"They cheaper than us, for one thing."

Advice my (White) mom got as an American heading to Germany in the '70s - put a maple leaf flag on your backpack and try to pass as Canadian.

Eh…the cynic in me says that most of us will never be offered anything close to what we think we're worth - "everybody's loyal when the money is low". What makes Ben's actions so galling is that the money was *nonexistent*.

Things that I have no faith the current DoJ will try to stop.

You mean Chris, the protagonist of Get Out? Chris was American, but his actor Daniel Kaluuya is apparently British.

My complete ignorance of Nigerian history means I don't know a parallel, but is there some horrible atrocity in his nation's history that he, as a Nigerian, would be outraged to see papered over? A quick Wikipedia search has me guessing that if somebody tried to paint Britain's colonization of Nigeria as a neutral…

I don't know enough about UK pop culture to know if the history of American slavery and the civil rights movement is something they'd have been exposed to growing up. If you were only dimly aware of them until you became an adult, I can see why a chance to play a runaway slave might be exciting rather than wearying.

I've known more than a few folks who had deep prejudices against Black people but would, upon hearing a foreign accent come out of a Black person's mouth, immediately reclassify them from "lazy negro" to "hard-working immigrant".

The speech itself was at a naturalization ceremony, meaning he was addressing an audience of immigrants. If this were a game show-style challenge to bring up the topic of slavery to this particular crowd, I suppose this would be a way to try and make the topic relevant. The question about this speech isn't "why…

This is what happens when I recycle jokes that are old enough to drink.

I get the impression it's that AA actors don't want to play another slave role the same way a lot of VSB regulars don't want to watch another slave movie. Whereas Black Brits are…just happy to get the work, I guess?

That's a universal US vs. UK thing. Quoth Dave Barry: "Alistair Cooke could introduce reruns of Miami Vice and Americans would find them intellectually stimulating."

"Immigrants in their own way" is not a great choice of words. But it still acknowledges the difference *right in the quote*.

There's saying a wrong thing across hundreds of speeches during eight years in office, and then there's saying several wrong things over the course of (checks watch) 48 days.

Yeah, this is combing through hundreds of speeches to find one fairly obscure, cherry-picked quote. We're not saying it's good, we're saying it's nowhere near as bad. Oh, and in case you were wondering who went to the Obama archives and did a search for "immigrants":

Eh, it's one of those weird statements that's acknowledging it's own poor choice of terms. Can't hold a candle to Ben or Betsy's word salad.

At this point I'm not sure anybody wants him.

Apparently his liver and heart were just in bad shape. "Natural causes" here means that he died of persistent conditions rather than an acute episode…same way Charlie Parker died of "natural causes" at 34.

Did not know he was married to a Black woman. Think the key difference is, unlike Gary Owens, you don't immediately know.

Part of it is that they figure they can appropriate existing memes at will (see Pepe), because who's going to want to go to the trouble of saying it's *not* racist?