"Excuse me, kind sirs. Could you point me in the direction of the nearest Banana Republic?"I am not a racist. Let me say that again. I am not a racist. The idea that in this day and age I could harbor a single discriminatory thought is absurd. Laughable, even. I am not a racist. That being said, let's talk about black people! First, a little history of myself. I grew up in a town in southwest Iowa that had a population of about 900 people when I went to school. The one traffic light in town wasn't really a traffic light, it was a crosswalk for school kids. There was one bar, one gas station, one post office, one grocery store (that could not stay open), one high school, one elementary school and two churches. In a town of 900 people, not one but two churches were erected, both Protestant, of course. The town was a mostly middle-class to upper-middle-class farm town settled mainly by dirty Pollocks and Nazi-sympathizing Krauts (I am not a racist). The local color was obviously white. Very white. There was not a single dose, not one fucking ounce of color whilst I was in school. Back in the day, America had many towns called "sundown towns." Sundown towns were small towns that allowed black people in them, but only during the day. Once the sun went down whatever black population was in town was forced to leave. I thought for a long time that maybe my town was one of these sundown towns. I think white people are genetically hard-wired to discriminate. Thousands of years of being the most dominating race on the planet probably infused in us an idea, consciously or not, that we should think of ourselves as superior. I think this only because when I was in high school some of my friends gave me shit for being a Catholic. I am basically every stereotype of a white person, yet I was still lambasted at school for being different. Every season when Lent rolled around and I had to get "fish" (I once asked a lunch lady what kind of fish the school served for lunch and her response was honestly, "Kind? Fish is fish.") my friends would heckle me with all types of clever names like Fucking Catholic. Catholic Douche. Fucking Douche. On Ash Wednesday when I would go to school with ashes on my forehead I had to answer the same question all day: "What's that shit on your head?" Although, Ash Wednesday was a good way of finding out who all the Catholics were at your school, so you could form little support groups to help deal with the onslaught of slurs from those fucking Protestant heathen pieces of shit motherfucking blasphemous Martin Luther loving cocksu...but I digress. The point that I am trying to make is that a lot of white people, not all, but a lot of them will find something, anything to make fun of another person about, even if that other person is almost a spitting image of the other. I lived in a very Protestant town, I took shit every now and then for being Catholic. It's as simple as that. Needless to say that I was woefully unprepared for the world outside of my cozy little town. In high school they don't teach classes like How To Walk Down the Sidewalk Confidently During a Gay Pride Rally or Black Nationalists Are Not Targeting YOU Specifically or Muslims: Some of Them are OK. I attended college at the University of Iowa, which, like a lot of college campuses, was pretty liberal. Christ, it was a goddamn Gomorrah compared to what I was used to. They handed out condoms and lube in the dorms, every other block someone wanted you to sign up for this or that cause, and the culture, my God, the culture! Coming from my town to the campus in Iowa City was like going from owning a Daisy air rifle to being chief scientist for the Manhattan Project. It was culture shock. Fuck, it was Culture Epileptic Seizure. Now, I don't want to give my readers the impression that I was some rube from a podunk town in Iowa. I considered myself intelligent, open-minded, empathetic and eager to learn. But I had come from a town with absolutely no diversity, to perhaps one of the most diverse places in the country. After college, I stayed in the area, and I now work with a handful of people who look exactly like me, and lately I have been sensing some of that white supremacy starting to creep in a bit. The other day I was driving home from work and while at a stoplight I noticed an African American gentlemen waiting at the bus stop. Without warning I muttered to myself, "That's the seventh black person in a row I've seen." I was surprised, to say the least, as I was not consciously aware that I was counting black people on my drive home. Now, the neighborhood I live in currently is a diverse section of town, i.e. a lot of black people live around me. One can tell this just by the amount of abandoned shopping carts found on the street corners (Jesus Christ, it's a joke). And even though where I live now is miles (both literally and metaphorically) away from where I grew up, I am very happy and safe and secure. I am glad that I grew up in the town I did. Even though it was ethnically diluted, I was still able to meet some of the best people I will ever know, while at the same time build up my tolerance for alcohol, something that serves me well to this day. As a kid we can't choose where we live, just as we can't choose our parents, and those two things are really what shape us. I could have easily become like some people I knew in my town, close-minded, bigoted, extremely conservative, but I didn't, and I am thankful for that. But an open-minded liberal white person must always be on guard to repress any supreme urges that come up, like me with the counting. Or maybe I can use my subconscious cataloging of black people for a good use. We all know how much the blacks hate to fill out census forms, but now they don't have to worry. I'll be sure to keep my totally-not-racist eyes on every one of those motherfuckers.
The Moore You Know: I wish I didn't have to watch the new stripper come up onstage and clean the pole off with WD40. It's like when Toto pulled the curtain away from the Wizard of Oz. I don't want to see that shit. I want to maintain the illusion that these girls are healthy, in body and mind. Don't sterilize the pole while I'm sitting there. I don't want to be confronted with the fact that those poles are the United Nations of STDs.
© Eric Moore - 2010
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