It's a good thing Melissa Harris-Perry's patented Racially Insensitive Language Reprogrammer was set to stun Monday morning on MSNBC when a conservative guest did the unthinkable and dared call Paul Ryan a "hard worker." Because if not, the world would've never known that the term has been redefined to only apply to slaves who worked in the cotton fields.
Republican Latino activist Alfonso Aguilar was deep in his pitch for Ryan to succeed John Boehner as House speaker when he inadvertently slipped in his own "relative privilege."
He said, "If there's somebody who is a hard worker when he goes to Washington, it's Paul Ryan." He continued for nearly 20 seconds when MHP was finally able to process his problematic language and cut him off so she could check said privilege:
I just want to pause on one thing, because I don’t disagree with you, that I actually think Mr. Ryan is a great choice for this role. But I want us to be super careful when we use the language ‘hard worker,’ because, I mean, I actually keep an image of folks working in cotton fields on my office wall, because it is a reminder about what hard work looks like. So, I feel you that he’s a hard worker. I do. But in the context of relative privilege -- and I just want to point out that when you talk about work-life balance and being a hard worker, the moms who don’t have health care who are working. But, we don’t call them hard workers. We call them failures. We call them people who are sucking off the system. No, really, y'all do. That is really what you guys do as a party.
Aguilar respectfully protested her tirade saying, "That is very unfair."
But unfortunately Aguilar was also unaware that "unfair" doesn't mean what he thinks it means.
