Don Lemon’s Intersectionality Lesson

For years, talking head Don Lemon has been whining about oppression, always from a white oppressor/black victim position. Recently though he learned that he too can be an oppressor because although he is both black and an out homosexual, he is lower down the totem pole of oppression than any woman on this planet, including the daughter of two academics who is said herself to be worth $2 million. 

Don has been pilloried as if not the dumbest man on television then certainly the dumbest talking head after the departure of Brian Stelter. He has been mocked tirelessly by Tucker Carlson, especially over the disappearance of a certain plane. While there was intelligent speculation that it had been shot down or suffered a mechanical failure, Lemon suggested it might have been swallowed by a black hole. If these things actually exist, and if it had, then the Earth would have been swallowed up too by now. 

Indeed, it is likely that Lemon has asked only one intelligent question in his entire career, one that brought him unjust criticism for once. Joan Tarshis was one of a number of demented women who accused the veteran comedian Bill Cosby of sexually assaulting her decades before. At the time, she says she was 19 years old and writing scripts for Godfrey Cambridge. Like this accomplished comedian would have needed to rely on a teenage white girl for his material. 

She told Lemon when Cosby tried to rape her she deterred him by claiming she was suffering from a venereal disease, so he raped her orally instead. Why didn’t you bite him, asked Don, intelligently? That was what Chema Benson did when she was attacked in her own home by a serial killer. He beat her seriously for it, but she had the pleasure of watching him die by lethal injection.

Tarshis didn’t bite Cosby because she never met Cosby, although she did meet God and spent all night talking to him. He was in a light bulb in the ceiling of the psychiatric hospital where she was being assessed.

If Don’s questioning of Tarshis was intelligent, his put down of Nikki Haley was due entirely to her age, a mere 51, and younger than him. While it is true that some men age like wine and some women age like milk, the important word here is some. Every member of the so-called Squad is younger than Haley – all are dumb as well as malicious.

Can Haley win the Presidency? Probably not, even if the election isn’t rigged like last time, but she has already been Governor of South Carolina, so she is hardly unqualified.

What has happened to Don after his unkind remark? He is said to be undergoing something called sensitivity training, as if he isn’t a big enough snowflake already.