Allen Johnson: Robinson reserves a special place in his contempt for Black people

What is it with Mark Robinson?

Even if not one word of CNN's reporting is true.

Even if he didn't post lewd comments on a pornographic website more than a decade ago.

Even if he didn't profess to be a "Black Nazi."

And even if he really didn't say that he longed for the good, old days of slavery, Robinson already has said and written so many other gratuitously mean, tasteless and offensive things, does it matter?

These posts and pronouncements are extensive and well-documented.

And Robinson has neither disputed nor apologized for them.

We know he has targeted Jews and Muslims and women and gay people.

We also know he has reserved a substantial amount of his vitriol for Black people.

He even went out of his way to suggest that Michelle Obama is a man.

And in 2018 he attacked the movie "Black Panther" in a post in which he also managed to disparage on the character's Jewish comic-book creators and to include a Jewish epithet for Black people.

Why?

In case you hadn't noticed, Robinson is himself a Black man.

Does that matter? Should it? After all, there is no law, unwritten or otherwise, that being Black means you can't be critical of Black people.

I've done it myself on such issues as gangs, gun violence, personal responsibility and the troubling disintegration of traditional families.

Yet, I've also tried to do it in a spirit of constructive, if sometimes difficult, self-reflection. I can't say I always succeed. But I try.

By contrast, Robinson's references to the Black community are downright vicious and contemptuous.

Nor is there is any moral to most of these stories, just savage, hit-and-run verbal grenades, lobbed here, there, everywhere ... just for the hell of it.

The only object, it seems, is to shock, provoke and cater to the baser instincts of his predominantly white audiences.

He can be — to appropriate phrasing from a certain former president — Bill Cosby at his crankiest and most self-righteous ... on steroids.

For instance, on the holiday honoring the man to whom Donald Trump likes to compare him, Martin Luther King Jr. , Robinson posted on Facebook: "It is at once funny and sad that so many people will follow the lead of a bunch of atheists and worship an ersatz pastor as a deity" (Jan. 15, 2018).

In a smug shout-out to a congressman who was severely beaten by police during a peaceful protest in 1965, he wrote: "Hey John Lewis, just because you got beat up by some Democrats in 1965 doesn't mean you can't get criticized by some Republicans in 2017" (Jan. 16, 2017).

As Robinson sees it, the Civil Rights Movement was "crap" and did more harm than good. It "was never about giving rights, it was about setting the stage to take rights away," he posted on Facebook on Aug. 4, 2015.

Sometimes his logic seems perverse, as when Robinson suggested that Black people shouldn't receive reparations for slavery; they should pay them.

"If you want to tell the truth about it, it is you who owes," said Robinson during the 2021 North Carolina Republican Party Convention.

As for the purely gratuitous stuff, where to start?

Calling Beyonce a "butt-shakin', devil-worshipping skank" (Facebook, March 2017)?

Describing then-outgoing first lady Michelle Obama as "an anti-American, abortion and gay marriage supporting, liberal leftist elitist and I'll be glad when he takes his boyfriend and leaves the White House" (Facebook, January 2017)?

To be clear, from Washington to DuBois and Malcolm X to MLK, Black people have never been monolithic in their views.

There must be room in our public discourse for a variety of political perspectives.

But this isn't Jason Riley of The Wall Street Journal making a well-argued case (with which I still disagree) against affirmative action. What Robinson has spewed on the internet (most of it easy to find with a cursory Google search) is not discourse.

So really, is there much of a leap from that kind of rhetoric to Robinson's alleged declaration that he's a "Black Nazi"?

Or from what he says online to what he says in person?

Often the personas we concoct on social media can be dramatically different from the flesh-and-blood human beings at the keyboard. The internet can make monsters of the meek.

But the Mark Robinson you get on social media is the Mark Robinson you get in person.

A raging mountain of grievance and self-destruction.

I'm almost tempted to pity him.