Attempting Normal

by Marc Maron

When you hear “the hood” it means someplace you wouldn’t go, where you aren’t wanted, but you might be tolerated and it’s cool, there might be trouble, but it’s cool. Oh, and black people are crazy and wild and don’t live like us. Some of this is true. Some blacks don’t live like me, but then some white people don’t live like me, either. It’s called poverty. Many poor people live in broken-down communities, and in most states, certainly in the South, some black people are kept there by layers of historic segregation, racial and economic. I am not racist but I’m a nervous person. It is not ethnicity or race specific. It is a case-by-case feeling. If I am confronted by something that I don’t understand, it frightens me or makes me uncomfortable. Whether it be a person, a place, or a thing, I get nervous. I don’t think that’s an inappropriate human reaction. Nervousness doesn’t become racism until you hear yourself saying things like “Oh, shit, there’s a lot of them.” Then you might need to check yourself and follow where that thought goes. You might be on a slippery slope.