all right, motherfuckers. i got something to say.
i was going to delete this journal. just lock up and go home. i can’t now, because i just gotta rant about something.
some of you may not like this… but ALL of you have earned my respect and/or admiration in some way, which is why i link to your ass in the first place. you’re all smart, so i hope you can all dig what i got to say. if not, at least i know you listened. unless you skipped this over because of length, but i digress…
and for any non-LJ stragglers who may be reading this, i can’t say enough about you either. blah blah blah ok go let’s rant.
for the last 300+ years, Blacks, Asians, Am. Indians, Gays, Latinos, Jews, and all kinds of other people have been yelling, screaming, kicking, crying, hurting, and dying; all of them just trying to get their due, their fair share. all of them just tryin’ to get a fucking leg up. just a little over thirty years ago, America started to finally give in to the pressure, although i can’t say that they’ve come through on very many promises; nor have they paid back their debt in full. not even by a longshot, and you know i’m right.
recently, three white kids started crying and whining that they couldn’t get into UMich, and now the whole affirmative action program is suddenly under fire for promoting non-whites too much??! at a school that enrolls (as a percentage of the population) less freshman of Black and Hispanic makeup than the national average? and far less African-Americans than the Michigan average?
are these people insane? have i been living off-world someplace? what is going on here?
okay, here’s the deal with affirmative action. it’s old. it needs some minor adjustment. but the bottom line, by far, is the fact that we shouldn’t even need it at all, and yet we do. we need affirmative action, or some other similar plan, desperately. otherwise, when we stop enforcing it, employers and admissions people are simply going to go back to ignoring nonwhites. same as it ever was, actually. but things are much better with it in place.
let me repeat this point: we should not have to enforce affirmative action, but if we don’t enforce it, nobody will abide by it. enrollments and new hires for nonwhites will go down, and layoffs for same will go up. because let’s face it: America’s whites think they OWN this country… which would be a completely laughable notion (ask any Indian), were it not for the fact that it’s just really… sad and pathetic.
when i was younger, i watched my employer, Tim Cooper of V.I.Pizza (now defunct), tear up and throw away an application filled out by a black girl before she was even out the door. (and before you ask: yes, he bluntly said, at the time, that he wouldn’t hire a black person.) i didn’t do anything then; i was young and naive, and i thought that maybe employers had the prerogative. like i said, i was dumb as shit. i wish now that i would have slapped his bitch ass to the floor. (don’t get me wrong- he’s a genuinely good guy, except for that (and i hope that he’s changed since then; he’s had plenty of time, and this country has seemed to become at least a little more enlightened in the intervening years, thank fuck)).
i’ve worked numerous places since then, and thankfully i’ve never seen anything quite that blatant. but it’s there. not the majority of places i’ve worked, but certainly a significant minority of them, have had a distinct, though often very subtle, ‘no niggers’ stink to them.
and i am god damned sick and tired of it.
in my home town, the ‘burb i grew up in, there was a popular pastime among the kids in the neighborhood. (this is in the late seventies and very early eighties.) it was called “nigger-knocking.” the object of the game was to go up to the door of a black family’s house, knock, and run away. total racial harrassment, and these kids were like 5-12 years old! to this day i am absolutely proudest of the fact that not only did i never ever take part in that stupid shit, but i was even bold enough to chastise them for it, even though many of the kids were older, bigger, and much tougher than me. they learned it from their idiot fathers.
the most popular house to go nigger-knocking at was this house down the street from me, where – surprise, surprise! – a different family seemed to live there just about every four or five months.
this town where i live is the same town, and we finally have (last i checked the census) nine black families!
the annual town festival used to be called the “Heritage Days” festival. this was an obvious euphemism for “white ‘supremacy’ day.” just a couple of years ago, the city council finally decided that white power may not be the most positive thing in the world, so they changed the name and focus of the event, to honor the many Latino families that lived nearby, working for far less than minimun wage in the local fields.
now it’s called the “Salsa Festival.” in reality, because it’s the only thing we gringos understand about them spics.
i guess somebody already took “Chihauhua Celebration,” or “Sombrero Day.”
my sister’s Black, too. she’s a beautiful girl. she’ll be 26 very soon, if i remember right. i’ve never met her. she lives (last i heard) in N. Little Rock.
so yeah, y’know? these days i really don’t take very kindly to white people trying to fuck things up for everybody else. we got it far too good in this country. it’s high time we stepped down and let somebody else take over.
or at the very least, fer chrissakes, let somebody else have a little teeny tiny bit of our precious little piece of power-pie.
