Oh yeah, almost forgot

Happy Perfect Token Negro Day to y'all. Today is the day where, all over the land, teachers present to their students and networks present to their viewers the image of the Perfect Token Negro -- mature, grey haired, pleasant, well-dressed, and so forth. Their Perfect Token Negro never crowds into offices of politicians demanding social justice, equal opportunity, and voting rights, never listens to that icky "rap" music that is so offensive to white bread honkey ears, never puts on bling or drives a big luxury car to display his wealth (hon, that's restricted to white people, when a black person does it that's scary!), and most of all, never, ever, hurts a white person even if that white person is trying to hurt him.

See, Perfect Token Negro is, like, PERFECT, so if the white man slaps his face, he'll just take it like the proper servile servant that he is, rather than fuck the white man up. Of course, Perfect Token Negro isn't *real* -- not at all like the Rev. Martin Luther King, who was a rabble-rouser who set up perfect photo ops to demonstrate Southern brutality against blacks but was no martyr until the day the bullet took him down -- but what the hey, the *real* Martin Luther King Jr. isn't around, so there's nobody to say, "hold it, Token Perfect Negro *ISN'T ME!*". Well, except for various leftover relics of the 60's Civil Rights movement, who, for reasons of their own, have helped elevate Perfect Token Negro to his pedestal, but so it goes.

And do I sound utterly cynical about "Martin Luther King Jr. Day" and all the festivities that go with it? Fuck yeah. It's all a scam, in the end, intended to keep people from taking effective action to better their plight by saying, "hey, Perfect Token Negro never would go outside the system like that and try to bust it up." So it goes.

-- Badtux the Cynical Penguin