Race is an awkward, touchy subject in America that usually requires white people to hang their head in shame as they're sternly lectured at by some grandstanding impresario or another, whether from the pages of "TIME" or "Newsweek" with such offerings as "The Legacy of The Civil Rights Movement", "What We Could be Doing More", and other limp handfuls of spaghetti meant to top off "the news hole" with something trite and useless.
Or worse yet, you have some activist telling a tear-jerking story in front of a mixed audience as white people feel the impetus and guilt to dutifully swing their head over to the other aisle, feel "social expectation" making them rise like zombies, and shuffle over to give their black brothers and sisters a hug before settling back into their seats, mortified but chastened. But after the show, when the cameras leave, they go back to what they've always been doing-- which is stay amongst their own kind, those with whom they feel the most comfortable.
By always making "race" the center of the dialogue, people genuinely don't know what to say to each other and steer clear in order to avoid pinched awkwardness. No one wants to look like "a white doofus" who isn't "hip" to the social dynamic of "letting things be cool".
Just how much white people should assist black people along, if it's in their place to be this constant "information booth" of what is out there, or if this is merely an ego-boosting exercise-- that the liberal emerges from his background of wealth and privilege to mingle with "the downtrodden" because on some level he feels superior and contemptuous of them, and these feelings make him feel guilty. So he overcompensates by romanticizing "the other" and surrounding himself with the trappings of "liberation", merely a rotten projection of his ego and "taken out" on an exotic group of people used as "moral chess pieces" in their quest for power, to make the world adapt to their candied, middle-class needs.
Conservatives are no less guilty of this, calling on the principles of Dr. Martin Luther King to justify their programs while everyone essentially ignores, or tries to ignore, "his black brother" mumbling down at the police line-up with a red doo-rag on his head and holding up a sign with the date of his arrest for drugs and homicide.
On some level, we're all Marxists
back in elementary school. Everybody is bright and quick, and you believe that
all can be saved. Humanity is reasonable, notwithstanding the fact that you took
off with the secret indulgence of watching "In Living Color" instead of doing
your homework, jivin' along like a 10 year-old little honky kid who wants to be
"in on the joke".
Brownies and bubblegum cards make the world go 'round though it would be a feeble economy with which to erect the skyscrapers downtown, much less seal the handshake of business in a suit. You're convinced that if only enough laws are passed, war & inequality can be outlawed forever-- notwithstanding "the law of the jungle" out in the schoolyard where you take the law into your hands and crush your enemies with a yelp, standing on top of the jungle-gym and roaring like a Tyrannasaurus-Rex.
It was fun to play at "gangsta"-- the ultimate bane of ostrich-headed white suburban existence. The idea of hard, gem-like "badness" away from the pallid throes of my upper middle-class vale of proper, soft living where all was tame. It was like a city slicker dressed up like a Wild West gunslinger as he sat in a juice bar, or a Bruce Lee fan dabbling in the code of Samurai bashido and purchasing rubber ninja throwing stars through the Johnson Smith "Things You Never Knew Existed" catalog. Of course, none of them would raise a hand to defend themselves-- even though the Bruce Lee enthusiast is enthralled with the incident he read about somewhere concerning an enemy of the Shogun getting disemboweled with a meat-hook.
Oh, humanity-- cowardly and curious, mortal and base.
I semi-immersed myself in "gangsta" culture, hoping some of that "badness" and "authenticity" of "the other" would rub off on me. I figured one would be "street smart", "edgy", & "hip", though at summer camp off in Colorado I might as well have been a hand-sign wavin' Martian who stepped off the saucer as I spoke with mock ghetto bravado like the palest half-Jewish facsimile of a "homeboy" this side of the Rockies. Some metal kids from California shook their heads with disgust at my feeble collection of hip-hop tapes, and heaped on their opprobrium and head-shaking amusement at this pathetic counterfeit whose bluff was called.
I was left to ponder on my identity, what "whiteness" meant among my kind out here in the clean, crisp mountain air of the West away from the bogus gesturing of television. This was life "as is", the white man "in his element", and all this hip-hop jive did not mesh with his soul so far as I could see. For this one time, in 1993, I had this sense that I was truly with "my people" out in the glorious wild. Hip-hop may have been a novelty, but it was truly alien to us.
By middle-school around this time, other kids must have been feeling it too and were self-segregating at the lunch tables. Yet it seemed oddly natural that this would happen. What would some prim, white, uptight science geek have to say to "Lamont"-- shuffling around in his baggy pants and guffawing through his chocolate milk with snorts? The white kids at my well-to-do school always had a sheltered, nervous countenance while our "imports" from the desegregation program seemed heavier, slower, meaner-- more lethargic except when taken to bursts of wild excitement that rapidly got out of control, especially when there was a big group of them. We would only turn our heads in their direction and wonder what the disturbance was about.
We white kids were uncertain, faltering, and unsure of ourselves-- and in a contest between cultures the side with the most energy always wins. The high school dances couldn't have illustrated this principle any more clearly. The black girls organized it with a more advanced, harder-edged social facility, because no one stepped in to fill the vacuum. And lo and behold, there in the corner sat a D.J. wearing so much gold that he made Mr. T look penniless. The dance was a magnet for black kids all over the city, some who looked dangerous with sharp eyebrows sketched into evil V's, if not lower lips sticking out in criminal contemplation, and while the D.J. scratched "booty music" the white kids wandered around uncertainly in the Africanized darkness at a complete loss. It was our school, yet it wasn't our dance.
We were losing our will to live as a civilization, as a people. What was taking over was the jungle beat of social decay-- the cold urban streets, the hopelessness of St. Louis's social problems that were not on our side of the plate. All the money, glint, and flashing gold was gathered here in one dance hall, though these kids went home to a windswept ghetto stoop where a stray dog wandered by with its nose nodding down to the pavement.
And all the while, our ostrich-minded curriculum found it easier to keep blaming our society for making these people into what they were, when it was something that went way back into their natures, how they were "wired" as human beings, something fundamental that went down to essence, soul, and the shimmering of atoms in the great cosmic dance.
The healthiest relationship I've ever seen between the races was at a local restaurant when people mostly stuck to their side of the aisle with some friendly mingling. The bartender was an outgoing black kid who "melted the ice" so everyone can hang out in this one place with an upbeat attitude, yet understand that you mostly stayed around your own kind. . . . . . who and what you know, with a little "spice" thrown in around the edges.
Because the rest is unspoken. . . . . .
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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
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(Rheeee of Crickets)
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("I heard that, Missy!")
© 2008 by Insufferable Industries
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