Blacks and fags
Emancipator? I hardly know'er!
The joke goes like this: You ask your audience how every racist joke begins. Then you look around slowly to make sure no one resembling your punch line is within ear shot. The problem, of course, is sometimes your audience might be indignant even if they look as you do. The only thing worse than offending some one’s sense of morality is offending their self-image.
This is one of the only reasonable complaints about being a white guy. People who don’t know you will say all sorts of foul, ignorant things just because you appear to be one of their kind. And let’s face it, while all sociological divisions have racists, when I say, “Picture a racist” it’s unlikely you picture a Vietnamese woman. You picture me. An overweight, poorly dressed white guy living in the south.
Me. According to you.
So Kelly and I were at the brewery enjoying a tasting and shooting the breeze with the bartender. We were listening to his spiel about crap beer − i.e. Coors Light and having sex in a canoe are both fucking close to water − and generally continuing to praise the establishment. *A brief note: In Delmar going to the brewery isn’t enough. Many of us feel if we don’t compliment them obsessively they’ll wake up, realize they’re in Delmar and move away.
We were joined by a transplanted Pennsylvanian who was a beer enthusiast himself and spoke, at length but not boringly, about other breweries he’d visited.
He remembered stopping by a roadside store somewhere in America’s heartland and being disappointed in their beer selection. He told us he good-naturedly took the clerk to task for this:
“So I said, ‘You got any beer here that’s not for blacks or fags?’”
There’s so much in that sentence that’s revelatory. For example, I’ll bet “Blacks” was a newly acquired public word for him and its use likely owing to a woman’s presence. Given that I was with the woman and the bartender wasn’t in a gay bar, the logical conclusion for this guy was we were all-man men. Given that Colt 45 wasn’t on tap he guessed we weren’t very light-skinned blacks. And finally, given that he wasn’t stereotyping us he guessed we weren’t bothered by off-color observations about absent people.
Kelly and I were fortunate. The joke wasn’t directed at us so we were able to stare into our beers wordlessly. The bartender, however, was on the spot.
With his longish hair and purposefully unkempt facial hair he may as well have been wearing a sign that said, “Liberal Arts Major.” But he’d been bartending long enough to know how to handle opposing views. He chuckled lightly through his nose saying “Huh” in a “How about them Yankees?” kind of way.
The man finally left us in a near dead silence I broken with the question:
Google images hit #1
“So. You got any Jew beer in here?”
We laughed for a bit but the jovial mood was broken and I almost felt a little bad for the guy. Still, none of us said anything to him. We demonstrated our displeasure with an affected silence rather than a tsk, tsk but we let it pass without really letting it pass. The troubling thing wasn’t really the remarks. Not really.
I think what bothered us was that when he looked at us he saw people for whom his statement might hold humor. We were all way more offended by that implication than any assault against stereotypical beer preferences.
The bartender pointed out that the gentleman probably got a little carried away − we were having a nice enough time − and, given that, turned off his filters.
I tend to operate without filters as well and know the feeling of having accidentally offended people. But the difference is one of specificity. It’s the generalizing that makes a bigot. He speaks openly about his biases in “the right company” which makes him a relatively honest bigot.
I pick at particular personal foibles, openly offending individuals individually if accidentally. That makes me an honest, if oafish, jerk.
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