Furious Fridays, Episode 5: October 31, 2015

Hey, everyone! Welcome to episode five of Furious Fridays! Also, happy Spoopyween! I hope you guys spooped your heart out, because I sure did! Anyways, enough spoop-speak; before we get into this week’s rant, I would like to say something very important.

The content of this week’s rant is VERY REAL, and while these blogs are usually meant to entertain and are dramatizations of my real opinions on things, the one topic addressed in this week’s episode will be genuine, undramatized, unedited, and will no doubt create some buzz in the comments. I just wanted to let you guys know that if you came here this week for some lighthearted, dramatization of my anger, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for next week’s blog, because today I will be ranting about…

Racism
Yes, that’s right; I’m gonna be ranting about racism. Now, I don’t wanna assume too much, but I think it’s safe to say that at least 50 percent of the world’s population have been victims of racism, discrimination, prejudice, or some sort of hateful act solely on the basis of their ethnicity. Yes, I’m including “white people” in that estimate. God, I hate that label. White. “White people” don’t have fucking white skin! I can guarantee if you take a piece of paper from your printer and hold it next to the skin of a “white person,” the paper will not match their skin. Now, I get that it’s much easier to call someone “white” instead, but am I the only one who as a child, didn’t call them white people? If a “white” guy bullied me at school, I didn’t go home and tell my aunt that a white kid bullied me. I said, word for word, “Auntie, this kid with light skin bullied me today.” And honestly, what’s so hard about doing the exact same thing now? That’s still how I identify people. I don’t call “black” people black. If I have a friend with a darker pigment, then I say that he has darker skin. It’s not that hard! I’m not sure if I’m in the minority on this, (hahahehe joke) but I think we should just start referring to people like that, because “black, brown, white,” or any other labels like that sound at least a little bit discriminatory. Can we at least call people by their ethnicity in a non-derogatory way? There are neutral words to identify people by their ethnicity: caucasian, mexican, canadian, french, russian, etc. Then again, maybe it’s just me, I dunno. What I do know is that things were much simpler, for me at least, when I was younger and didn’t even know that people with dark skin were any different than people with light skin.

Okay, enough about that; now I’m going to talk about my most recent experience with racism. If you don’t already know, I’m latino, mexican to be more exact, and I’m proud to identify myself as such. Now I’m not gonna sit here and say that mexicans and latinos have it the worst, because we don’t. I’m not gonna play a sympathy card and say, “Oh, look at us latinos! We’re so helpless blah blah blah Donald Trump blah blah blah deported blah blah green cards blah blah blah cartels, refugees, poverty, blah blah poor me.” I’m not gonna do any of that crap, because in all honesty, everybody gets the same amount of racism, no matter what ethnicity you are. The only reason I’m going to talk about latino racism first is because since I am latino, latino racism is the only one I can speak about as having personally experienced it firsthand. Alright, here I go. So I was walking home from class one day and I happen to walk through a rather wealthy neighborhood on my way home from class everyday; and it happens to be a predominantly caucasian neighborhood as well, and by that I mean I think that I am the only person, at least in sight, that is not caucasian. ‘No problem there,’ I think to myself. ‘That doesn’t mean anything, not all rich white people are racist, contrary to popular belief.’ So I pop in my earbuds and start listening to some music to make the walk home more enjoyable. As I’m passing one of the houses in the neighborhood, I see two adolescent caucasian males working on a large truck in their driveway. I thought nothing of it until I see movement from them out of the corner of my vision. Seeing as how I am the only other person outside within my field of vision, I presume that they’re talking to me, and so I take out my earbuds, stop walking, and turn to them. I address them with a polite but lazy smile and a simple phrase. “Hey, guys. What’s up?”

The conversation started out politely enough. “Not much, man.” Dude 1 replies in a slightly southern accent while chewing on what I could only assume was tobacco, seeing as how he then reached for a brown-stained water bottle to spit some of his dip-tainted saliva in. “Come on up here, and I’ll give you some water.”

Though I was a bit wary at first, I felt pretty safe knowing that I had a knife in my pocket should anything turn violent. Even though it was probably safe to assume that these guys wouldn’t try to harm me, thinking through the worst-case scenario was just how I was raised. So anyways, I walk up their driveway and stop a few feet away from the truck they were wrenching away on. Dude 2 then approaches me and hands me a bottle of water. “You look a little thirsty.” I thank him for the kind gesture and guzzle about half of the bottle; I was indeed a little thirsty, I’d walked about two miles and I’d forgotten to bring water of my own. After I stop drinking from the bottle, I see that Dude 2 has an almost confused look on his face. Before I can ask him what’s wrong or if there’s something on my face, he blurts out the lamest excuse for a racist joke I’ve ever heard. “Woah, hombre,” he starts before spitting some dip into his bottle, “I thought your kind used water to keep their backs wet.” Right on cue, Dude 1 burst out in laughter at the remarkably stupid attempt at comedy, which cause the dumbfucked grin on Dude 2’s face to grow exponentially.

Now, this wasn’t the first time I’d been made the butt of a joke because of my ethnicity, but I was pretty ticked off. Not only did he make a (horribly cringeworthy) racist joke, but this guy went out of his way to waste my time, only to poke fun at me because of my ethnicity, something that I can’t control. Now, in hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have flung dirt back, and I’m still ashamed that I stooped to racism as a response, but then again, only hindsight is 20/20. So I grimace at the joke and I throw an equally derogatory comment right back at them. “And I thought that your kind belonged on torn-up couches on rickety front porches, wearing sleeveless racing tees and cut-off jean shorts while watching your kids play on a jury-rigged tire swing.”

I think I struck a few nerves with that one, because the next thing to come out of Dude 1’s mouth was, “Y’know what? Go back to Mexico, stupid spick!”

Wow, so original. I bet nobody has ever said that one before. Instead of getting mad, though, I instead chose to stand there with my arms crossed and smug grin on my face as if to say, “Fuck you, pricks; I had the better racist insult, and you numbnuts just gave me free water. Ha. In your face.” After gloating for a few more seconds I turned around and walked the rest of the way home.

Now, some of you might be asking. “Well, that’s not even a shocking amount of racism, dude. What made that story so significant that you had to put it on the internet?” Well, the answer to that is this: Even though I was mad at these guys for pulling a race card on me, my first response was to do the exact same thing back to them. So how am I any better in that regard? Why am I so mad? The thing is, humans are total hypocrites! I don’t think a lot of people would ever say that they like racism, yet we encourage it. What’s even worse is that we often have preconceived notions about a person before we even get to know them just based on what they look like. In my mind, as I was walking up to these guys, I started to label them as having southern roots, just because of the way they were dressed. And the fact that I was probably right doesn’t make me any less guilty. I’m just as much of a racist as those two were, maybe even more so.

If someone harasses you with a blow to your ethnicity, isn’t your first response usually to fling some sort of hateful word or phrase back, usually the most hurtful phrase you can think of, and isn’t said phrase usually about their ethnicity? If somebody has very dark skin, isn’t “black” usually the first word that they think of when they think about a way to describe how this person looks? Now, obviously, I’m not perfect. In fact, I definitely wouldn’t call myself a good example for this, but why not just ignore the comment or respond politely and completely defuse the situation? And why not just think of people as people when we meet them for the first time, and not as a certain race or ethnicity. Honestly, it would solve so many problems with hate and racism. But, I digress.

Another thing that really pisses me off, and no this isn’t racism, but it is race-related, is college scholarships and financial aid on the basis of ethnicity. My college offers almost free classes for “people of color/ethnicity;” if you’re latino or african american and are attending my college, you can get a crazy discount: every unit only costs one dollar. Also, there are national scholarship awards that all latinos and african americans can apply for, some of them even offer full-ride scholarships. And what is the criteria you must meet to apply? You must be “of color/ethnicity.” What the fuck? Is this supposed to be an apologetic gift or something? As if to say “Oh, sorry that our caucasian ancestors enslaved, killed, and abused your ancestors; here’s some money to make up for it. We’re cool now, right?” Nope. This is retarded. I don’t need your pity money, government and Board of Higher Education fuckheads. Just because I’m a young latino doesn’t mean I need financial help. Then again, maybe I’m overthinking this whole thing. One thing I do know, however, is that I’ve never seen scholarships in which the only criteria to apply is to be caucasian. I have seen scholarships for a bunch of other ethnicities, though: latino, african american, french, asian, eastern islander, and so on. Alright, I think I’ve made my point with this.

In closing, I’d like to sum up the point I’ve tried to make in a few sentences: race should not be a fucking issue or point of any sort of hate or pity. We are already one race: the human race. Why the fuck do we need to make subdivisions of ourselves? We don’t need to separate people on the basis of physical appearance or family lineage, period. We are all the same species, we need to stop quarreling with such a trivial thing like skin color and focus on actually making this world we inhabit a better fucking place.

So, that just about does it for this week. Sorry this one was so serious, but I needed to get this off my chest. Have an awesone weekend.

Deuces, guys!