September 13, 2004
Joseph C. Phillips: All men get tired.
Actor and friend Joseph C. Phillips has been interviewed six ways to Sunday the past few months.
As a visible black Republican who is supporting George W. Bush, Phillips gets calls for interviews all over the place (as do I), with many folks politely asking what would make someone become a conservative. Then there are the not-so-polite ones. You know the ones. I've written about them ad nauseum here. I talked about how I was most recently browbeaten on two radio interviews -- the same day, mind you -- by ignorant and vindictive callers who have called me every unmentionable name under the sun. After enough of that, every man can reach the limits of his tolerance.
Joe reached his recently.
The tipping point for me came last Friday morning during a radio interview with Mildred Gaddis on WCHB's "Inside Detroit." As a favor to an acquaintance I agreed to the interview late Thursday night even though it meant I would have to wake up early Friday and speak about the Republican convention after only a few hours of sleep.Yet and still we're supposed to be the bad guys, right?Ms. Gaddis was friendly and we seemed to be getting along quite well until one of her regular callers referred to me as a "so called black man." That was it. I told him I was not going to get up at the crack of dawn in order to be insulted and insisted Ms Gaddis get him off the line.
I have had it up to my eyeballs with black folk who feel they have been anointed as racial gatekeepers and therefore have the right to stand at the door checking ideological credentials and passing out racial membership cards.
Ms Gaddis, much to my surprise and disappointment, not only defended the caller, but also suggested that I was being rude in demanding that she "get him off the line." (For a moment I had forgotten that when debating with liberals they are allowed to call conservatives anything they like, but the moment we defend ourselves we are being intolerant or rude.)
I expressed that I was disheartened at her position that the callers not using the actual words "Uncle Tom" made it okay to address her guests in such a disrespectful manner.
She cut the interview short. The line went dead without so much as a howdy-do from her, her staff or her co-host who had asked me to do the program somewhere around midnight of that morning.
To hear the liberals tell it, we are.
Just damn.
Posted by mhking at September 13, 2004 04:56 PMI live in the metro Detroit area. What Phillips describes is typical of Mildred Gaddis. She is a phony--she will pretend to go along with a black conservative while she is speaking to him, but her true colors will out.
I did not hear the show, but my father did, and he was disgusted by her attitude, and what she allowed to happen.
It is not surprising she got Phillips off the line. She did the same thing to a black minister from Boston. She mistakenly believed he was a black Republican who was angry at Bush, but when she found out he was a conservative disgusted with Democrats, you could hear the disappointment in her voice. She pretended to go along with his points, and then conveniently lost him. Somehow.
Is the idea of a black "Fox" a fantasy? Instead of dealing with the Mildred's of the world, could we route around them?
Posted by: Jamie at September 16, 2004 08:43 AM