I was talking to a co-worker not too long ago and she started a standard rank about how hard it is to be black in America. She is twenty-one years old and in my humble opinion, she doesn’t know what it is like to be black in America either. She was born at least thrity years too late. I am a mostly white guy, a mixed breed with a father that looked like Juan Valdez of Colombian Coffee fame and a mother that looked a bit Irish. Dear old mom would tell stories of not being served in restaurants when she went in with my father. Both my parents were solid racists themselves, which always made them getting together at all seem a bit odd.
I grew up in a standard issue ghetto in Fort Worth, TX, which has many fine ghettos to choose from. Poverty really does suck. But in all honesty, I never ran into roaming gangs in the streets, was never beat up in a dark alley, never had much fear for my life. However, there were tons of assholes with really loud radios, lots of guns being fired at all hours, and lots of cop cars with their sirens blaring away.
So, when it comes to hating people, skin color is not my first level of interest. I hate people who play their radios loud and would kill them all without a second thought if I could. These assholes come in all colors, though it does seem to be mostly a black and Hispanic thing where I live. I would next take out everyone with a car alarm. Then kill everyone who uses a cellphone in any public place-cars, theaters, grocery stores, etc. I think that would weed out most of the really annoying people, I could then do some fine tuning with the handful of people left.
Ok, I don’t really care to kill off anyone. But it is interesting that most people that hate other people leap right off the bat to the kill the bastards option.
Ok, I think of myself as white, if I bother to think in term of race at all. So like most white people I tend to think that the whole race thing is curious note from the sixties, like long hair and sideburns, that doesn’t really matter at all in the world we live in today. That is to say, racism is dead. The government has done all that can be done about it. There are laws in place now that were not there fifty years ago. If I own a business and don’t want to hire a black person, I can be put out of business. Imus got fired for saying what could be the least offensive, offensive remark in history. The sports world is dominated by black players and there are more and more coaches and commentators. Music, film, TV, books, Presidential Candidates and virtually all businesses you can name are no longer the sole domains of Old European White Guys.
I am not rich. No one is lining up behind me to say my failures are due to my race. But it is perfectly fine for some twenty-one year old kid to blame her problems on her skin color.
So I guess I would add one more group to my the-world-would-be-a-better-place-without-them list: people who blame everyone but themselves for their problems. That should pretty much get rid of everyone. Peace on Earth.
