Wait, marvelous isn't the right word.
Is "ofFUNsive" a word? If not, I'm coining it. If you happen to use the word offunsive, please mail me a dollar.
The videos of his which I've watched recently have had racial themes and as someone who's life has been consistently permeated by racial issues, I like to listen to other smart white people discuss their points of view on the subject.
Let me back track a bit.
As a kid growing up across the river from Detroit, I've always noticed issues of race when they pop up. These issues didn't happen all the time, but when they did, I was always intelligent enough to notice them. I might not have known at the time exactly why Detroit's suburbs were riddled with burnt-out houses streamed with police tape, or why the neighbouring homes had steel gates on the front doors, but I still remember them.
Okay, let me back track a bit more.
My family has always told me stories of the great racial divide. All my life I've heard about the race riots. The border was shut down and Windsorites would gather along the riverfront to watch Detroit burn. Tanks rolled through the streets and helicopters buzzed the skies.
Before that, my grandfather took the family to Florida. Back then black people weren't allowed to walk on the beach during the day because they would cramp white people's style.
The story here is that a well-known black entertainer and activist broke the rules while my grandfather and the fam were at the beach. White folks sat by in disgust as this man, dressed nicely in a suit, took off his shoes and socks to walk along the beach in a silent, one-man protest.
The locals were disgusted and sat by as he walked along the beach. This man caused such a scene that he was being followed by police to make sure the shit didn't hit the fan. I'm not sure if it was for his own safety or to make white people feel safer. Because well... black people in the 50's were pure evil, you know.
When he passed by, my grandfather made the family stand up as he passed. It was a sign of respect for the black man and maybe a little bit of defiance from my grandfather because no other white people would dare acknowledge what he was doing by standing.
The black man passed by and nodded and all my grandfather said to my mother was; "Remember this."
Shortly after the man passed them by, my grandfather had to pack up the kids as quick as possible to flee the angry white folks who looked at my family as "nigger lovers."
My life is riddled with stories of race; my mother's college friend who was in the Black Panthers. My cousin who got kicked out of Sunday School for making a "black" angel (Angel's can't be black, apparently.) My grandfather and the kids, again escaping from white people in the southern states who were going "coon hunting" and noticed the Canadian plates on the car, making them a suitable alternate target.
Everyone knows the basics of segregation. The water fountains for black and white people (which my mother actually drank out of the wrong fountain once as a kid. Which again made my family a target down south. Nice one, mom.)
Whenever I think of race, I always remember a story of my own from when I worked for a summer in a book store.
Two black ladies were shopping in Windsor and I knew immediately they were from Detroit from the accents.
The one lady asked me where the "Black Section" was and I took her to the Cultural Studies shelves and to Black Studies which maybe had a dozen books on a lower shelf.
She asked if that was it and I felt bad that our black studies section seemed so small compared to what I thought any good bookstore in the States might carry, so I told her that we could order just about any book she wanted.
Then she asked me if that was also all of our "black fiction" and I had no idea what to think, so like an idiot I stared at her trying to imagine what she meant. So she asked again where we kept fiction books written by black authors.
I understood what she said but I finally got what she was really telling me.
Bookstores in the states are still segregated. In exchange for sharing a water fountain with white folks, black people now have their own fiction sections.
What's worse is that the lady almost looked offended when I told her it was with all the other fiction books listed alphabetically by author.
"So... the black writers are all mixed in with the rest of them?"
"Yep."
"... oh. Okay," she said and walked away with her look of shock, telling the other black lady what I had told her who then also looked shocked.
That experience made me feel so sad for everyone.
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