Sometimes it’s just weird to be white.
When you’re white, bigot whites think they can get away with saying their bigoty, bigoty things in front of you, just because you happen to share their pasty hue. Like you’re gonna give a big wink and a grin and say, “I know what you mean, my milk-faced brother!”
I worked at a hardware store for awhile while I was a college student where there was this manager who would refer to black people as “black” as long as there were customers in the store. But as soon as the store was empty, save for us white employees that is, black people became “colored”. Which just bugged the shit out of me because she obviously knew better or she wouldn’t ever have bothered to censor herself.
And I can’t tell you how many times I was told at my grocery store jobs to “Watch the black and Indian customers we don’t know to make sure they don’t shoplift!” (That’s Indian as in Native American.) Again, this is total bullshit. When you work in retail, you learn to spot the shoplifters pretty quick and believe me, there’s no correlation between skin color and shoplifting. The white old fucks I worked for know what shoplifter behavior is like. So why perpetuate that kind of ignorance except that you simply want to?
It was particularly weird to be white in those situations because A) I was young and B) I was a subordinate. I wanted to be able to do the right thing by speaking out, but it would have come at the risk of poor treatment at the least, and losing my job at the worst.
I recently received the email below from a bigot relative of mine who I’ve had plenty of screaming matches with about racism. (Ahhh. One of the pleasures of growing older is that you tend to speak your mind more freely and not give a shit what other people think. Of course, that’s also probably why my bigot relative thinks it’s awesome to keep sending me this trash.)
The subject line of this email proclaimed “cute story!” which it most certainly is not. Not only is it ugly in it’s narrow-mindedness, but it’s just plain ol’ fuckin’ stupid. Observe:
In South Los Angeles, a four-plex was destroyed by a fire. A Nigerian family of six con artists lived on the first floor, and all six died in the fire. An Islamic group of seven welfare cheats, all illegally in the country from Kenya, lived on the second floor, and they, too, all perished in the fire. Six LA, Hispanic, Gang Banger, ex-cons lived on the 3rd floor and they too, died.
One white couple lived on the top floor. The couple survived the fire.
Jesse Jackson, John Burris and Al Sharpton were furious. They flew into LA, met with the fire chief, on camera. They loudly demanded to know why the Blacks, Black Muslims and Hispanics all died in the fire and only the white couple lived.
The fire chief said, "Simple --- they were at work." First off, you can tell that this is an email circulating in the American Midwest and South, because the idea that there are all these brown people sitting at home collecting welfare is very much the Midwest and South’s vision of what the coasts are like. Secondly, the email assumes that the fire chief is white—in fact, it assumes, I guess, that the whole force is white. But check out this photo of the LAFD:
Gracious me! In addition to white fellows I do believe I see some black fellows and Hispanic fellows and maybe even an Asian gentleman. Who woulda thunk it?
Thirdly, and perhaps most stupidly, the email makes a broader assumption that brown people don’t contribute to society, which is easily refuted by simply exiting your very Aryan home, opening your bigoted eyes and taking a look around at all the brown people going about their jobs every single day.
Sometimes when you’re white, it’s a little surreal, a little like being in that old Eddie Murphy SNL skit where he disguises himself as a white person and finds that white people give each other things.
Only the truth is far less glamorous.
