We’ve found the latest perpetrator of Blackface: Her name is Candace Owens, and it looks like she’s been getting away with it for a while.
I refuse to believe that Owens is a real Black woman. Sure, she looks Black and appears to be a sentient human being, but there’s nothing else there to suggest that she’s a card-carrying member of Black Girl Magic. Even I can accept that Stacey Dash, with all her bucketheadedness, is an actual Black woman – she was in a Damon Wayans movie and a Carl Thomas video.
But Owens came from out of the clear blue atmosphere one day and stepped right into becoming a marionette for the far-right, who needed someone pretty and with actual brown skin to dance in front of the cameras like N*SYNC-era Justin Timberlake. Whatever her schtick it appears to be working. Owens was invited by the Republicans to testify during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the rise of white nationalism in America. Which is like inviting my childless, penis-possessing-self to speak on a panel about the pain of childbirth.
Owens actually baffles me enough to make me expend energy wondering who, and why, she is. Here are a few theories I’ve come up with:
A Bloke From Across the Pond
It should come as no surprise to anyone that Owens is engaged to a white British dude named George Farmer, chairman of the group Turning Point UK and avowed supporter of the Brexit movement. I would imagine the one thing that could potentially turn a woman away from her whole race is the same thing that might make me question my loyalty to my own mother: remarkably good sex. Owens’ judgment could be clouded by some fancy-sounding pillow talk that has entirely made her forget where she came from. As Owens’ former bestie, Kanye West, once said: “Good d— will do that.”
She’s One of The Tethered
Perhaps Owens is a real-life victim of the world Jordan Peele concocted in his blockbuster movie Us. Like Lupita Nyong’o’s character in the film, Owens was born a regular-degular Black girl to two righteous Black parents who raised her never to trust white people and to always properly moisturize. But, as a teenager, her family visited the Creation Museum in Kentucky and were never heard from again. She encountered a MAGA version of herself and hasn’t been the same since. Just sayin’…have we ever seen Owens’ parents?
She’s a science experiment between Putin and Trump
Now that we’re pretty sure the Russians helped the Sugar-Free Orange Kool-Aid Manbeat Hillary Clinton, is it outside of the realm of possibility that they used some Black DNA to create a Black woman and indoctrinate her to convince all black people to step away from the Democratic Party and to question everything we’ve been taught about slavery and racism? I’ve seen shit like this on the SyFy Channel, and I’m sure the Feds are keeping it from us. Think about it: had anyone heard of a “Candace Owens” before Trump became president?
She just said “f— books” forever
Owens dropped out of the University of Rhode Island while pursuing a degree in journalism, which makes sense because any topic she approaches that requires any semblance of journalistic scrutiny can be thoroughly debunked by a 5-year-old with the manual dexterity to visit Google. Owens starts talking about points in history that are backed by tons of empirics and you can bet all the money in your bank that they’re about as fully-fleshed out as that last season of Chappelle’s Show after Dave went to Africa. She actually sat in front of Congress with a straight face and said that the Southern Strategy“never happened.” To be so confidently loud and wrong so frequently is almost admirable.
She’s doing it for the money
Probably the closest approximation to the truth, Owens is very likely out here on the wrong side of the political streets daily in the name of securing the bag. The difference between her and white counterparts who have done the same – the Tomi Lahrens, Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys of the gutter – is that she’s letting down all of her ancestors in the struggle every time she wakes up in the morning. She’s the equivalent of a grandson of Auschwitz survivors marching in the Charlottesville, Va. hate rally. I hope the bag is worth it.
Dustin J. Seibert is a native Detroiter living in Chicago. Miraculously, people have paid him to be aggressively light-skinned via a computer keyboard for nearly two decades. He loves his own mama slightly more than he loves music and exercises every day only so his French fry intake doesn’t catch up to him. Find him at his own site, wafflecolored.com.
