Michael Rapaport speaks during ‘March For Israel’ at the National Mall on November 14, 2023, in Washington, D.C. | Source: Noam Galai / Getty
There is irony in a white actor who used Black culture to become famous accusing a Black politician of “race hustling,” but that’s where we are in 2024, particularly when it comes to the topic of politics.
Following Jamaal Bowman’s Congressional primary loss on Tuesday night, movie star Michael Rapaport took to X, formerly Twitter, and claimed in no uncertain terms that he thinks the New York lawmaker’s campaign ran on a platform of antisemitism.
Bowman, who has been an outspoken critic of Israel bombing Gaza, ran “a campaign based on JEW HATE,” Rapaport posted on X on Wednesday morning. He also accused Bowman of “race hustling” and making excuses for his primary loss.
Rapaport is certainly entitled to his opinion.
But any allegations of “race hustling” lobbed at Bowman and not also his opponent, Westchester County Executive George Latimer, could be greeted as being disingenuous considering the full circumstances of the entire primary campaign.
After all, it is a fact that Latimer’s campaign trafficked in racist dog whistling that stereotyped Bowman as “angry” and fearmongered based on the color of his skin, among other race-based strategies that apparently paid off. And speaking of paying off, Latimer’s campaign enjoyed a significant funding advantage over Bowman thanks in no small part to AIPAC, the powerful and influential – and ultra-conservative – pro-Israel lobby that helped make the campaign the single most expensive in U.S. House primary history.
Considering Latimer suggested that he couldn’t be racist for reasons like because he grew up in a Black neighborhood and because he appointed a Black man to be his deputy, it was curious why Rapaport would not also make the same accusation of Latimer.
Bowman told NewsOne weeks before Tuesday’s primary that he found it “unfortunate that George Latimer has decided that the best way to win an election is to divide our communities with a blatantly racist campaign.”
With that said, Rapaport’s selective criticism might not be lent much credence had he, himself, not been guilty of the aforementioned “race hustling.” Lest we forget how Rapaport flagrantly appropriated Black culture in his earliest movie roles – from fashion choices to his speech pattern and more – an undeniable aspect of the onset of his success.
Rapaport has also referred to himself as a “wigga,” a slang term derived from “wigger” that blends the words “white” and the “N-word.”
In 2016, after threatening to sue the Root for blocking him on social media, Rapaport called himself “The Wigga You Love To Hate.”
Making that tweet even more curious was how just about one year earlier, Rapaport – possibly telling on himself – tweeted, seemingly unprompted, that “The term WIGGER is what white people call other white people who they accuse of actin black, the USER of the word really dislikes black peeps.”
For the record, Merriam Webster defines the word “wigger” as “a usually young white person whose clothing, language, and mannerisms are regarded as imitative of those stereotypically associated with African-Americans: a white person who admires and seeks to emulate black culture.”
It was in that context that Rapaport accused Bowman of “race hustling.”
This is America.
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