The Most Racist Thing That Ever Happened to Me

Okay, you really, really should read all of this article, but I want to share the intro with you:

There's a Chris Rock joke that is emblematic of modern racism. It's from his 2008 standup routine "Kill the Messenger," and it's about Alpine, New Jersey, the posh town where he lives in a multi-million dollar home. His neighbors include Mary J. Blige, Patrick Ewing, and Eddie Murphy. Rock says Blige, Ewing, Murphy, and he are (or were) among the best in the world at their professions, legends in their line of work. They're also the only four black homeowners in town.

Then he says his next-door neighbor is a white dentist. "He ain't the best dentist in the world," Rock says. "He ain't going to the dental hall of fame. He's just a yank-your-tooth-out dentist." Rock spells out the point with a devastating punchline: "The black man gotta fly to get to somethin' the white man can walk to."

He's saying that in modern America blacks can ascend to the upper class, it's possible, but they have to fight so much more to get there because white supremacy remains a tall barrier to entry. The fact that a few slip through the infinitesimal cracks is a way of advancing the idea that white supremacy does not exist, an attempt to mask its awesome power, because the Matrix doesn't want you to know it's there. How can someone argue that Alpine, New Jersey, is racist when four black families live there, welcomed by the community and unharassed by police?

This is actually how all civil rights fights are being framed right now. Men point to the few women CEOs and say "we let them in." People have token blacks, token Hispanics, token Asians. And even harmful groups like the Bailey Blanchard autogynephilia movement have token transsexuals willing to sell off their rights to people who think they're self-loving sexual freaks.

There are token gays for the Republicans, and token blacks, including a certain black freshman senator who was asked by a white representative to move his luggage because he was mistaken for hired help instead of a colleague.

If you read On a Clear Day, You Can See Detroit, you know John DeLorean talked about being the token hippie for GM. And that's how white males keep hold of the vast majority of American assets and how all people under them support the system of drip down privileges. At the top of that pile is always the white rich males. Everyone else is under them.

And, anybody below you in the social pecking order is easy to dismiss because people now see privilege as a zero sum game. If you extend rights to minorities, you somehow lose some of your rights. But you aren't giving up anything except for your privilege to mistreat others, either directly or indirectly. Many people can even freely admit that what they want to preserve is the right to discriminate against others based on morals standard. They claim freedom of religion, but what we really need is some freedom FROM religion.

Minorities themselves cannot get out of their social pecking orders without fighting tooth and nail twice as hard as their privileged coworkers. This is true no matter which minority group I highlight. Women have to work harder than men to be recognized, and the same is true of black men working in the office. When you're white, you're in the good enough society. Slacking off is okay, but if a black person took the same number of breaks as a white, this would be seen as "typical behavior of their people." It's okay to be a white slacker. A black slacker with the same job skill set is unacceptable.

Chris Rock is a man with a passion for his message, and he can make a whole lot of white people laugh at themselves over their privilege. But all his work still can't convince people to give that privilege up. Richard Pryor worked against it his whole life. Yet for as much as white people respect both men, they still can't be bothered to talk to their white friends and say, "But all jokes aside, I think maybe he's right, and we still have a problem with racism."

And some people say, "Well don't lay these problems at my feet. I'm not prejudiced, and I let everyone be." That's a cop-out to acknowledging your civic duty to defend other citizens of your country. Your nation asks many of you to sacrifice yourselves in war, and you would heed that duty. But this civic duty to support equal rights for all Americans is easy to shirk. There's too much else to worry about than the rights of other people. So Americans will volunteer to lay their lives on the line for Uncle Sam and American values, but they won't defend those same values for their minority neighbors.

This kind of cop-out attitude is what's making America poorer and poorer, both financially and morally. American men won't defend American women from rape apologists. White Americans do not talk about racism with each other. Straight Americans do not read queer books or support queer civil rights, but then co-opt themselves as our allies, just because they say they leave us alone.

Americans do not like white elephants, and instead of dealing with any of them, they attack anyone pointing out the problems. Kill the messenger, Chris Rock says, and he's right. Because it's easier to silence or dismiss the critics than it is to admit you're fucking things up and try to do something different.