Dr. Laura—healing the racial divide

Full disclosure: I haven’t always been a Dr. Laura fan. When I’ve been exposed to her ‘work’ previously, I’ve found her to be a shrill, hypocritical, bullying, punishing shrew. As she bases all of her valuable relationship advice on her gut, the Old Testament and a thoroughly inapplicable PhD in Physiology, I decided long ago I’d have better odds of getting a truly helpful answer from my Magic 8 Ball. “Is this a good day to take start taking Dr. Laura’s advice seriously?” Answer: Very Doubtful.

And I’ve always felt bad for her fan base (a couple of whom are even friends of mine). Most of them (my friends excluded) don’t know that Dr. Laura’s doctorship has nothing to do with her current gig and that they’re receiving critical relationship advice from someone who is currently estranged from her own mother. It would be like turning to Elvis to resolve one’s own Mommy Issues. And his advice would probably be better. “Here, eat a handful of these and meet me in the Jungle Room in 20 minutes for some karate.”

Having thus conquered family issues, the redoubtable Doctor L. trained her laser-like insight on race relations this week on her radio show, repeatedly using the N-word with one increasingly flustered caller. Eventually the caller mentioned that she was uncomfortable with Dr. Laura’s use of the N-word, which just set the voluble host off on a tangent where she repeated the offensive language with such frequency and meter it began to sound like raindrops hitting the roof of a tin shed.

Cut to a day later—a day in which I’m assuming she heard from a lot of her radio show advertisers—and she was back on the air, issuing a terse apology. An apology which included a further, lame-duck defense of her use of the objectionable language, summed up most succinctly when she pleaded, “I don’t get it.”

Finally! Dr. Laura and I are on the same page; we have found common ground at last.

She indeed does not get it. Didn’t then and doesn’t still.

You gotta listen to the whole clip. At the end where she says, leaning hard on the “I” part, “_I_ made a mistake,” with the same stunned disbelief as if she was reporting that the statue of liberty had just been sighted strolling down 42nd Street in her underwear. Unintentional hilarity in its purest form.

In Chris Rock’s most recent HBO special, he says people ask him, “When is it okay for a white person to use to N-word?” And he always answers the same thing—Almost never. Then he runs down some hypothetical situations where dunderheads like Dr. Laura may think it’s okay to use the N-word, and explains that, no, it’s still not cool. I don’t recall exactly, but I think maybe the only Chris Rock-authorized time it’s okay for a white person to use the N-word is in the context of informing a sleeping neighbor his house is on fire… and probably not even then.

I think the definitive word on the subject belongs to Richard Pryor in his “Live On The Sunset Strip” performance. In previous stand-up appearances, Pryor threw around the N-word like lollipops at a Shriner’s parade. In “Sunset Strip,” however, Pryor talks about having taken a recent trip to Africa. How he found himself taken aback that everybody, from the mayor to the town drunk, was black. He said, “And I looked around and I realized, I didn’t see one single nigger.” He then went on to repudiate use of the word, within the black community and without, including his own past usage.

So my advice to Dr. Laura—based on my G.E.D. in fence-post sitting and my extensive experience flipping burgers at McDonald’s—is to stick to what she knows, dispensing hateful, unhelpful relationship advice to her emotionally disenfranchised audience and leave healing the racial divide to people who recognize that there still is one, and that Dr. Laura is on the wrong side of it.