Ever since Ted Cruz and the Koch Brothers invented racism, it’s been a well-known fact that conservative middle-class Americans are the biggest racists to ever be racist. Disgustingly, ridiculously racist. Oh my God, the racism practiced by everyday citizens who want lower taxes and go to Church on Sundays is just appalling. Racists, racists, racists.
We hear it all the time from a news media industry populated by liberal twentysomethings two years removed from their “Heterosexual Norms In Nazi Germany” classes and 10 removed from their co-ed soccer games where they ran around the suburbs in yellow shorts for the amusement of their khaki-clad boat shoe-wearing emasculated fathers. Yup. Liberal Generation Y kids are the non-racists, and everybody else is just a low-rent Donald Sterling voting against “Selma” at the Oscars. That’s how it is.
But let’s examine that for a moment. Let’s look around at reality and ask ourselves, ‘When black people think about specific white people they don’t like, who do they actually see?’
Like many people in this economy, I live in a crappy apartment in a crappy urban neighborhood where white people traditionally didn’t used to live. Recently, due to the craven foresight of real estate developers, the average rent in these kinds of neighborhoods has gone through the roof as part of over-hyped “renewal” projects that usually consist of putting a new Whole Foods someplace where a methodone clinic used to be. The result: young white people start pouring into formerly black neighborhoods to pay vast sums of their parents’ money for rat-infested apartments that used to house families of four.
This weekend I was in line at Wendy’s, per usual. The employees know me and vice versa. I happened to be one of two white people in line but nobody would have noticed that had it not been for the behavior of the other white person in line alongside me.
Now as white people go, I get a fair amount of respect, even with my generally conservative political views. I don’t look like I have way more than other people because I don’t. I live alone, I don’t bother to shave a lot of the time, I’m skinny and mediocre-looking. I dress frumpy. Nobody dates me for very long. I get crapped on by others in my profession while hacks take my material and get famous with it. My adolescent desire to be Norman Mailer didn’t really pan out and I wear the shrugging disappointment on my face.
In other words, I get a pass. I don’t get hassled if I’m chain-smoking outside a Spanish laundromat at two in the morning on a Wednesday. I carry myself like I’m supposed to be there. I keep my head down, I don’t judge anybody, I don’t smile, I don’t make trouble, I don’t let anybody touch me, I’ll give somebody a cigarette if they need it. It’s fine. (THAT’s how you gentrify, kids. Take notes).
But lo and behold, this other white guy in line at Wendy’s was reading a book. Some frilly little kind of book. It could have been Emily Dickinson for all I know. He was dressed in smug glasses with a little scarf and some kind of twee little indie petticoat and he looked like a more effeminate version of “Whistler’s Mother.” He then proceeded to step up to the counter, sigh, look at the menu, take his time to the point where everybody else was aggravated, and then in a voice that probably made his WWII-era grandfather roll over in his grave he ordered.
He ordered some kind of salad-type thing and a chicken sandwich with all kinds of preconditions: no this, no that, like, uh, no I don’t want that on it. Whatever. It was thoroughly disgusting. I felt the angry eyes of other people in line linking me and this loser together as though we came as a socioeconomic couplet. I almost had to apologize to the crowd.
How did this person turn out this way? Is he really so oblivious that he can’t even go to a downmarket Wendy’s without stoking an undercurrent of racial tension that everybody went to the restaurant on a Sunday to just forget about? Is he actively trying to be a punchable asshole?
And here’s the bitter irony: THAT guy is probably some kind of liberal blogger who makes his living accusing Republicans of being racist. THAT guy is exactly like the kind of dweeb who would Tweet at me after this column runs and tell me I’m making all sorts of culturally insensitive “microaggressions.” Microaggression? Dude, you just set racial tolerance back five decades with one Wendy’s order you smarmy little quisling.
Black people don’t walk around complaining to each other about “microaggressions.” That’s only on Buzzfeed. But you know what? They do get a little annoyed when you come traipsing through their neighborhoods two to a unicycle dressed like “Geppetto Goes To Portland” and you cut off old women walking down the street so you’re not late to Whole Foods to get your organic ass cream.
Show a little humility. Show a little damn respect. Black people didn’t even want you co-opting their “Hands Up” Michael Brown protests with your dorm-room Sylvia Plath whining and you showed up anyway and wouldn’t move, prompting them to be annoyed by you even more.
And for all your talk of multiculturalism, you’re the most racially insular and exclusionary group of people I’ve ever seen. You only hang out with white people. You only talk to other white people. Any one of your group coffee dates would be the whitest meeting Steve Scalise ever went to.
You’re a bunch of self-described journalists who don’t tell the truth, writers with nothing to say, and artists who suck at art. And you think that whatever bullshit special identity you give yourself makes you better than the actual people who live in your neighborhoods? Go to Hell. Black people make real art. Black people gave us Marvin Gaye. You gave us Lena Dunham.
So who, exactly, are these white racists that you keep talking about in your shitty “Salon” articles? You know, these white supremacist Republican types driven to the polls by their blinding hatred of black people and their homophobic gun-grabbing One-Percenter religious zealotry? Where are they? Because I don’t see them in black neighborhoods. I don’t see anybody like that at Wendy’s. You know who I see at Wendy’s?
I see you, self-infatuated fake racist finger-pointing liberal white hipsters. Everybody sees you. So do us all a favor. Next time somebody takes a swing at you, go ahead and put your Hands Up.
