Charles Johnson from Little Green Footballs reports that a large chunk of the comments on the story regarding Houston's death show blatant bigotry. So nobody misunderstands, it's not of the dog-whistle, wink-wink variety. It's blatant.
Eric Boehlert from Media Matters also linked to the comments from his Twitter account
More below.
As just about everyone knows by now, Houston passed away yesterday at the age of 48. She had struggles in her life with substance abuse. Many of the commenters used that struggle as an occasion to attack her for it and to state openly, not imply, that black people in sports and entertainment can't handle their success.
Charles Johnson reposted a healthy sampling of the comments in his article. He pointed out that many of them either put spaces between letters in certain words or deliberately (or not) misspelled them to avoid any word filter that might be in place on that site. I will not repost them here.
Johnson put it best, though, in his opening paragraph:
I don’t even know what to say about this any more. There’s a real sickness running rampant in the right wing; the Fox News comment thread on Whitney Houston’s death is yet another disgusting deluge of outright racism
This also illustrates a huge difference, to me, between progressive sites and sites like Fox. While it's true that many white progressives have some beams to remove from their own eyes (and I as a white male am far from perfect on the subject myself), what you will not see on this site are smatterings of blatant racist comments with the "n" word or even implications, much less outright statements, about black people being incapable of handling financial success without falling into substance abuse and/or dying broke and young.
If a blatantly bigoted comment, of any kind, slips through the cracks, here, you can bet good money that at least someone will notice it, then it will get HR'd into oblivion. Even the subtle comments that may be prejudiced out of nothing but sheer ignorance come under scrutiny here. We aren't perfect about it, but I'm absolutely certain that we're better people than the folks at Fox about it, where comments like that are allowed to stand despite maybe a few objections about it. And probably at least half of the comments objecting to the bigotry are met with "you're playing the race card" - as if simply pointing out bigotry is 'playing the race card' and as if 'playing the race card' is equally as bad as, if not worse than, blatant bigotry itself.
And if a comment like that does slip through here, the last thing you'll see is numerous approvals or 'likes' of said comments.
Am I naive, or was there a time where there was some sense of honor among at least some conservatives? I mean, it at least seemed to me that attitudes like that would be met with "hey, that's not cool!" from at least a few staunch right-wingers.
Stay classy Fox lemmings. How does it feel knowing you're basically the first to exploit someone's death with your bigotry, instead of Fred Phelps? At least the fist to be published? Oh, never mind! You probably wear that as a badge of honor.