ONLINE ONLY: The Real Chris Stewart

When the quote came out with her saying to Sarah Janecek [of the Politics in Minnesota newsletter] that liberals in the district were just a little bit too eager to elect a Minnesota black to Congress, I thought about that. I thought about the fact that what I know about Keith Ellison—people talk about the troubles in his life and reduce him to that. But when I thought about it, I saw a guy with an advanced education who's a dad, who's married, who's given a lot back to the community. In terms of what we're taught growing up as African-Americans, that's kind of the Valhalla. If you do that, you're successful.

So he's passed all the signposts you're supposed to have to pass to be successful, but it comes down to people claiming he was chosen because he was black. And that's very insulting. And it was doubly insulting coming from someone I'd placed so much faith in. I'd written good things about Tammy Lee, and I had faith in her.

When that quote came out, it deflated me. It's perplexing in part because it's saying that all the liberals in CD5 are racist—that they have no minds beyond seeing a black candidate and thinking, let's send him! Keith Ellison was more than that. So that bothered me, and it bothered people around me.

My spoof was, to me, not a spoof of Tammy Lee—it was a spoof of the idea that we shouldn't vote for this guy because he was chosen for his race. That was the subtext of the spoof in my mind: Vote for me, because I'm not the guy who got chosen because he was black. It's not attacking her whiteness. We didn't call her any derogatory names, none of that type of stuff.

CP: Do you think in retrospect the point of the satire would have been clearer if you'd cast it in the voice of a Tammy Lee/IP supporter rather than the candidate herself?

Stewart: I would say it was wrong either way. It was just wrong.

CP: Because you were entering the public eye by running for office, or because it was "bad speech"?

Stewart: No, just in general it's probably wrong. I mean, you look at the visceral response and the division in the community, and—I should back up and tell you, I'm an evangelical, I'm a Christian, and this is a colossal moral failure for a Christian. This is something that shouldn't have gotten out there. Most of the time when I get too biting, it's something I give myself permission to do in the realm of letters. But not all those [writings] are really for public consumption. In high school, I had a journalism teacher who taught me to channel a lot of what I was mad about into letters. And it's something I've done since I was a teenager.

There's a line you cross when you write stuff for yourself, as a writer, versus the stuff you sharpen up to show to other people.

CP: And the blog, being a collective of people writing mainly for each other, kind of blurred that line.

Stewart: It blurred that line greatly. I was accepting of people writing stuff that was sharper than what I would write. If I wrote something that was too sharp, I would wind up pulling punches if I thought it was going to be something others might see. If you ever saw the blog, you'd see that a lot of the stuff was just meant to be funny, and not in a savage sense. The Tammy Lee thing was savage. It was a spontaneous response to something. Most of what I write is better thought-out than that.

CP: Do you think part of the energy attaching to this stems from the fact that most white Americans don't know, and don't really want to know, what most black Americans think about the country, about politics, about white people?

Stewart: Well... I mean, it's funny. I like to think that I've studied human behavior enough to understand people pretty well. Here I have to admit that I don't. I've had white people say to me, I don't know what it's like to be black, and I never will. What I have to say in return is, I don't know what it's like to be white either. I'm listening to the responses I've gotten and trying to feel my way through them.

But, you know, white people participated in this [Tammy Lee parody]. It's not a "black thing." It was a collaborative thing, and a majority of the writers I know are white people who have very strong opinions about white people. And they feel better, more sure, about lampooning white people than I would. And I'd probably feel better lampooning someone in my own community than they would. That's just a given.

CP: So some of the folks who worked on the Lee parody were white? I hadn't heard that.

Stewart: Yeah. The majority of them were white. Nobody's pointed that out, including me. But I've had white people say to me, I can't even believe you have friends who think like that! And my thought is, well, they're kind of closer to you than they are to me... [laughs]