News of today's ruling from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which canceled trademark registrations for the name Washington Redsk*ns, has hit racists across the country particularly hard.
This includes Representative Steve King (R-IA), who has given us a stunning – even by his standards – display of idiocy and disrespect:
While I'm tempted to dissect the above Tweet, annotating every falsehood, utterly insane metaphor and piece of bombast, to do so would be an insult to "free people's" intelligence everywhere.
However, I do want to focus briefly on his "King Jong POTUS" quip. This is not just an indefensible display of disrespect hurled at a sitting President by a member of Congress, it is also contextually a double-edged display of racism. For here you have King, outraged that a racial slur has come under attack, in turn attacking a black President, falsely accusing him of taking away King's freedom.
And which freedom is that, exactly? The freedom to say and use the "R" word with impunity. In other words, the freedom to cling to one of our country's remaining, normative acts of racism: the denigration of Native Americans.
It's almost as though King is expressing metaphorical rage for a history of racist, white 'privileges' that have been stolen from this oppressed majority. First, their slaves were freed. Next, their schools were integrated. And now? Now, Washington's football team might have to get a new nickname.
For this indefensible disrespect toward Obama, and for his overt bigotry, King has no business being in Congress. But he remains, suffering the plight of the besieged white man. At least King will still have Muslim-Americans to slur in a nation where Islamophobia still runs deep.
He'll still have that.
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David Harris-Gershon is author of the memoir What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?, recently published by Oneworld Publications.