(Feature photo courtesy of the author (L) and Thomas Story (R))
(Dedicated to: Mr. Thomas Story)
My parents did a swimming job of keeping racism out of our house. They had friends of all kinds, they listened to possibly every genre of music in existence. They made no comments, used no words, tolerated no discourse even remotely compliant with contentious racist thoughts.
Again, I asked myself: how did I end up in this utterly non-sequitur position of racism? I declined to answer that calling, yet it seemed like a whole world was begging to differ.
My big sister came home from school one day, her contribution to the dinner table being a new word she heard in school, one of whose meaning she had no idea whatsoever, but it just sounded to her like a funny name you could call any nondescript putz: ‘jungle bunny’. There she was, forking fish sticks in her pie hole, and rambling on about jungle bunny this, and jungle bunny that.
My parents were blatantly horrified, as they held their faces closer and closer to their dinner plates, and shoveled food in faster and faster… until my mother could endure no more:
“Shut up, Alycia Gale… SHUT UP! Don’t you ever use that word in this house again; don’t you realize what that word means???”
And my innocent sister, sat sadly and quietly with her head bowed, not eating, still not knowing what the hell jungle bunny meant, other than you are in trouble if you say it.
My compliments, Ma… 57 million better ways exist to handle that conundrum, but you picked that one. By the way, can I take Chinese in school this year?
Ok, so I had great parents, so it’s not me. Everyone I know had great parents, so it’s not them. Everyone in the whole United States had great parents. Well somebody is lying somewhere, because there is an awful lot of race disgrace going on here, coming apPARENTly from nowhere (YSWIDT?).
Am I to conclude then, that secretly incubating in so many homes lurks racism, with everyone leaving their houses for the day wearing their Rainbow Coalition capes to ostensibly prove their support. “Some of our best friends are from other races… look at my fruity cape—I’m good people, me!”
Line up now folks; I want to eye poke everybody at least once. I’ll start with whitey; here’s one of the most prevalent statements of self-loathing ignorance, one that I am guaranteed to projectile vomit at the suggestion of. As soon as someone starts in with it, I know we are through talking:
“Well, you know there are really decent black people, and then there are n*****s!” Well for the love of Christ; something is certainly dark in Denmark!
I honestly have nothing clever to say about it, nothing. If that were really the case, can we all get you-uns, to please wear and ‘A’ or a ‘B’ on your’n lapels: ‘A’ for ‘Alright’ and ‘B’ for ‘Bad,’ so’s we-uns know in advance which one y’are? Us whitey promise to wear and ‘L’ for ‘Legit’ or a ‘C’ for ‘Condescending’ on our’n lapels in exchange—win-win!
Remember this, Seuss fans: Star-bellied Sneetches had belly’s with stars, while the plain-bellied Sneetches had none upon thars. Read the book now, if you were never a kid. There’s a tremendous message there.
Now who’s turn is it? Ah… Black and Hispanic folks get pissed off when white people cross the street, or pull their kids in close when they see y’all coming toward them. Now as far at the kids part goes, no special reason warranted; if you don’t like it, then screw you. Parents get a pass when it comes to protecting children, despite the threat appraisal.
Remember the part about my dad telling me that I didn’t know what the guy’s past was like… the guy in basic training who turned me into a Goddamned white bastard? Same thing applies; you just don’t know what the people you encounter have been through. All they have is deductive reasoning. What is that, you ask?
Tabla Rosa Baby puts hand on hot plate, baby burns hand. Baby puts hand on hot plate again, Baby burns hand again. Baby stops putting hand on hot plate, Baby’s hand feels fine. I think Pavlov and his two hounds, Spike and Mr. Cuddles, proved the premise of Operant conditioning, hours, if not days ago.
Take a walk with me now past Pavlov’s dogs, to the vaunted Harvard graduate B. F. Skinner. Gaze ye now into Skinners model of operant conditioning in which he does postulate: pink widget passes orange widget, and gets beaten and robbed by orange widget. Pink widget again attempts to walk past orange widget, and again gets beaten and robbed. Conclusion: pink widget does not want to walk past orange widget any more.
I’m quite confident that under America’s grotesque distortion of the definition of racism, that I have sounded the racist bell loudly and clearly. It has become easier to define what a racist is not, rather than what it is.
Hey folks, this is Race 101. Races would get along like grade school kids on the playgrounds, except for the baggage that comes along with race; namely, our older brothers and sisters teaching us racial hate back when we didn’t know any better.
“Good afternoon Sergeant, I was told to report to the Staff Duty with my orders for assignment to Company A, 2nd BN, 7th Special Forces Group Airborne”
“RGR Corporal; have a seat and I’ll be right back.”
The Staff Duty’s runner edged up to me; he had something burning to tell me: “Company A, huh? That is Sergeant Major (SGM) Billy Lee’s ‘Plantation.’ Everyone of his guys say its miserable; the worst place to be in this Battalion. He is a total asshole and everyone hates him.”
(in my best John Madden voice) “Heres a, a guy, now here’s a guy… here’s a guy who needs to be to be pistol whipped while hanging from his wrists that are tied behind his back, drawn and quartered by Clydesdales, decapitated, and then his head shot out of a Bushmaster cannon at the side of a barn made of granite.
My point is, I had no Earthly clue what Billy Lee’s ‘Plantation’ was like. I may have had stupid soup and dumb doughnuts for breakfast that morning, and thought SGM’s Lee’s company was the next Disney World. I may have continued to return to Lee’s place well past my term of service just for a vacation!
But this one phuq-face ruined it for me. He taught me to hate the place before I even had a chance to learn otherwise on my own. That is the how we learned to hate on a pre-conceived basis.
We brothers and sisters teaching our young-uns; we fathers and mothers teaching our children. Those children in the ‘house across the way’ didn’t hate black people; their parent(s) hated black people, and now we are stuck with their block chips.
I’ll slap you. You’ll remember that, and you’ll punch me. I’ll remember that and then I’ll kick you. You’ll smash my car. I’ll burn your house down… you’ll hurt my children, and now we are wholly committed to sinking underwater with our horns desperately and hopelessly locked in mortal combat. We both lose; lose-lose.
Delta was great. No rub incidents detected in my entire tenure with the organization. The Unit did an astounding job background screening of all candidates to ensure we had no members or even former members of racist groups like Skin Heads, Aryan Brohood, Bloods, Crips, MS-13, Surenyos, Norenyos, Latin Kings…ect.
White guilt: yeah, now what exactly is that again? I did what now, to who? Or rather what did some phuqr do a long time ago that is somehow intertwined with my six degrees of separation? I’ll tell you what white guilt is, it’s being guilty by association to the republican party, by way of being a career military man.
BTW sports fans, you saw the census document. My family came from New York City; not much slave owning going on in that town in 1905.
(Continued with part III)
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