The High-Speed white Guy in the black Pawnshop
a vignette of when I realized we are in more trouble than I thought
A pawnshop sits in the blackest neighborhood east of Troost, Kansas City’s racial Mason-Dixon line.
A middle-aged, healthy-looking American walks in alone, six feet tall, western european in features, garage musician of clothing choice, young of hair.
He comes directly toward me, the other only other caucasoid in the store, and just loud enough for everyone else to hear asks how I’m doing.
“I’m fine. How are you doin’, man?”
I don’t have to read nametags around here to know whether I am allowed to refer to a stranger as the sex mammalian evolution has enabled me to discern at a distance, from someone’s visible age and genetics, without effort.
In more masked, more fearful parts of our now dangerously blind country, gender doesn’t matter at all and therefore using gendered terms like “man” can matter very, very much, is how the logic feeling goes.
In such parts of the country, the television only has to say covid is a threat again, and it is.
With zero evidence, people will start masking again, tho not one of them knows anyone who has caught it in the past year, as tho a stranger on screen with no verifiable qualifications can speak reality into existence, a reality that becomes as real and hard as the walls of an internment facility, once enough minds believe it, repeat it, and by their nonparticipation in any shared reality enforce it.
“Oh, I’m good… except they missed,” he replies. Big grin. I don’t understand.
Closing the distance between us as casually as a psychopath in the night, dagger tucked, he extends his fist toward me while saying something that must have come from his most recent reality update:
“At least we have someone better running now.”
I think he means Trump. I smile back as I return his fist bump, the faded gesture of respect I grew up with, once called giving daps—a way of expressing respect or appreciation to someone you hardly know, now a simple greeting that white enclavers, the Obamas, and other clueless poseurs have diluted till unrecognizable.
He has imbibed his politics, drunk it in the dark from bigoted spigots of nonstop hatred, gulping daily reminders of whom to distrust, dismiss, and disparage, in unevidenced slanders and suggested tribalistic presumptions and ready-made frames constructed to help him dismiss incoming facts that would be disruptive to his dehumanizing opinions of his neighbors, poisons I cannot swallow maybe because I am unafraid whether I will make it to the next oasis and only want clean water.
“Man [islamist] attacks people at a far-right [anti-unchecked immigration]…”
See the frame? It’s the same all over the West, meant for the same Good Whites.
They make no attempt to win hearts. Much, much less to win minds. Minds are beside the point. The job of the mind is to agree or reject, not to convince or be convinced.
All they feel is certainty. They know they have no malice toward humanity—the species they are so disappointed in and convinced is unworthy of this Earth and wouldn’t mind seeing reduced—nor any prejudice in their hearts that they aren’t atoning for, unlike those unrepentant redhats who don’t care about all the lynching and gaybashing and exclusion of minorities that occurs nowhere ever.
I’m supposed to keep waiting for this man to grow up, to see others, to listen with his ears instead of with his protective filters, and to look with his own eyes. For years I’m supposed to be patient, for this fellow countryman, who has been hypnotized into dehumanizing anyone who disagrees with his spoonfed surreality. And its updates.
There is no love.
I realize he means Harris. Kamala Harris. Is he scared The Blacks won’t know he’s an ally unless he proclaims his down-ness in this tiny, forgettable public moment?
Because it doesn’t work. Silently the others in the store agree psychically, as blacks often do, to ignore and let pass this nonsense without wasting time interacting. I myself find his display condescending, tho forgivable because of course such a man would believe speaking the correct shibboleths will get him in the club. He could even be trying to avoid the violent racist hatred whites, and mostly whites, experience.
And I am still so confused by this strange other dimension he comes from that I don’t even notice he is using me, as a prop, a safe color to fist bump and make contrived conversation with to declare his membership in White Dudes for Kamala, or whatever embarassingly virtue-signaling group is now pretending anyone, black or white, honestly likes the pilled out, race-baiting… president? She’s our president now, right?
I can’t tell.
The living pharma ad. The mistress of malapropism. The oppressor of more black men than… well, Joseph Biden.
“They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us.”
[Skip to minute 9:29 of last year’s speech in Florida, just before she declares debate to be unnecessary—the prime tenet of the new statism.]
{Insult and gaslight, ey, neurolinguistic speechwriter?}
(The cult’s word wizards just copy the terminology of our criticism now, if you haven’t noticed. Because they can do nothing but pervert, unless misappropriating terms to make ungrounded provocations of tribal enmity and to keep the spellbound confused is something worse than perversion.)
So I participate in his cooperative masturbation until he turns to leaves, signaling by that neat termination of our pseudo-engagement that he is satisfied with his performance, his proof of allyship (their word, an original).
(Poets, all.)
You need to show that you understand how racist Trump is, and how authoritarian Republicans are, and how intolerant women who are going to vote red this year because they are scared of showering around strangers with erections are, just like every single media source you trust says—the ones that all spontaneously agree, organically, even when they reverse what they say, simultaneously.
You’re not a racist. You’re certainly not a white supremacist. And therefore, without a doubt, you could never be a nazi—the kind of people who activated the wider German public’s sneers and pharyngeal reflexes by describing entire peoples as vermin, diseased, infectious. You are no such dangerous soul.
The Trump people are dangerous, he says. They want to ruin the country, our democracy. So I say to him as he turns,
“I’m in the blackest neighborhood I’ve ever stayed in, man, and they all want Trump.”
Without a second’s consideration, or any other option, he turns his face over his shoulder just enough to utter his automatic response, one I could have predicted were I not still so hopeful.
“Disgusting.”
