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He thought black folks were always trying to steal from him. He’d sit my mother next to the door and say in Yiddish, “Watch the shvartses.” He was robbing these folks blind, charging them a hundred percent markup on his cheap goods, and he was worried about them stealing from him!
The way anti-Blackness is so ingrained in every single culture to the point where even those who are being oppressed by THE SAME PEOPLE will hate us and want to kill is.
BC powder. It cost twenty-five cents and came in a little blue-and-white packet. Folks said it made them feel better and pepped them up. Of course it had cocaine in it back then,
They were putting cocaine in everything back then!
Tateh hated black people. He’d call the little children bad names in Yiddish and make fun of their parents, too. “Look at them laughing,” he’d say in Yiddish. “They don’t have a dime in their pocket and they’re always laughing.” But he had plenty money and we were all miserable.
It really pisses racists off to see joy and resilience in the people they hate, yet they can’t see how their own commitment to white supremacy and capitalism makes them the most miserable and abusive people on earth. Sucks for them!
The book of Ecclesiastes was Tateh’s favorite. “I said in my heart, God shall judge the righteous and the wicked; for there is a time for every purpose and every work.”
The wickedest people are always the ones most obsessed with righteous justice, like babe, do you not realize the hammer is aimed at you???
One afternoon I came home from school and cornered Mommy while she was cooking dinner. “Ma, what’s a tragic mulatto?” I asked.
I’m sorry, but I laughed at this!
but I got into a fistfight with one of his friends, a scar-faced, scratch-a-match-in-the-palm-of-his-hand homosexual who was harassing me. Who knows, maybe it was my girly face and New York accent, but he got funky with me one afternoon and I punched him in the face a few times before he went under his car seat for his pistol and chased me around the station.
What in the homophobia? Like this is A LOT.
or shot dead by some horny dude who was trying to take my manhood.
Again with the homophobia
Looking back now, the whole incident was only a routine stop, ticket, and trip to night court, and when I later covered cops as a reporter for the Wilmington News Journal, I saw a much better side of the Delaware state police.
Not him jumping in to say "don't worry guys they're not that bad! There's some good ones, promise!"
To the very end, Mommy is a flying compilation of competing interests and conflicts, a black woman in white skin, with black children and a white woman’s physical problem.
Your mother is a white Jewish woman, there has never been nor will there ever be a moment when she is a "Black woman in white skin".
Their “I was raised with nuthin’ and went to Harvard anyway” experience was the criterion that white editors used to hire them. But then again, that was partly how I got through too.
Exactly. The tragic mulatto calling the kettle a n****r.
