elisem

Yeah, it takes me a while. I'm having an inarticulate week.

Actually, mostly I am reading other people's stuff, and pondering things, and then having little bits of the past and the present connect up with other things, and the words aren't coming out, much. Snippets of them. I could tell you about jokes....


"So these two black guys...." Yeah, makes me tense up any time I hear that. What I learned growing up was that it was going to be a joke about how stupid black people were. Granted, there were more Polack jokes being told in the school I went to than there were black jokes. There were lots of Polish folks in town, and only one black kid. But anyhow, those jokes had a thing in common: the people who were the butt of them were defined as stupid and dirty and never capable of getting things right.

So the other day, a white guy started telling me this joke. "So these two black guys are walking down a street and they see a sign that says Untanning Parlor."

Ooh-kay, I think. The person telling me this is somebody I've known for years, but that doesn't mean I don't get that tense feeling, that pit-of-the-stomach uh-oh. Maybe it's worse if I've known somebody for years, if I suddenly am shown something so plainly that I can recognize it, and then wonder how I could have missed that about them, and wonder what else I've missed, what I didn't stop. So I was worried.

"So the sign says Untanning Parlor: special, $1.95. And the one guy sticks his hand in his pocket and says, "Damn, I've only got a buck ninety." And the other guy sticks his hand in his pocket and says, "I have two bucks. I'm going in." And he does."

Uh-huh. I'm waiting. This could go anywhere. But my guts know that it's probably not going anywhere good. And yet, I know this person.

Do I know this person? What do I know? What do I miss?

"So after a little while, the guy comes out and he is totally white. I mean, white, absolutely. And the first guy says, "Whoah! That's really... I gotta try that. Hey, bro, give me that nickel." And the other guy looks at him and says, "Get a job."

Huh. Not where I expected that one to go, though I was mostly trying hard not to expect. I laughed. The delivery was good.

Is it funny because of all the million other jokes, the ones that go where I was worried this one would? A joke with a twist only works because it's metacommentary on what's usual, what's normal.

Normal. A word to conjure with. I once was talking to somebody in my home town, someone who right after saying what they said, swore me to secrecy forever about their identity as the sayer of what I am about to tell you. She was a young woman who lived in my home town, and she watched soap operas, as lots of women around there did. I didn't much, though I maintained a polite social interest. She was telling me about one character whose family was all angry at him, because he had gone down to the Virgin Islands or Barbados or somewhere and gotten engaged and married in a whirlwind courtship. I was trying to figure out how come his family was so upset, and I knew this character -- like most of the characters on any soap opera in the nineteen-sixties -- was white, so I asked, "Is she black?" And the person replied, "No, she's normal."

And then she clapped her hands over her mouth and made me promise never to reveal her name. She realized what she had said, and what it meant. She was horrified at what had just come out of her mouth.

It was a little farm town in the upper midwest. When I was growing up, my sister and I were the kids who wouldn't say "eeny meeny miney moe, catch a nigger by the toe." We went for tiger instead. Some of the neighborhood kids picked on us for it. Our folks, though, said we were doing the right thing to say tiger, and that the other was unkind and mean.

I remember my dad explaining to me some of the political rhetoric being thrown around in the middle sixties, and what was wrong with the people whose response to black Americans fighting for their rights was to say "send them back where they came from." He told me -- I was probably about six at the time -- that they (the black people) mostly hadn't had much choice about getting here in the first place, but that they were from here NOW, and that nobody could just tell them "Well then, uproot your lives and leave!" and think that that was an adequate response to the justified anger and frustration and determination that the civil rights marchers and protesters were expressing.

Then again, when it came down to a question of his daughters dating black men, he wasn't exactly comfortable with that. He said he thought it would be too hard on the children, that they'd face too much prejudice. (Nobody said to him, "But dad, we're from here NOW.") Neither of his daughters married black men, though both dated them, among people of other colors.

Yeah, America, it's all black and white. Remind me to tell you about my sweetie Vijaya, who got hassled by some white assholes in the TV lounge at Coffman Memorial Union right around the time the Iranian hostage situation was going on. The white boys couldn't be bothered to notice any nuances other than "you are sort of ivory-brownish, and therefore Alien" and since the aliens they were all about bashing right then were Iranians, that's what they decided he was. I got really, really angry. (He showed me later something he wrote about that day. He said he would have said something to them when they started, but he was feeling a little tired, and besides, he said of me, "she was cutting them up pretty good.") They finally fell back on telling him to go back where he came from. At that point he said, "I was born three blocks from here, in University Hospital. Get the hell out of my neighborhood."

Yeah. Like that. I am reminded of being explained to by British friends that it's not color that says where you came from there, but how you talk. There's some of that here, but mostly it's the book by its cover. And there aren't many categories in the minds of the folks making the judgements.

How much do I do that? I don't know. I try not to be a jerk. I try not to let racist crap pass unchallenged, but it's not anything I feel virtuous for doing, because it's all playing catch-up. Things are so screwed up so often that it's the Normals against the Designated Scapegoats, and no matter how much confrontation, remediation, and reparations I do, it's not something that ever has joy in it. Because it is something I inherited from a lot of other people who are pale like me (but a bunch of them had a lot more money -- though in the end, that doesn't let me off the hook in any way, because white people without money also do the racism thing, so hey). It's something I didn't ask for, but I've got it, and we're from here NOW, and we have to figure out how to make here better for more than just some of us.

I wonder how come people don't say "I'm worried about how hard it will be on the children" when they mean "so we should do a better job at stopping this racism crap and cleaning things up," instead of meaning "so you shouldn't date that person of darker hue than you." Well, OK, it's a rhetorical wonder, but still.

I do kind of like the untanning parlor joke. I like jokes that are Coyote jokes, that are trickster jokes meant to shake something into a new light.

I told pisces3857 a joke once. Rather, I... well, I don't exactly know what to call it. I'll describe it, and you decide.

Now, he and I go back a long time, back to when we used to work together. He was my boss, and I got him into fandom so I could get more time off to go to conventions, but that's another story. Suffice it to say that when we first became friends, there was the sort of polite reserve in the friendship that was still appropriate to the office. After we got laid off in the Grand Massacree, we stayed friends, stayed in touch, and gradually loosened up a little, but I think there was still a tiny bit of reserve left on that night that I said to him, as he was driving me home from an evening of socializing, "Hey, um, Ishmael? Can I tell you something I've never told anybody before?"

Now, pisces3857 is from Brooklyn, and he has the best bullshit-detector voice. And when I asked him that in a sort of breathy tone, he used it right then, sort of a drawled, "O-kaaaaaay...." How so much skepticism got into two syllables I don't know, but it was a beautiful thing.

I said, "It's always been a fantasy of mine..."

I could see him looking over at me for an instant as he drove, and he was probably thinking that he thought he knew me, but what was this? Maybe he was thinking, "Things that start out like this don't generally end well." I dunno; I've never asked him. I should, probably. Anyhow, he said "Oooo-kaaaaaaaay" again, even more skeptically, so I went on.

"I've always had this fantasy that some day, on a beautiful summer evening, just like this one, I could ride down the street in a car with a black man...."

He didn't even need to say the word this time. The bullshit-detector was beaming full-force. Or maybe it was just the Brooklyn. I forged ahead.

"And we could go driving down the street until we came up alongside a white man walking on the sidewalk..."

He wasn't totally sure where this was going, but he was giving me enough rope. Also, a hairy eyeball. I worked not to crack up in giggles, and managed to keep my voice level, though probably the breathiness increased a tad.

"We could drive up alongside a white man walking on the side, and I could lean over and lock the door."

He about drove off the road. "Damn!" he said, when he could form words again. "I think that's one of my fantasies too, now!"

Jokes like that aren't funny unless the contrast to what's usual, what's "normal", is comprehended.

I've told that one a few times. It's always a little shocking to me when somebody doesn't get the joke. The ones who don't get it? They're never, ever anything other than white.

I don't kow what any of this all means. I am a little fearful that I'm waving a banner around and dancing up and down and trying to win a hat that says Clueful White Chick, or something. And I'm not. I miss all sorts of clues. Not just about racism, but many things. But racism is the topic of this thing, and I felt like I couldn't write anything about it, and now I have. Whether it's worth anything, I have no idea. But it's out there. It's what I've got, or at least what I've got that I can be articulate about at the moment, so here you go.