” because a recent occurrence is no laughing matter. Stewart apologized to his audience, then shared his thoughts about the tragic shooting at Charleston’s historic Emanuel AME Church, where a white man killed nine black people during Bible Study. Stewart says racism is alive and well here in America, and we all need to stop acting as if it does not exist.
I don’t need to tell you my thoughts, Stewart summed it up perfectly. The following are POWERFUL excerpts from his Thursday night show:
— “I didn’t do my job today, so I apologize. I got nothing for you, in terms of like jokes and sounds because of what happened in South Carolina.”
— “Once again we have to peer into the abyss of depraved violence that we do to each other in the nexus of a gaping racial wound that will not heal and that we pretend doesn’t exist.”
— “I’m confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is. we still won’t do jack shit. Yeah, that’s us and that’s the part that blows my mind.”
–“What blows my mind is the disparity of response between when we think people that are foreign are going to kill us and us killing ourselves. If this had been what we thought was Islamic terrorism, it would fit into our…we invaded two countries and spent trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives, and fly unmanned death machines over like five or six different countries all to keep Americans safe. Nine people shot in a church, what about that? Hey, what are you going to do? Crazy is as crazy is, right? That’s the part that I can not, for the life of me, wrap my head around, and you know it. You know that it is going to go down the same path.”
–“This is a terrorist attack. This is a violent attack on the Emanuel Church in South Carolina which is a symbol for the black community. It has stood in that part of Charleston for a hundred and something years and has been attacked viciously many times; many black churches have. And to pretend that, I heard someone on the news say,a tragedy has visited that church… this wasn’t a tornado. This was racist. This one was “black and white, there’s no nuance here. We are steeped in this culture in this country and we refuse to recognize it. I can not believe how hard people are working to discount it. In South Carolina, the roads that black people drive on are named for Confederate generals who fought to keep black people from being able to drive freely on that road. That’s insanity, that’s racial wallpaper. You can’t allow that.”
–“Nine people were killed in a black church by a white guy who hated them, who wanted to start some kind of Civil War. The Confederate Flag flies over South Carolina and the roads are named for Confederate generals, and the white guy is the one who feels that his country is being taken away from him. We’re bringing it on ourselves. And that’s the thing, Al Quaeda, all those guys, ISIS; they’re not shit compared to the damage we can apparently do to ourselves on a regular basis.”
