I think there were four of five black kids in my High School class. I don’t know the exact figures, but it was abysmally low. So much for desegregation. Once I started working and went off to college I met all sorts of people (read: “Not Whitey”). People with diverse backgrounds that all told me the same thing—shit in this country hasn’t changed very much since Dr. King first had his famous “dream.”
As a young person (who looks a bit like a drug mule), I have faced some…shall we say “extra scrutiny” in shopping malls and at the airport. But nothing like some of the stories I’ve been told by friends not lucky enough to be born “white.” Recently I was chatting with a guy who told me about how he caught a prospective employer throwing away his application TWO SECONDS AFTER HE TURNED IT IN.
What happened was, he turned it to a secretary then left—on his way to his car he thought of something he wanted to add to application. So he goes inside and asks for his application back. The lady says she can’t find it, which is strange because he just gave it to her. So he goes and sits down in the lobby, and while he nervously staring at his shoes—he sees his application TORN IN HALF sitting atop the secretary’s trashcan.
If this happened to me I’d think “Gee, they must really not like the looks of me,” it’s different when you’re black. Whereas I would have gotten really pissed, this guy just shrugged and took it in stride—he said he was “used to it.” To me that’s the worst part of the story. Whereas I would have been filled with rage, this poor guy just shrugged and took it in stride—because it was normal for him.
I think that blatant sort of discrimination/racism is tough to fight—but what’s tougher is the more passive forms of hate. There is application-ripping, bed-sheet-wearing hate…but there is also a more nefarious, subtle bit of hate. Hate/hate-speech is ingrained in American life and can sometimes slip past even the most sensitive liberal-hippies.
In High School the “cool” way to put a person, idea, or thing down was to call it “gay.” It got to the point where even I was saying it. Without even thinking about it I would proclaim my hatred for Geometry by saying, “Geometry is gay.”
No. Geometry is fucking difficult, boring, and utterly useless to me…but it’s not going around sleeping with like-sexed schools of math. Does that even make any sense? No, no it does not. You can’t even try to use reason on the sentence “Geometry is gay.” It defies reason.
So I’ve lived a charmed life being the same color as a loaf of Wonder Bread. But as I grew older and began mixing with other types of people I witnessed a few instances of discrimination.
I speak of course about the infamous “California Pizza Kitchen Incident.”
My wife Leah is white like me, but unlike me she’s Jewish. Before meeting her, all I knew about Jews I gleaned from Jerry Seinfeld and SHINDLER’S LIST. The only Jewish person I’d ever really met was this mousy-girl that sat adjacent to me in a community college composition class. Leah being Jewish didn’t and does not bother me. But it has opened up my eyes to a few things…
“The California Pizza Kitchen Incident”
One time, Leah and I went to California Pizza Kitchen—which by the way is a fucking awful pizza place. I don’t want to totally derail myself here, but I feel like I need to let the world know that though his story occurred at California Pizza Kitchen, I think it’s terrible and I don’t normally eat there.
Interlude: California Pizza Kitchen Sucks
My reasoning is this: Pizza is an eastern thing. Chicago. New York. Those places are “back East,” where Pizza SHOULD come from. The only way that California is “back East” is if you somehow circumnavigate the globe, so that by going East you end up going West…
Look, the Earth is round. I wish I could explain all that better…but I fucking flunked geometry (twice) so I have only a rudimentary understanding of globes and such. Anyway, California isn’t known for FANTASTIC piazza.
California Pizza Kitchen also sucks because it’s one of those restaurants that try to take a “low-brow” or “everyman” food item and make it “high-brow” and a “pinkies-out” kind of dinning experience. Look, when I eat pizza, I want either an animatronic bear (singing about how good the pizza is) OR I want paper napkins. CPK has neither of these things—therefore it sucks.
End of Interlude
So Leah drags me to this place, and everything is going as good as it can go (in a pizza place with no singing bear or paper napkins), when we finish our meal and we get the check. Like most young people, Leah pays with a debit card. Our waiter, a young twenty-something who looks like he stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue (not that I look at those), has been polite and done a decent enough job waiting on us.
After he runs Leah’s debit card he gives her that little leather booklet-thing they give you in fancy (“pinkies-out”) restaurants that holds the credit slip. She opens it and asks for a pen (so she can finish paying).
Our waiter reaches into his kangaroo apron/pouch and pulls out a pen and hands it to her says (of the pen):
“Sure, here you go…just don’t Jew it.”
Then he turns and walks away.
Leah looks at me and I look at Leah. A few seconds tick by, then we both kinda ask each other at the same time—“Did he just say what I think he just said?”
As a gentile, I didn’t even fucking understand what that was supposed to me. My immediate reaction wasn’t so much “I want to punch this guy’s lights out,” so much as ask him what he hell he meant by that. Was he referring to her tipping?
Leah didn’t think so; she thought he meant stealing his pen.
Not used to these hurtful/embarrassing situations, I looked to Leah for what to do. She decided to leave a nasty note on the receipt. What else could we do? It wasn’t like we were going to walk up to they guy and ask what he meant by his anti-Semitic slur. I mean, I couldn’t ask a question like that. Not without tearing out his throat with my bare hands.
I’m just not built that way.
So we left a note (and I’m sure Leah tipped him, though it was a really small tip).
End of "The California Pizza Kitchen Incident"
The weird part was, a few days (weeks?) later this douche-bag contacted Leah on Facebook and tried to apologize (which tells me he probably didn’t mean anything by it). He tried to pass his comments off as a misunderstanding, and that he just didn’t want her to steal his pen.
This guy went to Fontbonne University (a school out here in St. Louis) and his Facebook page made me wish I had punched him. Of course he had SHINDLER’S LIST down as one of his favorite movies…which Leah thinks he added to appear like less of a d-bag.
What’s messed up is, this guy might have just been honestly misheard by Leah and myself. Maybe he didn’t say “Jew” maybe he said something else. Maybe this guy truly does LOVE JEWS and was just using “jew” in a pejorative fashion in the same way that I used to use “gay” in High School.
The sad part is, we just don’t know.
We all have these negative attitudes and prejudices inside us—and I think one of the lasting legacy’s of hate is that people see it sometimes when it might not actually be there.
4 comments:
At work one time, this new guy came up to me after he was late or something and said, "Aw, man, I didn't mean to Jew ya like that" or something. It was the first time I'd heard that expression, and so I wasn't quite sure how to react. I think I just kind of stared at him, slack jawed and my head cocked slightly to the side. I called him out on it, and he said, "Oh, are you Jewish?"
THAT'S NOT THE POINT, ASSHOLE!
Seriously, some people make you want to beat your head against a wall and say, "This hurts less, this hurts less, this hurts less..."
People (myself included) say stuff without even thinking about it. I'd say intent factors into all somehow...
But yeah, this expression is odd. Growing up in Kansas City, I never heard it.
I've heard the phrase...and Leah probably educated the kid.
Discrimination is such a strange thing, when you sit down and think about it.
Of course, so is pizza from California.
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