Sarah Silverman is planing to hold a comedy show in Texas, the home state of Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry. And she plans to call it “Live From Niggerhead: Stripping The Paint Off Of Good Ol’ Fashioned Racism.” Take a deep breath. Let it out.
My initial reaction when I heard that Perry’s hunting ground in Texas was formerly called “Niggerhead” and that the name was painted on a rock at the entrance for years? Shock, swiftly replaced by a cool, knowing disappointment. Of course it was. This is our American history. Rick Perry’s family has been in Texas since before the Texan Revolution. Texas was the last state where slavery was abolished, in 1865. Perry was born in 1950, which means he was 15 before Jim Crow laws were overruled. He grew up in a segregated United States, and in a Texas county that began observing Martin Luther King Day two years ago. A place where a County Judge told the Washington Post: “[Niggerhead] is just a name. Like those are vertical blinds. It’s just what it was called.” (Perry has said it’s an “offensive name that has no place in the modern world.”)