The White House refused to criticize black comedian Larry Wilmore on Monday for using the N-word to describe President Obama at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, amid a minor furor over who is allowed to use the slur and whether the president is being hypocritical for tolerating it.
“Comedians are going to go right up to the line,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest, who said he didn’t think Mr. Wilmore was using the president as the butt of a joke.
Mr. Wilmore, a Comedy Central entertainer, referred to Mr. Obama as “my n——-” during his routine Saturday night. He closed his monologue by turning to the president on the dias, beating his chest and proclaiming, “Yo, Barry, you did it my n—-a.”
Mr. Obama grinned and beat his own chest in response.
Mr. Earnest said the president told him later that he “appreciated the sentiments” of what Mr. Wilmore said, noting that the comedian expressed pride in having a black president.
Others were not amused.
“Many of us are against using the ’N-word,’ period,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton. “To say it in front of the president of the United States in front of the top people in the media was at best in poor taste.”
New York Daily News columnist Leonard Greene wrote of the episode: “Besides unfairly putting Obama on the spot about the most loaded word in the English language, Wilmore gave white people, many of whom have for nearly eight years been beside themselves over a black man in the White House, license to use the N-word against the leader of the free world.”
During the White House daily press briefing Monday, veteran White House reporter April Ryan with American Urban Radio Networks told Mr. Earnest that the comedian had crossed a line.
“He crossed the line of many of the African-Americans in that room to include civil rights leaders, black comedians — very appalled, even members of the Republican Party,” she told Mr. Earnest. “Black Republicans were upset, black Democrats were upset. People felt that it was not just being thrown at him — they threw it at him and it diminished the office of the presidency and it diminished him. Did [Mr. Wilmore] cross the line?”
Mr. Earnest said the president “appreciated the spirit of the sentiments that Mr. Wilmore expressed.”
“[Mr. Wilmore] made the observation that our country has made remarkable progress just in his lifetime from not being willing to accept an African-American quarterback to electing and re-electing an African-American, not just to lead the United States but to lead the free world,” the president’s spokesman said. “I take Mr. Wilmore at his word that he found that to be a powerful transformation just in his lifetime and something that he seemed to be pretty obviously proud of.”
Ms. Ryan observed that the president used the N-word in an interview last June “as a teaching moment to show that issues of race are still a problem in this country.”
“But Wilmore used it as, for the president, somewhat as a butt of a joke,” she told Mr. Earnest. “And you were in that [dinner] room as well as I was. It was an eerie, awkward silence and quietness. People didn’t know how to handle that.”
She asked Mr. Earnest whether the president approved of people using words such as “jigaboo” or “thug.”
“Well, April, I’ll just restate what I said before,” Mr. Earnest said. “What the president said is that he appreciated the spirit of Mr. Wilmore’s expressions on Saturday night.”
In an interview with Marc Maron last year, Mr. Obama startled many people by using the N-word.
“Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say n——r in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not,” Mr. Obama said.
Some observers said they worried that Mr. Wilmore’s use of the word would encourage more people to use it.
“By calling the first black president of the United States a ’n***er’ on national TV, Larry Wilmore let down Barack Obama, and himself, and only guaranteed one thing: its longevity,” Piers Morgan wrote in the Daily Mail.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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