#CancelColbert activist Suey Park (sort of) responds to "Late Show" announcement

The hashtag activist quickly become the target of online scorn after news broke of Colbert's new gig

Published April 10, 2014 6:00PM (EDT)

  (Comedy Central)
(Comedy Central)

Hashtag activist Suey Park has responded to the announcement that Stephen Colbert will be the new host of "The Late Show" — by pointedly refusing to render an opinion on the matter:

RT @suey_park: [Absence is a politic. #NotYourClickbait]

Update: Following the publication of this article, Park deleted the tweet in which she responded to the news of Colbert's hiring. The above quotation was recovered from manual retweets of Park's original comment.

Park ignited a firestorm two weeks ago by calling for the cancellation of "The Colbert Report" after an errant, offensive tweet was published by the show's official Twitter account. The social-media snafu -- magnified by the rapid proliferation of Park's #CancelColbert Twitter hashtag -- exploded into a national conversation about race, even forcing an on-air response from Colbert himself.

When news broke on Thursday that Colbert would be replacing the David Letterman after the longtime "Late Show" host retires, Twitter was quickly flooded with mocking jokes about the #CancelColbert movement. Much of the response was specifically targeted at Park, who is no stranger at this point to angry rejoinders from the public.

Reacting to the sometimes-violent backlash against her activism, Park told Salon last week that,

I will get rape and death threats for not thinking Colbert is funny, or for trying to crack my own jokes about race. And I think that’s unfair, cause in the same way he thinks Orientalism is backward and old, but he still uses it to make a point. For every time he does that, it should be more than justifiable for me to actually target the system of structural advantage that is whiteness and to be able to make jokes about white supremacists, which I do all the time in my work.


By Peter Finocchiaro

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Related Topics ------------------------------------------

#cancelcolbert David Letterman Stephen Colbert Suey Park The Colbert Report The Late Show