If you like your political analysis with a heaping side of humor, there's an interview you should read right now.
That said, never fear, conservative America, Wilmore has a lot to say about the entire media's general complicity in our current political affairs, too.
For those unfamiliar with Wilmore or his show, "The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore," there is some language in this interview — especially in regards to Wilmore's theory about what really animates national politics at this moment in time. Wilmore and his show often refer to "the unblackening" — or as Wilmore puts it in this interview, the "de-Negrofying" — of the White House.
Wilmore hears and sees Americans referring to "taking our country back." He has watched Trump, the presidential candidate, question Obama's birthplace and his citizenship and, therefore, his eligibility for the Oval Office. Taken together with Trump's front-runner status in most national polls, all of this points to the pulsing desire of at least some segment of white America to return to a different time, like pre-2008, when it was unthinkable that a black man would be elected president.
Obama's presence in the White House seems to signal all sort of things for these Americans. And what Wilmore is positing is that the process of moving toward a new and different — and very likely not black — president also has weighty meaning for white Americans gripped by anger, anxiety or some combination thereof about the state of the country.
We encourage you to read the entire Mashable Q&A, but below is a particularly interesting exchange:
Q: When you're talking about the 2016 election on your show, you often call back to the idea of the 2016 "unblackening." Where did that come from?A: The "de-Negrofying" of the White House. When you have somebody like a Donald Trump. He made no bones about trying to disprove Barack Obama's Americanism in trying to make him out to be some foreigner that was born in Kenya — I thought that to be very racist. I don't think that was masked at all, and I feel like there has been an element ... of some ugly racial things. Not everyone is like that of course, and I think most people aren't. But there is a streak of that on that side, and it's not good. So that, to me, is part of my comic take. When people say "Let's take our country back," my way of saying that is, "Yes, you want to unblacken the White House."Q: What do you make of the fact that we're still talking about Donald Trump as the frontrunner in 2016?A: Well we have no choice because he's the frontrunner. It's like we're being forced to talk about a reality show when we really want to watch a good drama. It's really unbelievable to me, and he just keeps going on and on and on. I thought he was going to flame out a long time ago, but I was proven wrong. I don't know what to think anymore, to be honest with you. It seems like the more [expletive]d-up things he does, the more people seem to like him. I've never seen anything like it.
The "unblackening" is Wilmore's pithy way of describing his sense that so many white Americans are eager for more than an end to Obama's presidency but what they sense is the ascendancy of non-white Americans, their concerns, interests and experiences. The "unblackening" is a political moment, like Reconstruction or the final years of the Cold War. And according to Wilmore, the "unblackening" is happening now.