A Failed Race Experiment

Say it. Go ahead. Say it.

Imagine you, you Yankee Doodle, went to Moscow on vacation. You happen to bring your smartphone and you are taking pictures and movies of all the interesting things and people you see. Your Russian is fairly decent and you chat up various people, but it’s clear that you are not a Russian, in fact you are an American.

You are having an interesting discussion in a pub, drinking vodka and Red Bull with some smart people and you try an experiment.

Yankee: This is really a great discussion, but I want to try something.

Muscovite: What is it you want to try?

Y: Well you have been telling me that you don’t like the kind of repression of free speech in Russia.

M: Yes that is obvious. Try what?

Y: Just between the two of us, tell me that Putin sucks.

M: Oh I would never say that.

Y: Because you are forbidden to say that?

M: There are many reasons not to say that.

Y: Yes but it is just between you and I. It’s not like I’m going to rat you out. Do you think we are being surveilled?

M: Let’s talk about something else. Please.

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All analogies break. I’m talking about ‘nigger’. The N-word cannot be said. Not by white people. Or maybe it is fairer to say not by good white people. That is the racial taboo.

Last weekend, I tried to get some [nominally white] people to break this rule, even somebody who was not born in the US. Nobody bit. In fact, I think in the crowd of us five, I turned two of the people off and they ceased to engage in my discussion. Which of course would be reasonable if I were baiting them. But I was not and I ran out of patience to explain anything about my sense that people do not necessarily feel free to be unchained by rules they don’t wish to abide by.

I can only presume, as I charitably must, that these gentlemen simply do not curse in public. That is only fair. What I don’t want to presume is that this reticence makes Kendi and Malcolm X right, in that they are unconsciously playing a particular racial role and that their ethics teaches them they should never undermine their racial integrity as the good white people.

I couldn’t sustain the conversation long enough to make that point. I’m a writer. I’m free to write whatever I fucking please. But they too are writers, journalists first I might presume, and that such things should be edited out and never uttered. It would be professional suicide, and what does it prove?

I might as well have asked them to step on Superman’s cape or spit into the wind. What does it prove?

The topic brings up interesting connotations about the legitimacy of black rage as a political strategy, and this might be a kind of political expression that has currency no journalist would be wise to ignore. It also brings up the question of the pervasiveness of a kind of white liberal guilt I would have expected to have died decades ago. Then again, some think the earth is flat. That’s not racial. As I think about it, I am reminded of the sort of humor I have generally enjoyed from Bill Burr, whose wife is a black American. Bill is unleashed in a way a lot of people don’t quite understand.

To me of course the most salient aspect is that anybody at all is allowed to say ‘nigger’ or ‘fuck’ yet it is expected of some. I confess as a sheepish Anglophile that “A gentleman is one who never insults anyone by accident.” But the standard of the gentleman is abused daily in our society according to a racial double standard as illustrated by White Mike.

I don’t think there is any good use for race. It’s a rabbit hole. Then again, sometimes it’s an interesting rabbit hole, strictly on an intellectual basis. The purpose of me writing here at Human Race Man is to help any and everybody to think outside of racial identity and the taboos of racial theories. You can’t help that you are born in or live in a country with racial boxes, but there is true freedom in thinking your way out of that box. And to the extent that somebody would take any use of one word and presume only one context shows how automatically we default to the most shallow interpretation.

Now I know that professors have lost their jobs reading from texts in classrooms where the word was used. I know that professors have been sanctioned from saying ‘nei ga’ in Mandarin which kind of means ‘you know’. In that Orwellian sense, our inability to even study the context in an educational setting reinforces the idea that it can only serve as a window to a polluted and racist white essentialism or tragic black low self-esteem. But this too is a burden that needs to be overcome. It cannot be done out of a sense of fear, or shame.

I like White Mike because he thinks his way through stuff and as a Christian he wants a singular moral standard. So he’s a gentleman.

I haven’t been mindful about the racial rabbit hole because I’ve been thinking too long about working towards my ideal self, a self that doesn’t have patience for making racial distinctions. All I have are my residuals of how I grew up as black as I was in my youth, a blackness that rarely connects with what is called blackness today. It doesn’t bother me.

But I spontaneously got that idea when I presented FBT at the conference in explaining that we all are trapped by these racial identities that don’t fit. I’m used to throwing away my racial identity as useless and superfluous, but I can’t prescribe how you do it. I just know we’ll be better off, should we be ladies and gentlemen of singular ethical standards regardless of race.

Oh yeah. And the other side of being a gentleman who has given up dueling is that we are not so quick to take offense. Or maybe that’s just me.