Ellen just reminded us what happens when white liberal friends get too comfortable

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Usually, Ellen DeGeneres can do no wrong in my eyes.

But this week she reminded all of us what happens when your favorite white friend gets a little too comfortable and crosses the line.

Anyone who watches The Ellen DeGeneres Show knows that she and rapper Nicki Minaj are practically besties. Their clever exchanges are always chock full of laughter and witty sound bites. Ellen managed to expertly pay homage to Minaj’s Anaconda video without offending the masses and a few Halloween’s ago she even showed women everywhere how to wear a Nicki Minaj costume sans black face.

More often then not, when it comes to embracing black culture with class and compassion DeGeneres is a ninja; deftly avoiding all the traps that her counterparts often fall into.

Until she decided to parody Minaj’s upcoming TV show by placing ‘butt pads’ on a young black girl.

It appears all the kudos and adoration from not just Minaj, but from our community as a whole has gone to her head.

To be fair, white privilege is a hell of an affliction to overcome while doing your best to be a socially responsive human being. Being a successful white ally requires you to always be mindful of your surroundings, to think about consequences before you speak or act, and to make peace with the fact that any false move you make will be used against you no matter how small.

Basically, being an ally means doing by choice the very things black people have done as a necessity for centuries.

However, the thing that Ellen and many other liberals don’t seem to fully understand is black people don’t ever get days off, and if you are feeling progressive (and trill) enough to declare yourself a part of our extended family – you can’t take any days off either!

There isn’t some magical point in your relationship with the black community where you can unhook your political correctness girdle and let the messy gut of your ignorance take a breather. 

That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.

I can just imagine what Ellen must have thought when she greenlit this skit:

Nicki and I are cool. She lets me giggle over her booty all the time. She won’t mind if I turn the story of her life into a skit that resembles a minstrel show revival. She won’t mind if I over-sexualize a young black girl and make her bend over to expose her rear to a laughing audience. Nicki won’t be upset if I reduce the entirety of the black experience to the absurdity of their grotesque physiques. Everyone knows black people have huge butts so this should be funny. Haha! Butts.

While everyone on Black Twitter is dragging Ellen on the Internet streets and giving her a thorough lesson in “Not today Satan,” I almost feel bad for her. And a really petty part of me wishes Iyanla Vanzant would grab her by the hand, pull her to a corner and be like “You know that was corny right? Give me back that imaginary black pass you stole out of Nicki’s purse.”

That’s really what this comes down to isn’t it? The assumption that there is some ‘get out of jail free’ card for white folks that clears them of any social responsibility after a certain amount of good deeds.

We ourselves perpetuate the myth of the ‘black pass.’ Whether it’s that one white woman in the hood who is so “down” you don’t even consider her white, or the homie from school who we let use the n-word on occasion because we know he means no harm. Not to mention all the white feminists who sneak through the back door using the password “misogyny” to gain access into conversations about oppression.

Sustainable progress can only happen when we make it clear that there is no pass.

No matter how much your black friend lets you touch her hair, joke about her large rear end or drop a few n-bombs, you will never have the right to used her perceived permission as an excuse to perpetuate stereotypes that insinuate that we (as a whole) are oddities that can be made fun of.

She might be your friend and love you enough to let it slide, but she doesn’t speak for all of us. The biggest privilege of whiteness is constant access to your humanity. White people – as a whole – will always be seen as three-dimensional and sympathetic human beings. Human is their default setting. People of color don’t get that luxury. We are seen as a solid mass of peculiarity. Our default setting is otherness. If Keisha or Marcus allow something stupid to slide or say something problematic is okay, white people assume they are speaking on behalf of all of us.

Case in point: Nicki Minaj has a habit of taking it easy on rich, respectable white women when their privilege rears its ugly head (cue her duet with Taylor Swift after a mild Twitter exchange) – while raunchier more ratchet white women get called out on stage. ‘Miley, what’s good?!’

At best this is probably a smart business move on her part; at worst it’s strategic pandering. I can’t really call it either way. But if history repeats itself, the script for how Minaj will respond to this controversy is already written.

Nicki will Tweet something like: ‘OMG Ellen is so funny. I love her and totally get it. She’s not a racist’

Then Ellen will tape some sort of message with sadness and remorse in her eyes, clarifying that she was innocently making fun of her best friend Nicki; quietly reminding us that she is our favorite white lesbian.

Puss in Boots himself can’t melt hearts as well as Ellen can. It’s like her super power.

But this time I’m not falling for it.

I don’t care how many times Ellen batts her baby blue’s at me, that skit was foul and deep down I know she knew better.

How? Because at the end of the segment she giddily looks at the camera and says, “They have big butts. That’s the joke,” smugly stating the obvious, as if she’d once again managed to get away with something the average white woman couldn’t.

Nice try – but no.