“The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and Stephen Colbert’s “The Colbert Report” arguably offer the most honest commentary that we have on the constant chicanery and racism that are contemporary right-wing politics.  I tune in to each show almost daily.

So I was deeply disappointed to see a tweet from “The Colbert Report’s” Twitter account, excerpted from a show earlier this week, that read “I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.” The statement came from a longer bit on the show where Stephen Colbert rightfully and scathingly satirized Dan Snyder, the owner of Washington’s professional football team, for minimizing and dismissing the concerns of indigenous people who find the team’s mascot a slur.

Twitter erupted with a procession of #CancelColbert tweets, led by Asian American activist Suey Park and other people-of-color activists on Twitter, prompting Colbert to tweet from his personal account that he does not control the show’s Twitter feed, and he found the tweet offensive as well.

I sent a few #CancelColbert tweets in solidarity, making it clear that racism (and ethnic insensitivity and Orientalism) is simply unacceptable. And I was most disheartened to receive several tweets and Facebook replies from black people defending the show. Though none of them used the word, the gist of many of the replies was to explain to me that the tweet was part of a satire — a satire meant to critique racism — and as such, the show shouldn’t be canceled, because Asian Americans were just being hypersensitive and overreacting to something designed actually to help.

How soon we forget!

I get the impulse from black people and those on the left to defend the show. As I mentioned, Colbert really has some of the best race commentary that we got going in this country, and to lose that commentary would feel like a real loss. But we should be clear: A blind defense of Colbert and his show is absolutely reactionary and impulsive. And African-Americans above any other group in this country should know better.

I love good comedy. Chris Rock, Anjelah Johnson, Erin Jackson and Aziz Ansari are among my favorites. Comedy is a great medium to do race critique because it helps us all take ourselves less seriously. But we should be clear that embodiment matters. Stephen Colbert is a white man and that means there have to be boundaries. In this bit, and with his character Ching Chong Ding Dong, he used slurs against one group to shed light on the absurdity of slurs against another group.

But white people do not have a history of being devalued as white people on the basis of the slurs. Yes, Irish Americans, Italian Americans and Polish Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were frequently the object of ethnic epithets and discrimination. But as those groups “became white,” whiteness itself became what Cheryl Harris calls a form of property, a protection against racial devaluing. So when Colbert, a white male, uses these slurs, even in the mode of critique, he steps into incredibly muddy water, and surely cannot expect to come out unsoiled.

In other words, I’m saying that though the bit was intended to critique racism, it failed. Yes, Colbert was spot on in his analysis of the ridiculousness of Dan Snyder’s “Original Americans” Foundation. But to paraphrase one of my Twitter-locutors, Chris Robinson, you can’t make Asian people collateral damage on your way to proving a point about racism toward Native people.