I was riding my bike today, towards Alberta street, now second in honky migration to Mississippi street.
posted by nate on March 25, 2004
I didn't flinch. I thought, "Well that was fucking predictable," and I kept riding, switching to the I'm-not-invading-this-neighborhood look, the goddamnit-I'm-just-a-human-trying-to-get-by tilt to my scowl.
And it occurs to me, as so often happens: I am so fucking sick of race. The concept of race. And how self-imposed is this feeling of being out of place, of invading a neighborhood, of spearheading honky movement? Can the black man smell that on me? Is that what he's barking about? Why the fuck didn't I bark back? What exactly was that exchange?
I've been living in the predominantly black neighborhoods in Portland for three years now, along with a large portion of the mid-to-late-twenties artist/activist/poor white folk that I'm clumped in with. I've been immersed in Portland's archaic race dynamic. I intuit, as well as gather through bits and pieces here and there, that this has long been a segregated city, and the remnants of this are prevalent. But at this point it's turned into, as far as my experience has led me to believe, black people just wanting white people to get the fuck out of their hood.
Even the businesses are amazingly segregated. You see very few shops where there's any sort of a healthy mix of color, save Adult Family Services, tacquerias, and a handful of dive bars. People of different colors tend to clump together in small neighborhoods and not venture outside of that. Portland seems very un-city-like as you move away from downtown. And, of course, Alberta, Mississippi, St. Johns, Killingsworth, Ainsworth.. these were longstanding black communities, mostly from black people being more blatantly relocated into outlying less desirable areas of the city, but now are giving rise to the buzzword du jour: gentrification.
When I was a kid, I remember often wishing I was black. This desire was borne of the early awareness that I would most likely never truly experience suffering, unless it was self-created. And what kind of suffering is self-created suffering? That sounds fucking idiotic. In the midst of massive numbers of struggling people in the world, I step backwards and toss my silver spoon? How hard would it be, tho, for me to step back and grab that spoon? Hardly suffering.
Life for me has been a disgustingly sugary cake. I can't deny it. The only smidgen of judging/discrimination I've encountered is when I grew my hair out and got fucked up on hallucinogens, as a self-aware and exporatory, artistically inclined WAS-P is prone to do (and the discrimination was mostly from other well-to-do whites finding my rejection of the spoon-fed success distasteful). With time I honed my lazy-ass avoidance of making any sort of income; a vehement hatred of the suit-and-tie, rung-climbing, prole mentality; developed awareness of the emptiness of vast, endless, destructive american consumption; and wa-la! I've managed to maintain poverty throughout my independent existence. Then there's my bad luck with the ladies. And my tendency to stumble and break everything. Again, hardly suffering.
But I tell you: I didn't ask for this. I was born into it. I was also born into this stupid country that carries a subconscious racism like a vicious, bloodsucking monkey barbed on our collective backs. Is this better than other countries where racism and religious hatred is openly expressed (with much more regularity) in a spray of bullets?
But violence bubbles just below the surface in these neighborhoods. Just go for a walk at 3am and you'll get the sensation. And if you're caught in the right area, at the right moment, the subconscious racism becomes conscious, and real, and physical. I've been attacked, as have many people I know. The narrow and fluctuating line between thought and action seems as gray as the line between a punch and a gunshot.
Race hatred, particularly between blacks and whites, is a strange and inexplainable phenomenon that's been with us a long fucking time. Not inexplainable, I guess: it's fear and hatred from differences. It's a longstanding power play, which began with a bunch of we-can-only-hope ignorant, and we-can-only-guess dumb, white folk who took it upon themselves to enslave others whom they thought were less than human to do their bidding. It has now resulted in a bunch of timid, frightened white men guarding their coffers with new means of clever racism, and in the black community, a deep-seated well of rage and hatred towards whites passed on from generation to generation. From past to present, the white man in power has only proven to be the greatest fucking mook imaginable.
And today, in 2004, 138 years after slavery was outlawed in the states, 38 years since people of darker skin were allowed to take part in our increasingly useless voting system, here I am as a lowbudget, hiphop-addicted honky being hooted at on the street.
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to be cont'd..
