Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Archive for the ‘Black People’ Category

Even if I don’t always approve, I generally understand the things Los Angeles Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa does. This time around, it’s neither. This fool is trippin’.

In a recent statement, he’s excoriated some teachers at a South Los Angeles elementary school for encouraging some of their students to celebrate O.J. Simpson, Dennis Rodman, and RuPaul at a Black History Month event.

“I am shocked and outraged by the actions of these teachers at Wadsworth Elementary School,” Villaraigosa said in a statement. “These teachers undermined the school’s well-intentioned celebration, and they did so at the expense of elementary school students. Their actions were not only cynical, but did a terrible disservice to the students.

Apparently while “other students were carrying pictures of President Obama and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.,” these kids were displaying pictures of their heroes.

The outrage seems pretty universal. The superintendent of schools, “community leaders,” and a bunch of organizations have spoken out against the teachers’ behavior. They’ve been suspended without pay and, from the looks of it, they’re going to get canned. At least that’s how it always seems to go with these kinds of things.

But this is straight-up bullshit.

Among the many problems with the way we educate kids these days is that we reward them for giving us the obvious-ass choice for things. We feed them the conventional answers and expect them to parrot the shit back to us. If anyone should disrupt that process, we come down on them like Australians on a bucket of chicken. Kids go to the retarded class and teachers get fired.

NBA Rebound, Defense, and Hustle King, Dennis "the Worm" Rodman

The way I see it, Barack Obama and MLK don’t need any more recognition. One of them already has a national holiday that kids get off of school. The other guy has a Nobel-fucking-Prize and is on TV every day.

I wouldn’t want my various kids learning the over-simplified, sterilized shit it took me years to purge out of my system: Christopher Columbus “discovered” America, “Indians” and Pilgrims got along just fine, and Abraham Lincoln “freed” the slaves.

These kids are learning a valuable lesson: life is messy and complicated. O.J. Simpson, Dennis “the Worm” Rodman, and RuPaul may not be a conventional heroes, but they’re real.

I once witnessed a scene on a Philadelphia street corner that went something like this:

SEATED MIDDLE-AGED BLACK DUDE

(while looking at a girl over his shoulder and talking to another guy)

That girlfriend of yours, man: She’s. A. Fine. Ass. Woman. Mm. Mm. Mm.

MMMM.

No disrespect.

The crazy part is that I could see the other guy’s rage visibly increase as the black dude carried on like that about his girl and, then, evaporate just as quickly as as soon as he heard the “no disrespect.” It was an incredible sight. And I immediately recognized it for what it was: a powerful incantation for de-balling an angry fist. It was like a thin British girl, in the prime of her fertility, stopping a hoard of horny pirates dead in their tracks by simply saying “parley.” Or like placing a disclaimer at the bottom of your illegal copy of a movie like this:

None taken.

What I didn’t know was whether anyone could use the line, or if it only worked coming out of a middle-aged black dude’s mouth. I also didn’t know if it worked equally as good if you prefaced your potentially offensive statement with it (as in, “no disrespect, but you can’t sing”) or if you had to say it at the end, to clear the air after-the-fact. Worse, there was no way to test it until I got into some hot water—and, by then, it could be too late.

After years of experiments, I’m here to tell you that the line is solid gold—especially with ghetto-ish ladies, hostile ethnic types, and power-tripping authority figures. But it’s all in the delivery.

So use it and abuse it to get yourself out of jams. But if you get a beat down, it’s because you—no disrespect—fucked it up.

Every year around this time, the TV lights up with lame programs about “where we are” in respect to Martin Luther King’s “Dream.” Even though I recognize the value of the occasional check-in, I’ve always felt that the annual MLK news special was one of those hollow, easy gestures from the CNNs of the world—put mostly in place so the second-string newscasters can log hours while Wolf Blitzer gets “the night off.”  Needless to say, this year’s special got all fucked up because of the whole Obama thing. For the first time in a long-ass time, they actually have some movement on the Dream front.

I don’t actually plan on watching any of these shows that I’ve been seeing commercials for, but I can pretty much guess what they’ll sound (and look) like: a TV-Reporter Asian American Girl walking toward the camera while saying something like, “While Obama’s election marks a big step in the right direction toward fully realizing King’s dream, there’s still a lot of work to blah-blah-blah.” Cue footage of an especially dramatic Obama speech, inter-spliced with some black-and-white MLK footage. I guarantee it.

So, knowing how the news is going to handle that situation, where are we with the Dream, really–especially with a black president and all?

It’s complicated. But I’ll start with the stuff we won’t get into (at least not right now):

• How a whole new breed of dumb-as-shit, redneck racists is coming out of the woodwork since the election
• How Obama may have only gotten the job because the guy before him fucked up so monumentally
• All of the miscellaneous evidence that the world is going to shit (spike in overall stupidity, the economy, obesity epidemic, etc.)

What I will discuss is the condition of MLK Boulevards, Drives, and Streets everywhere. I’ll explain.

For most of my life, I’ve subscribed to the Chris Rock School of Thought on MLK Streets:

The way I see it, MLK Street is a good barometer on how far we’ve come to achieving King’s dream of equality. As long as MLK Street remains a ghetto-ass, dangerous place in most cities, things haven’t changed all that much. Just because a minority or two land a good job, that doesn’t mean the condition of that whole race has improved. It’s just a stroke of good luck or an exceptional hustle by that one person.

So if non-violent MLK Streets is a sign that the Dream has become reality, imagine my dismay when I found this—in Jerusalem, Israel of all places:

It’s a good thing Dr. King kept his Dream domestic.

Nobody likes being stared at. But ethnic people seem to have a special aversion to it. The more ethnic, the more they don’t like it. I can’t count the number of times–in my younger years–I asked, was asked, or witnessed the asking of whether someone (or I) had a “staring problem.” The staring usually ended right there. If you ever wanted to intentionally provoke a beef with an ethnic person, all you had to do was mad dog them for a little while.¹

¹Mad Dog (verb) To stare fixedly at someone in a hostile manner. Generally used to convey anger or disdain, can be a signal that a fight is about to happen.

[from Urban Dictionary]

So when I heard the story of “racist” malfunctioning in the new HP Deluxe Webcam, I immediately knew what was going on.

Hewlett Packard’s new camera includes innovative face-tracking technology, which follows a user’s face – even if it moves out of frame, or zooms in when the user is farther away.

This technology wasn’t working for one African-American consumer – the webcam didn’t move at all for him. But for his white co-worker, who was right next to him at the time, the face-tracking feature worked perfectly.

And so the man…had a message for one of the largest technology companies in the world: “Hewlett Packard computers are racist,” he says.

[Excerpted from theGrio.com]

This, I’m afraid, is no glitch. But it’s also not clear-cut racism. The device is just making a calculated assessment of the circumstances at hand.

Put yourself in its shoes.

Here you are, a nice deluxe-webcam from Palo Alto, California and, all of a sudden, you got a black dude in your face. The guy may look and sound friendly, but you know that even the friendliest ethnic people are liable to get pissed if you look at them too long, never mind follow them around the room with your “tracking lens.”

So, you play it cool, disregard your programming, and look away–while keeping an eye on him from the corner of your lens.

That’s not racist.

You have to hand it to Magic Johnson, after years of performing magic on the basketball court, he’s now performing his magic act in the pockets of unsuspecting ethnic people.

The metamorphosis from Magic Johnson, the jolly basketball player to Magic Johnson, the jolly street thug was a gradual process—so gradual, in fact, that most people probably haven’t noticed how sleazy he’s become.

Magic’s career as “business man” started like everybody else’s—with an eponymous chain of movie theatres. Before you knew it, he owned a few commercial buildings. Then, he got into the strange business of selling you your daily cup of undrinkably strong coffee (Starbucks) and your weekend order of “loaded” potato skins (TGI Fridays).

But, these days, Magic Johnson will sell you just about anything. His commercials are getting so outrageous, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s figured out how to pick your pocket through the screen when you turn your back to the television.

Here’s a sampling of Magic’s latest “inventory”:

San Manuel Casino

An unusually raspy Magic pitches the long odds and third-shelf entertainment of Southern California Indian casinos.

Jackson Hewitt Tax Services

Claiming that it’s “money like magic,” he pushes the loan-shark-like terms of the Money Now Loan—an unfavorable Tax Refund Anticipation Loan scheme for the most desperate.

Rent-a-Center

The most thuggish of Magic’s hustles, Rent-a-Center will lease you an old TV for three times its original price and send someone to threaten you at your house if you miss a payment. Despite how bad that sounds, I think most of us can agree: it would totally be worth it if Magic showed up at your door, and personally beat you down in his NBA uniform.

See Magic’s Rent-a-Center Commercials

According to the 1990s philosopher, Tupac, revenge is the second-sweetest joy. Today, Senator Roland Burris’s mouth is puckering up from the massive dose of delicious payback he’s slapping across the collective face of Senate Democrats that have been disrespecting him for months.

Sure, he got his seat under suspicious circumstances—not the least of which was being hand-picked at the eleventh hour by the now-impeached-for-corruption former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich. But I’m still having a hard time seeing how it’s worse to get a seat the way he did than by taking millions of dollars in contributions from multi-national corporations.

How you like me now? I'm in the mix.

Since his appointment, this guy has put up with all kinds of humiliation (most of it earned). He wasn’t allowed into his own swearing-in ceremony. They didn’t let him join any committees. And there was a growing chorus calling for his resignation. Imagine going to work every day knowing an additional two or three people are going to want you the-fuck-out. That was Roland Burris.

So after being rendered all but irrelevant, Roland sort of disappeared from the public spotlight—until now.

The Illinois Democrat, appointed by disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, says he’ll only vote for a bill to provide health care to millions more Americans as long as it allows the government to sell insurance in competition with private insurers.

You have to hand it to the guy; very few of us have this level of endurance. He sat back and waited for the right moment to cash in his token. Then, when he did, he landed a two-for-one: sweet revenge and doing the right thing.

The guy knows how to land a good job, he’s patient, ballsy, and stands up for what the vast majority of people want (but the vast majority of Congress is too pansy to support).

That’s enough to get Roland Burris added to the list of candidates for the Ethnic Avenue All-Stars.*

* Coming soon