Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Posts Tagged ‘Black Dudes’

Apparently, I picked one helluva week to ignore the news. Some funny shit went down last week.

White Guy Changes His Race the Lazy Way

What did Michael Jackson (and, to a lesser extent, Sammy Sosa) teach us about making absolutely sure no one recognizes you? That’s right: change your race.

Well, that’s exactly what this white guy did, in a string of robberies he committed in southern Ohio. But he did it by wearing a mask designed to look like a black guy. I shit you not.

The craziest part about this story isn’t that he pulled the stunt in the first place. Or, even that it worked several times. The crazy part is that they actually sell a black-dude mask. Admittedly, I haven’t participated in a Halloween-anything in a while, but I had no idea costume technology had reached this level of sophistication.

Wearing shorts gave him away.

This story raises more questions than it answers.

The most logical of those questions is whether they sell all the races. If they do, I could probably use a white guy mask to land myself a nice corporate-executive job and/or an Asian girlfriend.

When “You Throw Like a Girl” is a Compliment

If, a week ago, someone had said to me they had “tickets to go see the Gay Softball World Series,” I would have assumed they were speaking to me in some sort of secret locker-room code. But, now I know better. The event actually exists.

And, what’s more:

Three bisexual men have filed a federal lawsuit against [the] national gay-sports organization [that puts on the event], claiming they were unfairly deemed not gay enough to play for a gay softball team.

Apparently, the opposing team “stopped play” several times during the game on the grounds the other team was breaking the “two heterosexual players maximum” rule. After the game, the bisexual players were brought separately into a room with 25 board members and grilled on their “sexual interests and private life.”

And, at some point one of the (presumably gay) board members allegedly huffed, “this is the Gay World Series, not the Bisexual World Series.”

A lot of things came to mind when I read this story. After extracting the handful of obvious, lame jokes—one question remained.

How did they know they weren’t “fully” gay? I mean, seriously.

British Lady Turns Chinese Overnight

There was a bit of a commotion over this British lady who’s developed a rare condition (none of us have ever heard of) called Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS). Prompted by some sort of brain injury (in her case a really bad migraine), FAS permanently changes the way someone talks–usually into some foreign-sounding accented version.

According to the report, Sarah Colwill developed a “Chinese accent,” going from the Queen’s English to the Queen Engrish seemingly overnight.

The natural question now is: will white guys now be more attracted to her?

That aside, everything about this story sounds suspicious to me. Is there also a Foreign Strut Syndrome or a Foreign 10-Dollar-Minimum-to-Use-Your-Credit-Card Syndrome?

Because I definitely know a few people with those.

Even though I wouldn’t set foot in one today, I’ve been to the Olive Garden more times than I care to admit. I guess that, back in the day, the combination of bottomless (frozen) breadsticks and “salad” (a lettuce soup drowning in an Italian-dressing broth) was irresistible to me. The crazy part is that after eating a bunch of the free shit, I would still order a thing called the “Tour of Italy,” which–I’ve since learned–was basically a heart attack on plate. It was pretty much a catering-sized serving platter of creamy, cheesy, and meaty. I still don’t know how I kept my BMI at a healthy 21 the entire time.

Before you go judging me for going to the punk-ass Olive Garden all the time, know that I was living in the suburbs, where the choices were between that or Chili’s—a place whose mere mention gives me instant diarrhea. So, really, I had no choice.

The other thing was that, not that long ago, the Olive Garden was actually a reasonably inexpensive place. I’m not talking Burger-King cheap, but you could get out of there having had dinner for like 10 bucks. And that, I thought, was its pitch. You could have a semi-packaged, semi-real Italian restaurant experience without paying the full price. A step above Sbarro, but a step below frou-frou, it was a poor man’s fancy. You could walk out with your head held high (unlike the Sizzler or the Ponderosa).

But, in recent years, the Olive Garden has been trying to creep into actually fancy restaurant territory. I started noticing this shit toward the end of my tenure there. Along with your freebies, the waiter started offering you wine. I repeat: wine. The same guy who, last week, was just keeping the Minute Maid Lemonade flowing, was now coming around with a white cloth on his forearm and a bottle of deliciously generic “Italian wine” leaning against his hands.

That’s around the time I stopped going there. But I kept up with the transformation in the commercials. It wasn’t long before they started advertising things like the “Olive Garden Culinary Institute” in Tuscany, where they trained their staff about “authentic” Italian flavors.

Predictably, the Olive Garden Upgrade came with an upgraded price tag. From a distance, I also followed the climb in prices: from the reasonable $10 I used to drop there, to $13.50, $17, and 21 American dollars. The Olive Garden was trying to go legit by force.

The thing is: nothing had changed. They were still serving the same tired-ass breadsticks, salad, and Tour of Italy. So they weren’t fooling anyone, especially people like me that knew better.

Or were they?

Fast forward to the other day when I’m reading that, as I suspected, these shenanigans were intentional. The CEO of the company, a Clarence Otis Jr. (who I would have been willing to be bet serious cash was a black dude, just on the name) is credited with having kept the restaurant successful.

At the height of the worst recession in decades, when many casual dining chains began offering deep discounts to lure tightfisted diners, Clarence Otis Jr. resisted.

The crazy part is that the Olive Garden is thriving. All they had to do was incorporate a little black-dude game into their business: tighten up your look, raise your price, and act the part. Low cost equals low value, so don’t be low cost.

Lesson learned and confirmed: As long as you sell your shit for cheap, people are going to think of you as cheap.

If you haven’t already heard, Theology expert and ancient historian, Elton John, has declared that Jesus was, in fact, a gay man:

I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems. On the cross, he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving.

-Elton John

Now, it’s not a new thing to try to claim Jesus as a member of your own group. Over the years, Jesus has been a black dude, a severely out-of-place European with a blond beard, and even a right-wing Laissez-Faire capitalist. But of all of things that Jesus has been turned into, this is probably the most likely.

Think about it:

• Hung around with only men (so-called “Apostles”) and slutty fag-hags (Mary Magdalene)
• Liked things neat and tidy, as evidenced by his kicking out the money changers from the temple—with a whip, no less
• Drama queen that always talked about “being betrayed” and “fighting temptation”
• Always talking about “his body,” which he eventually “serves” up at the Last Supper
• Well-groomed and stylish for the time: neat beard, long hair, sandals, and two-colored toga
• Obviously kept up his physique, even crash dieting for forty days and forty nights

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.

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.

A lot of bad-ass shit that starts on the mean streets of the ethnic world, dies a slow death in the suburban cul-de-sacs of the mainstream. By the time young-ish white girls start doing it, you know the fangs on the tiger have been filed down to rounded nubs. Then, one day, you hear it coming out of a middle-aged lady’s mouth on an idiotic sitcom and you know it’s all over.

I’ve seen this process repeated with Swiss-clockwork precision on tons of urban, ethnic (often black) language and practices including: Snoop Dogg lingo (fo’ shizzle),” talk to the hand,” “no they didn’t,” the raise the roof palms-up gesture, the cabbage patch dance, corn rows, etc.

A recent casualty to this trend has been the distended-lip, kissy face pioneered by Latino men all over the world to discretely point to things without using their hands or, similarly, by black men to express intrigue or curiosity.

Cuba Gooding demonstrates his intrigue and curiosity.

But a deadly cocktail of digital cameras, picture texts, and social networking has rendered the once-useful gesture into the over-abused, default pose for lame self portraits (accompanied by the raised, extended arm toward the camera) or a generic, catch-all “cutesy” face for party-atmosphere group shots.

Aw, djeah, boy-ee. Don't be frontin'. Keep it real, like me.

So, it’s with great regret that I bid goodbye to the mighty kissy face. For decades, you served us well, my old friend.