Adrian NorthrupI had a couple of friends, a black man and a white woman, who were drinking one night when they decided to call each other “N—–” and “White Bitch.” Just matter-of-factly. They both knew on some level that they were thinking it and decided to make light of the matter. Alcohol has a way of bringing that out.
The thing about racism is that it can never really be stopped. It’s human nature, as the columnist on the opposite page points out, to stereotype people. When you meet another person, it’s only natural to draw on your experiences with other similar people to help decide how best to interact with them. We’re lazy like that.
When we have negative experiences with a certain type of person, we don’t have the best of information to go by, and if we have nothing at all to go by we take whatever we’ve heard from others or seen on television.
We feel really bad about it, so we bury it in mounds of political correctness and pretend it will go away. But it won’t. We do the same with sexism. Most people let their biases leak to the surface only around their closest friends – letting it slip out on the record can be professional suicide.
The problem with bottling up prejudice is that, like anger, it tends to erupt in violent ways. This is why cinema eroticizes violence (and rape, for that matter). It’s why a video game in which men drive around picking up prostitutes and killing them when they’re no longer of use sells millions of copies. It’s why a certain comedian recently yelled to a black man in the audience who heckled him, “Fifty years ago we would have had you hanging upside down with a fork in your ass.”
In order to have any hope of changing these destructive ideas, or at least consciously realizing that we have them, we have to understand them. That will only happen if we can talk about them. And judging by a few recent breakthroughs in pop culture, people are aching for some kind of conversation.
Take the 2004 film, “Crash,” which brings together an ethnically diverse ensemble of characters and delves into, in the words of a very open-minded cousin of mine, what everyone is thinking but is afraid to say.
In one of the film’s opening scenes, two young black men walk down a Los Angeles street, remarking on how white people edge away from them. Five minutes later, they threaten a couple and steal their car.
The conversation is underway on television as well. In the finer moments of “Chappelle’s Show,” Dave Chappelle had wickedly hilarious insight into stereotypes of black people, with the occasional grain of brutal honesty.
In one skit he played a white newscaster narrating chaos after the government finally decided to pay reparations for slavery.
Stock in fried chicken shot through the roof, and thousands of record labels suddenly sprung up. Amid the consumer-driven craziness, Chappelle pointed out how funny it was that as soon as the descendants of slaves got the compensation they deserved, they all hurried out to give it right back.
After watching this skit, one of my friends and I got into a discussion about how suburban white kids pour so much money into the “urban” culture of MTV hip-hop consumerism, which in turn drives that very culture. It’s a culture where blinged-out black men do most of the selling – but in the end, in the words of rapper Kanye West, “the white man get(s) paid off of all of that.”
I never thought Comedy Central could be so thought-provoking.
Another storyline in “Crash” follows two white police officers. After they pull over a polite, well-to-do black couple and the younger officer watches his partner force them out of their sport utility vehicle and frisk the woman quite invasively, he is so disturbed he demands a solo squad car.
But in the end, the young officer can’t escape his own inner prejudice. While giving a young black man a ride home in his squad car one night, the man looks at something and starts to laugh. The officer starts to freak out when his passenger says he’s laughing about “just people, man,” and when he reaches into his pocket, the officer panics and shoots him. As he watches the passenger’s life slip away, he sees what he has taken out of his pocket – the same good-luck charm the officer keeps on the dashboard of his car.
And that’s what it comes down to, really. Underneath, we’re all basically the same quirky, struggling, messed-up people. But we’re never going to understand that unless we’re able to put it all on the table, to start the dialogue, openly and honestly.
It’s not about being politically incorrect, or about being racist or offending people.
It’s quite the opposite – an attempt to stop burying what’s really on our minds and to start trying to make sense of this baffling aspect of the human condition. Let the conversation continue.
EDITOR’S NOTE: A statement in this column regarding the car theft in the movie “Crash” has been corrected.
