Unless you're retarded, you'll know that the calculations she made were not the oldschool "oh-my-god-it's-a-black-guy-am-I-safe??" calculations of our grandparents' era. No one has made those calculations about a black guy that looks like me in park slope for 10 years. No, her calculations were the newschool calculations in which every "normal" black person is a minor celebrity. Her calculations went more like this:
1) Getting off train now; go toward door
2) conflict detected: other human headed for door
3) collision inevitable unless someone yields
4) human is black professional man in business casual
5) his people have suffered because of my people
6) Will smith makes me feel safe
7) I've grown authentically comfortable with black people!
8) If we are all very nice to them we won't have any more race problems
9) I want them to know I'm not racist
10) I'm not racist - it's the opposite - they're usually great!
11) maybe we could be friends and everyone would know
12) tastefully yield right-of-way
You've got to realize that these are the calculations that every white Park Slope resident makes at all times every single day. Now, however patronizing it is, I really couldn't give a fuck. I enjoy it. I like getting treated well. And you know, it's something I'll miss about park slope. Of course it's true in manhattan too... and most cities I've been to when you look like me.
If I have to move to fuckin connecticut or someshit, it'll be 7 years behind - that means that the calculations will be rougher, less practiced and nuanced, so it might be a bit more annoying to watch their processors run and be marked by a touch of trepidation about executing the steps....still bogged down by that minute ingrained assumption that I might just stab 'em.
I'll tell ya, this shit has helped me all my life. Yeah, I had a few people call me nigger. I went to Ohio to visit a friend in 1986, and it sucked. I went through some of that shit - but by and large, I've been treated like a celebrity- getting into college, getting a job, getting white girls...
And by the way, that's the calculations leading us to choose Obama, for whom being black is a big fat ASSET. you're fucking kidding yourselves to think he hasn't enjoyed the same ass shit as the calculation above. Whole fuckin nation making those calculations voting for this guy who really hasn't done shit.
Sorry black people, if this pisses you off - you can be a celebrity like me if you want. Take care of yo bidness, do the minimum amount of maintenance in your life, and I'm telling you that you will enjoy privileges like me and Obama. And if you can't ride it and use it to your advantage in this apoplogetic-ass society, you're probably lazy or real dumb.
Ta!
4 comments:
dude, you got me, this is totally me. almost the exact thing happened to me at the post office yesterday (except I'm the white chick) and I instinctively behaved exactly this way. I thought of this post immediately afterwards.
Getting into college, getting a job, and dating white women had NOTHING to do with your merits as a human being???
Well yeah Alicia, I mean, I couldn't just take a dump on my college recruiter's desk. I had to be myself and be competent.
...but in general I've had a whole bunch of advantages because I'm black - and because I grew up privileged.
I'd think that 'affirmative action' type incentives, both social and institutional, are ideally aimed at raising the opportunity available to black people. Instead, what happened at least in my case was that I got these advantages stacked on top of my existing economic advantages, making me over-privileged in some sense (while some black kid in alabama still doesn't have shit.)
Now, add those privileges to the fact that I came up in New York and now in Brooklyn, where black people of my economic background are hardly discriminated against, and I'm a freaking superhero. A Blognigger, if you will.
Oh great, BN, one more thing to add to my split-second calculations: that you all know what I'm doing. Maybe it's easier to just go ahead and be racist?
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