• ou should always use basil the day you buy it - as they say, herb today, gone tomorrow.
• I don’t field like football today, and besides, baseball is a batter game!
• When I treated my friends to lunch at the Mexican fast food restaurant I had to pay the taco bill.
• Did you hear about the pig who couldn’t tie his own shoe laces? He was too ham fisted.
• Surprisingly, Julius Caesar preferred ranch.
• Banning Viagra was a big flop.
• The mathematician did not practice safe six and ended up with a binarial disease.
• During the rainy season I spread out large books for my guests to wipe their feet on. These are the tomes that dry men’s soles.
• I can’t recall the last time I did any running, but I’ve been jogging my memory.
• What is a duck’s favorite game to play? Billiards.

     There’s a good post up at Orcinus, discussing the idea of there being “black people” and “niggers”. I’ve heard this sentiment from a lot of people, to which my response has always been, “Assholes come in every color.” I have a tough time understanding why some people need to make this separation for black people (or any minority, I’ve heard a similar statement for others). When you stumble across some white guy who’s an asshole, you just call him an asshole and be done with it, but for some reason, certain people like to point out the assholes amongst the black people, and use it as an excuse to drop their favorite racist epithet. Orcinus is right — it’s racism in disguise.
     Now, I am one of the last people on the face of the Earth who is qualified to talk about this, as I don’t know any black people. I live in a small city which has, for nearly all its history, desperately tried to keep minorities and poor white folk out. Back in the day, their attempts were quite blatant — the city leaders and the Megacorp that owns this place just didn’t allow minorities (particularly blacks) into town. These days, the city leaders just make sure our over-inflated housing market keeps minorities and poor whites priced outside of the city. Before that, I lived in a teeny little red-necked town in northern Michigan, and we had a handful of Mexicans, a couple of Asians, and one black kid who played some of the best guitar I’ve ever heard. (I could listen to him play for hours. I hope he went on to do something with all that talent.) Still, those kids traveled in different social circles than I did, so I didn’t really know any of them, either. (I was in the drama/geek circle, which was made up almost entirely of white dorks like me and a couple of pretentious white preppie kids.)
     Still, I grew up thinking that everyone is pretty much the same, skin color aside, and I expect that holds true to this day. I also grew up side-by-side with a lot of dyed-in-the-wool red-necked racists, the kind that learned the behavior at their parents’ knee, who have no excuse for their racism other than being too lazy to think about it for themselves. I don’t know how many kids I went to school with who would freely admit how much they hated “them niggers” (despite the fact that many of them quite liked our token black guy). To this day, I can’t imagine why these kids all hated black people so much — they didn’t know any either! They all knew the same black kid I did, and John certainly never did anything to us! In fact, he was a pretty cool guy the few times I talked to him. (I confess, I harbored a bit of a secret crush on him. What? I have a thing for guitarists.)
     The only other times I’ve ever really met any black people they’ve been my customers, and they shared the same 70/30 ratio of assholes to decent people that applied to the rest of my customers. Although I do recall a few memorable occasions. We had a table of black kids accuse us of racism one night at the 24-hour diner where I used to work. They said we were being racist because we screwed up the one kid’s burger twice in a row. We assured that table that we were perfectly capable of fucking up an order regardless of race, gender, or religion. We were equal-opportunity fuck-ups. (We told him just like that, too. They didn’t know how to respond to that. Heh.) I remember another extremely tense occasion when we had a large table full of black fraternity members from the local university and a large table of neo-Nazi skin heads in full Nazi regalia in at the same time, and I was sad to see that it was the black kids who caused all the trouble, and the Nazis who were extremely polite and decent about the whole thing. We felt awful, but we had to throw the black kids out. Of course, the black kids were all fresh in from a party and drunk, and the skinheads were from a rally and sober, so that may have had something to do with it, too.
     Still, be all that as it may, I’ve never understood the “niggers/black folks” phenomena that I’ve encountered. As I said earlier, when you meet a white guy who is a jerk, he’s just a jerk. There’s no need to delineate him with a special, hurtful name. No one ever says, “You know, there’s decent white folks, and then there’s them goddamn honkies.” I have never heard that. But I’ve frequently heard the similar statement about black folks, and many people will nod and agree with it, without putting any thought at all into the statement. It is racism — racism with an extremely thin veneer of civility attached, but racism all the same.
     Assholes come in every color, folks. Any time you hear the “niggers/black folks” comment, chances are, you’re talking to a racist who thinks they’re getting away with something.

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