Enough With The Fucking Excuses Already

When popular progressive podcasters host bigots.

On September 2nd, a Palestinian journalist, who I won’t name, because she’s gotten enough attention, sat down with a podcaster, who I also won’t name, for the same reasons, to talk about Hakeem Jeffries and his dirty bank account loaded with AIPAC money. Her criticism of Jeffries’ support for Israel is a legitimate political argument. I share some of the same sentiments regarding AIPAC and Israel’s influence on American politicians. People are allowed to be furious about that. But, the podcast took a racist turn and it unleashed an entire network of apologists.

The Palestinian journalist called Jeffries “a bought and paid for AIPAC monkey”, then immediately added, “with all due respect and I don’t mean it in a racist way,” then called him an “errand boy.” The podcaster hosting her then kindly and politely told her that using the word monkey about a Black person “has terrible racial connotations.” Then, kept moving forward with the show as if the moment had been handled.

But it hadn’t been handled. And the outrage that poured out minutes, hours, and even days afterwards proves it hadn’t, afterall, been handled.

I said as much on my own Substack. I wrote that when a popular podcast host with a very large following quickly names the problem in real time, but lets the recording continue, that’s not actually correcting the record. That he’s letting it stand and that this is exactly how progressive spaces launder racist language when it comes from someone the audience already decided they’re “one of the good guys.”

I meant every word of it. I still do.

What I didn’t expect, or maybe I did, I was just naive to it, was how many people would break their legs running to my comment section to explain why it was more complicated than that.

One person told me that the podcast host corrected it and he’d addressed it immediately and repeatedly and that his guest had too. Someone else told me I was “attacking one person of color in support of another,” as though this were a scoreboard instead of a word with a very specific and documented history targeting a very specific Black man. Someone else told me Jeffries “sucks” as a politician, as if that has anything to do with whether he deserved to be called a racial slur on a podcast with tens of thousands of listeners.

One man told me to go perform “a strong exegesis” on my own sentence because he found it “Carlin level funny” that I could think Jeffries was a bad man and also think he didn’t deserve a racial slur, apparently unaware that both things can be true at the same time without contradiction.

The Congressional Black Caucus made a statement and said that there was no non-racist way to have said what that journalist had said. Representative Richie Torres called it racist and pointed out that if this had come from the right, no one on the left would be making excuses for it.

The purple check-mark Substack journalist apologized on X two days later, “unconditionally,” a word doing a lot of fuckin work for someone who has used this exact insult before. In 2018, she accused Ron Desantis of racism for telling Florida voters not to “monkey this up” by electing his Black opponent. She knows precisely what that word carries.

As for the popular podcaster who platformed her, he didn’t spend his follow-up posts reflecting on his own silence. He spent them pointing at a double standard involving Laura Loomer, a literal Zionist who has a hard on for Nazi’s. Then went on Joy Reid’s show, where by most accounts of that segment, the tone was less accountability and more rehabilitation - you know, damage control.

So no, he didn’t correct the record. He offered an aside and then he offered a defense and then he offered a friendly stage to repeat the apology. None of that is the same as stopping the interview in the moment and making his racist guest sit with what she’d said. Because she knew exactly what she was saying and exactly what it meant.

The part people keep skipping past because they’re too busy being pissed off at me for calling it all out, is that I don’t necessarily think that journalist is a monster. I don’t know her heart. I think she’s watching people she loves die in a war she has spent years trying to stop the world from looking away from and I think that grief and rage found the ugliest possible word to land.

But that only explains it, it doesn’t excuse it.

Both of those things are true at the same time and refusing to hold them together is exactly how this kind of language survives inside movements that would never tolerate is from the other side.

That’s the real problem if you were to ask me. It isn’t just about one podcast. It’s about the reflex. The reflex tells you that she’s on your side, so lets find the read where she didn’t really mean it. The reflex is what tells you he’s a bad politician, so the slur matters less. The reflex that convinces you that pointing this out is what’s actually dividing us, not the slur itself. Everyone of those reflexes protects the person who said the racist thing and asks the person who got called it and the people defending him, to do the emotional labor of staying calm about it.

I won’t stop saying the quiet parts out loud. Especially when I get messages like this:

We fix this by holding the standard steady regardless of who’s in the chair. If “monkey” is disqualifying when a republican says it about a Black official, it’s equally disqualifying when a progressive says it too. And the burden of proving otherwise sits with the person who said it, not the people objecting. We’re not reactionary. We’re doing the work.

We fix it by treating “I didn’t mean it that way” as the beginning of accountability, not the end of the conversation, especially from someone who has used the same line before.

We fix it be refusing the false choice between caring about Palestinian lives and objecting to anti-Black language… because that choice is manufactured every single time this comes up and it always benefits the person who gets to keep talking.

And we fix it by expecting hosts to end the recording. Not narrate the problem for the record and continuing to keep the interview moving along. Just end it and let the silence be uncomfortable enough that everyone watching understands this actually fucking matters.

I have been called reactionary, divisive, and unfair to a grieving woman for standing on business and saying the quiet parts out loud. I got told to grow a heart. But what I actually grew was tired. Tired of watching people, who look like me, and people I largely agree with, build an off ramp for racism every time the person driving is one of ours.

Jeffries is not above criticism. He never has been. But there is no version of holding him accountable for AIPAC money that requires calling him a racial slur and there is no version of being on the right side of Gaza that requires defending the person who did.

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