A well-respected British conductor was sacked because of a joke. Why? Because he emulated a Southern accent when speaking with his long-time friend, a black singer.A white woman got all kinds of offended.
An acclaimed British conductor has been fired from a prestigious American music festival after a seemingly innocent joke he made to a black friend was labelled racist.
Matthew Halls was removed as artistic director of the Oregon Bach Festival following an incident in which he imitated a southern American accent while talking to his longstanding friend, the African-American classical singer Reginald Mobley.
It is understood a white woman who overheard the joke reported it to officials at the University of Oregon, which runs the festival, claiming it amounted to a racial slur.
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The singer, who was born and raised in the southern state of Florida, said the concert had an “antebellum” feel to it, of the sort associated with Gone With the Wind and other rose-tinted representations of the pre-Civil War south.
In response Mobley says that Halls “apologised on behalf of England”, before putting on an exaggerated southern accent and joking: “Do you want some grits?”, in a reference to the ground corn dish popular in the south.
Mobley stated that the joke is one the two give back and forth, making fun of accents from their regions of origin.
However, this story does a great job of illustrating something many of us have thought about leftists and their ability to seemingly go out of their way to be offended. It’s based on their own racism.
To be sure, offering someone grits is no more racist than offering them a Coke down here in the South. In fact, some would argue it’s simply the polite thing to do at breakfast time. Grits are ubiquitous here in this part of the world. Failure to enjoy them — an affliction I suffer from — is often enough for many to consider expulsion from the ranks of Honorable Southerners. But it has nothing to do with ethnicity.
Yet this woman heard “grits” and somehow thought Halls was offering up watermelon and fried chicken with a side of orange soda or something — all foods stereotypically associated with blacks in the South. Grits are universal, but a white woman from the Northwest got up on her high horse and, due to her own prejudices, assumed it was racist.
No one asked Mobley or Halls for context. Mobley could easily have explained that grits are a Southern staple for all ethnicities and only a sheltered idiot could have associated it with anything else.
Yet the social justice jihadis have the world conditioned to see nothing but racism everywhere. Behold, our future.
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