Aziz Ansari hosted Saturday Night Live this weekend, kicking things off with an evisceration of all things Donald Trump and white supremacy. You see, much like Trump and his supporters, Ansari, too, yearns for a simpler time. You know, like a time in which blatant, eager racism was something of a social faux-pas. Because Ansari knows that Trump didn’t make the whites supremacists again; his victory just gave this “lowercase kkk movement … this kind of casual white supremacy†the confidence to blunder out into the open, let the blinding beams of sunlight hit their pallid, wan faces, and tell the likes of Ansari to “go back to where you came from.†Now, Ansari doesn’t expect these people to sidle up to basic decency anytime soon, but he does have one demand: “You gotta go back to pretending.†The narrative of national unity in the face of overwhelming divisiveness: It’s the American way.
