Colin Jost made a horrible, queerphobic election joke on 'SNL.' His defense of it is even worse.
Stop the presses, a white dude who gets paid to sound smart has no clue what he’s talking about!
Over the weekend, during Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update segment, anchor Colin Jost made a quip about Tinder rolling out a feature that provided people with 37 new gender options to choose from:
“It’s called, ‘Why Democrats lost the election,’” he said, presumably to the hoots and hollers of a bunch of hip liberal white dudes. Naturally, people called Jost the fuck out over Twitter, including the queer punk band PWRBTTM.
For some reason, Jost remained steadfast and decided to *gasp* explain the joke. Not only that, he also tweeted a link to an instantly notorious New York Times op-ed by Columbia professor Mark Lilla called “The End of Identity Liberalism,” which accused identity politics of perverting liberalism and destroying its electoral viability.
Funny how only white people see acknowledging the existence of gender, race, ability, and class as a form of division! Funny how they paint identity politics as a form of moral superiority that liberals use to absolve themselves of responsibility for Trump’s win, as if the act of blaming minorities for society’s problems hasn’t been going on for most of western history!
I guess it only makes perfect sense that a piece like Lilla’s—one that vilifies every person who has fought to be acknowledged, to whom identity politics means basic survival, truly speaks to Colin Jost. What makes even more sense is his ambiguous response to PWRBTTM’s demand that he not trivialize the most vulnerable, particularly when they are downright scared about the election.
Maybe he should examine how the same trivialization of identity feeds into the very overwhelming slew of hatred that forced his castmate Leslie Jones off of Twitter. Or maybe he should have examined how normalizing Trump by ALLOWING HIM TO HOST AN EPISODE OF SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE helped him get elected. But sure yeah, marginalized people demanding to be acknowledged is why we lost the election, guys! Good one!