Wednesday

Mope Squad America! Racism is Dead

I really had given up on racism, you know. Not whether I'm electing to be a racist or not (because we're all racist--that's simple human nature), but I'd given up on the concept of racism; whether it was a viable paradigm for survival and evolution. It's just so antiquated. Racism no longer serves any practical or aesthetic purposes. It's over like the teletype, the dial-up modem, and slavery. Racism is as old as saying, "da bomb." As in racism is da bomb. Racism melted in Paul Robeson's ice box back in the small times. Racism is over like the NBA.

My kid is sick and we stayed home yesterday and we're staying home today. You know, "we" are staying home, as if I had to call my boss and tell his racist ass that I'm staying home with my ill offspring and will miss out on my two-hour commute and that whole office scene (I visited an office on Monday and was horrified). We had to stay home? No. The B stayed home and I am working from the couch and when she naps or plays the piano. Quote of the day from yesterday: "I know you're sick but you cannot play the piano with your knees." Anyway, we're home and she's watching the TeeVee because that's what you do when you're sick and she's watching Curious George and the narrator goes, "There's no job so hard that even a monkey can't do it." Or something...I'm forgetting. But the first thing I thought of with that line was my boy Barack Obama in the oval office. You know, monkey...hard job. C'mon! That's some funny racist shit [with a way too long and disjointed set up].

It's perfectly OK to poke racist, sexist, classist fun. Because it's funny, that's why! Seriously. Everybody knows that that racist, sexist, classist humor is the funniest humor and people are lying if they say otherwise.

I never really embraced racism because I was born post-race. But racism as a practice is just like wicked stale now. In this age of Tiger Woods, Ben Harper, Derek Jeter, Barack Obama, Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz, Saul "Slash" Hudson, fellow UCSC graduate Maya Rudolph, and me, Ty Hardaway--[Rich, clicky for that Mya Roudolph/bedbugs thing I was talking about in the car in the ghettos of Cambridge]--in the present era, "race" is totally and completely irrelevant anymore.

We long ago found new and better ways besides race and skin color to divide ourselves into groups for the purposes of cultural warfare? We now use money and intelligence. Mulattos are the new robber barons of American culture.
[Ed. note: Speaking of culture and race, I have received several emails asking me if and alluding that I'm the Blognigger. Uh, no. Here are the clues: First, I am 10 years older than the Blognigger (I still say "da bomb" and stuff). I've never been to Park Slope and have only even been to New York City a handful of times. Blognigger pwned Berkeley, I pwned Santa Cruz (and Claremont before that). And the last clue: He's damn good. Really, really good. Different people, obviously. Besides, to execute a concept piece where you're a participant in another person's site is way too complex--brilliant but complex. I am not the Blognigger.]
If you're still dividing based on skin color, you're using old some old-ass pre-computer finger-counting math. But this morning I heard "Natalie the racist from Winchester [VA]" on the radio and I was horrified by her old-school and overtly proud racism. And in this case my horror wasn't any sense of personal fright or danger, but my horror was that people like this are still crawling around the grout of American civilization in the year of our lord 2008. It was...kind of quaint and oddly amusing because I felt so evolved from that kind of thinking. She was single digit addition and subtraction to my vector and tensor analysis. Mac versus PC. Toyota versus GM. Blue versus Red. McCain versus Obama. That shit is so CLEAR now. Not to say she's not a dangerous motherfucker, but she was so the embodiment of this whole Sarah Palin phenomenon.

Racism is as prehistoric as hell. Or politics. Or religion. Racism is so dead it shits its pants and smells terrible.

Mulattos for Obama Unite - 2008