(UPDATE: This is better than anything I could say.)
He is so insecure you can smell it through the television. He has a PhD but he knows it means next to nothing because a) it’s in theology and b) he’s black, so even liberals (quietly) assume he got some affirmative action dealie.
Distinguished scholars and intellectuals don’t snap “capiche?” at nervous young women trying to do their job in front of a hundred people. Men who use the word “Capiche?” are never Italian and are always Napoleonic, hypersensitive, insecure, usually lower class and middle aged (and worried about it).
It was a common expression among the older men in my circle growing up. They think it makes them sound like Frank Sinatra. It’s like calling the tv “the idiot box” — one of those tells that reveals an uncanny amount about the speaker’s background and his present-day station in life. None of it flattering.
Part of his insecurity probably stems from being light skinned in a black culture that places considerable (and, to outsiders, baffling) importance on almost imperceptable gradations in skin tone.
