Sometimes, ‘Humor’ Is Far From Funny

At this point, we’re not sure which is worse--the reprehensible verse that Assemblyman Pete Knight of Palmdale circulated Tuesday or his seeming inability to understand his offense.

What Knight did was to pass out a racist verse that he said had been mailed to him by a constituent. The incident occurred at a regularly scheduled private strategy session of the Assembly Republican Caucus in Sacramento.

The doggerel that Knight distributed mocked Latino illegal immigrants with such lines as “Write to friends in motherland, tell them to come as fast as they can. . . . They come in rags and Chebby trucks, I buy big house with welfare bucks.”

Knight’s action was a gross affront to Latinos in general and recent immigrants in particular. The freshman legislator must understand that such offensive language has no place in the realm of legitimate public discourse, and it must be condemned in the strongest terms.

Fortunately, some of Knight’s Republican colleagues have done just that, labeling the verse and its circulation at the meeting as racist, awful, unbelievable and insulting.

A spokesman for the Assembly Republicans said that the joke “does not reflect the consensus of the Republican Caucus by any stretch of the imagination.” Good enough, for starters, but it must be noted that those condemnations came after the meeting and after, we presume, the poem was obtained by reporters and inquiries were made.

We would like a better explanation of why no mention or criticism of the verse was made during the meeting. We would like to know why no one stood up and demanded to know immediately who had circulated it, and why Knight was not upbraided at the time. The current explanation, that meeting agenda items completely absorbed the members’ attention, leads us to wonder whether any condemnation would have occurred had the verse not been disclosed after the meeting.

But Knight, by far, is the biggest offender here. Though he said he was apologizing to Latino lawmakers, he declined to distance himself from the poem’s lambasting of Latino illegal immigrants. In fact, he initially worsened matters by calling the verse “a pretty interesting column” that he found amusing. But “humor” is by no means an acceptable explanation for such an egregious and damaging example of stereotyping.

Those who question the importance of this incident should be reminded that it is a sign that racism has hardly diminished. Over the years, only its guise has changed. In response, Knight’s Republican colleagues should search the rules of the state Assembly for a suitable form of censure.