Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket, the author of A Series Of Unfortunate Events, emceed the National Book Awards on Wednesday evening. The word ”emceed,” as you probably know, here means “led the celebration of authors who won the prestigious U.S. literary award,” but Handler also took it as an opportunity to make some horribly racist jokes.
Racism, a word which here means “made a ‘joke’ about how a black author was allergic to watermelon,” is usually not a good foundation for either jokes or emceeing, or for anything, really. The author in question, Jacqueline Woodson, won the young people’s literature prize for her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, written as a series of poems that the National Book Foundation calls “emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world.” Woodson has been honored with numerous other awards, words which here mean “a highly respected author who deserves better than to be reduced to a racist punchline.”