October 03, 2003

the pain of blogging

I'm gonna forgive this bastard for the low blow, but that's only because he wrote a post right after the cat-shit thing that's going to piss stupid people off but make intelligent people think.

We never had a maid when I grew up, but I knew other people who did. I envied the people with maids, because they made me feel like a poor boy. My mama did all the dirty work around the house all by herself. My dad, my brother and I weren't much help.

Thursday was the Main Maid Day, and the bus always was crowded with housekeepers headed home on the 5:30 from Whitfield Avenue when I rode it to Daffin Park for Little League football practice. Like everybody else, I called them "nigger maids," but I always gave up my seat on the bus to let one of them sit down when all the seats were taken. They were ladies, and I was a gentleman. I never saw the dichotomy in that at the time.

The n-word was spoken a lot in the South when I was a child. I took it for granted. That's just the way things were. I believe that I outgrew my early attitudes about race sometime during my dope-smoking college days. That's when I tried to become a liberal. That experience didn't take, but I learned a lot during that time.

A lot of people call me a racist today because I am not politically correct. They are full of shit. THEY are dishonest and I am not. I refuse to shut my mouth for fear of offending someone. Who the hell do you think you are anyway? What makes YOU so special?

I wrote about my family tree once and used the term "probably a nigger in the woodpile, too." I went back and deleted that line because I thought it might offend someone who I did not want to offend. I thought it might be taken the wrong way.

I wish now that I had not done that. As I have said before, there's no such thing as a bad word. When some words become off-limits, I feel an irresistable urge to use them over and over again. I want to hammer you with that word, beat you into submission and make you admit on pain of death that IT'S ONLY A WORD! Just letters of the alphabet arranged a certain way, that's all.

I do that with "fuck" all the time.

I once called black wimmen on the bus "nigger maids" because I was taught to do that. I still gave up my seat for them. Now I seldom use the n-word, but you can't be from the South and be my age and not recall it vividly. Hell, I can remember separate drinking fountains and seeing my brother get his ass whipped for drinking out of the "colored" fountain at Forsythe Park when he was too young to read the signs. He was just thirsty, and he hadn't learned yet that some water is more "special" than other water. He was a child. He thought water was water. He knows better now.

Those were terrible times. It just wasn't right to treat black people the way white people did back then. That was wrong.

I'm supposed to be riddled with guilt now, but I am not. I didn't set up that system; I just grew up in it and I opted out on my own. But I've had to deal with the aftermath, and I don't like the system we have now, either.

So, what did we end up with? A perpetual underclass with a few rare exceptions. Crime, crack and unwed mothers. Teenagers dead in the street. 40% of the men sporting records as convicted felons. A piss-poor work ethic. A victim mentality. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson doing their talking for them. Voting like sheep for the political party that WANTS them to stay right where they are. Sweet, aching Bejus!

Call me a racist all you want, but when one group has that kind of track record, we ALLl have a problem. Call me a racist all you want, but don't turn your eyes away from the truth. NOT ALL BLACK PEOPLE ACT THAT WAY. But the niggers running the show hate them when they don't. Who do black leaders REVILE in this country? Clarence Thomas. Condi Rice. Thomas Sowell. Colin Powell. Walter Williams. Ward Connerly.

What the fuck is wrong with a perpetual underclass that ATTACKS the best and the brightest among them? I opted out of accepting that crap as something I'm not supposed to talk about a long time ago. Call me a racist all you want, but there is something terribly wrong with that picture.

And if you won't admit that fact, YOU are the racist.