Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Posts Tagged ‘Black People’

Everybody knows that American jails are disproportionately packed with Latinos and blacks. But unlike my asshole Republican ex-boss, I think there are more sophisticated reasons, beyond “they commit most of the crimes,” behind this statistical phenomenon. One of those reasons is pretty obvious.

Our legal system is set up to detect and penalize certain types of crime over other types. There are no white-collar crime regulators driving around 24/7 in patrol cars with sirens–or setting up check points on the highway–to catch people in the act of insider trading or tax evasion or selling junk securities. Sure, agencies exist that are supposed to catch that stuff, but they aren’t on every street corner, and the mayor doesn’t go on TV every few months to talk about how he’s putting 2,000 more regulators on the force by next year. There’s no trained dog they can bring to your office to sniff out your illegal white-collar shenanigans.

So it’s automatically more likely that you’re going to get caught committing some sort of street crime. Then, when they do catch someone for that, the punishments for those types of crimes tend to be longer jail sentences than for the other things. You get a lot more time for stealing $20 from a liquor store than for counterfeiting $20 million Picasso paintings. That’s just a fact. And, minorities tend to commit the easier crimes because it takes a few generations of enfranchisement to get access to high-class, low-risk, lucrative, white-collar crimes we would all love to be committing.

That’s the first reason.

But, now the NY Times is saying something that I’ve been saying for years. Statistically speaking, Latinos and blacks also just act more suspiciously–at least in New York.

Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by the police in New York City in 2009, but no more likely to actually be arrested. Of the reasons listed by the police for conducting the stops…the most common reason listed by the police was a category known as “furtive movements.”

Furtive movements. In case you don’t know idiotic police-speak, that’s a five-dollar euphemism for acting sneaky and suspicious. And, that’s kind of annoying, because that’s a natural condition of living in the city in general, but especially of living in the ghetto. There’s a certain amount of constant, mutual suspicion in the hood–nobody really trusts anyone (and shouldn’t). So, naturally, people there (namely, blacks and Latinos) are going to act sneaky and suspicious most of the time, even when they’re not “up to something.” You can’t help it.

A black or Latino dude strutting across the street in a hoodie and shades (at night)–while looking over his shoulder–is probably just as likely to be scared of something than to be doing something scary. But, of course, to a blue-collar street-crime police force, set up to look for only that type of sneakiness, behavior like that is worthy of a pat-down.

Maybe it should be that way. But, what if we also had a white-collar police walking the streets, like I’m asking for: who would look suspicious to them?

Officer, I didn't do anything wrong. What do you mean I was "acting suspicious"?! Get your hands off me. I know my rights!

I’m always amused when someone is shocked or outraged by people just doing the things they’re predisposed to doing. Look, don’t get passive-aggressively mad at the intimidating black people sitting in front of you for talking through the whole movie. You should know better. Besides, if you’d actually stop and listen to them, you’d realize their commentary is enhancing whatever sorry movie you’re watching anyway.

A lot of us are convinced that we pick and choose everything we do. When, in reality, we can’t help but do some shit. Bring a White girl to a really good concert and try to get her to not “woo” and you’ll see what I mean.

Such is the case with IKEA furniture and Europeans.

For most of us, IKEA is a cheap-ass place to pick up planks of particle board, that we eventually assemble into disposable furniture by deciphering the hieroglyphics in the crappy instruction manual. Some of the stuff is so hilariously modern and abstract, that you buy it because it just looks interesting in the apartment you share with your 16 other roommates. But eventually, you get old–or rich–enough to leave the shit out on the sidewalk and get some real, adult furniture.

Europeans don’t see it that way. For them, an oversized red plastic bubble is a chair. So IKEA, for them, is a just another furniture store.

I learned this lesson a few years ago from these FOB Czech people I knew. They bragged, non-stop for like three weeks, about their “fancy new furniture” and how I had to come over and see it. When I finally did, their house looked like the IKEA showroom. Thinking they were playing some sort of strange Eastern European prank on me, I asked, with as-straight-a-face as I could muster: “is this from…IKEA?” They laughed in my face, and told me it was actually from some frou-frou European furniture store. But, guess what: It. Was. The. Same. Exact. Shit.

If that doesn’t convince you, read this story about a wealthy Icelandic couple that’s being sued for installing a “cheap IKEA kitchen” into a fancy apartment they rented (to the tune of 300,000 smackers) in a “swank hotel in New York.”

The lawsuit filed in Manhattan Wednesday alleges that Jon Asgeir Johannesson and his wife installed an “ugly” kitchen from the low-cost household furnishings store into the 16th-floor apartment at the Gramercy Park Hotel.

…the lawsuit claims the kitchen was unsuitable for such a luxurious home.

Whoever’s suing should have known better.

Just when you started to believe the excuses for the Australian KFC “crowd pleaser” commercial (e.g., that “not one person [polled] in Australia had any idea of the American stereotype of black people and chicken”), I uncovered another Australian gem–from back in the day (1992):

Now, admittedly, I’ve never eaten at Chicken Treat, but it’s probably a safe bet that, at $2.75, their “Chick’n Ham’n Cheese Burger” is no better than, say, Wendy’s Bacon Swiss Crispy. (Though Wendy’s wins on style points, for placing their adjective at the end.) In other words, Chicken Treat isn’t putting out an exceptionally delicious sandwich that’s universally known as the best. It’s just a regular-ass, fast-food, factory-farm chicken sandwich. So the fact that the black guy can’t contain himself around it—hungrily licking his chops while visually fixating on it at the beginning—says more about the guy than the sandwich.

Wendy's Bacon Swiss Crispy

Then there’s contrast between the two characters, which couldn’t be more stark. On the one hand is the cool, collected White guy with his deep voice (and exceptionally bushy, expressive eyebrows). He’s a wearing a conservative button-down shirt, buttoned to the very top, and a deliciously Fantastic Sams hairdo, circa 1988. On the other hand is the out-of-control, screaming black dude carrying on about the sandwich in his shrill voice. He’s got on the loudest—and frankly, nicest—floral shirt I’ve seen in years, as well as a flattened-bill baseball cap rested on the rear three-quarter on his head. I swear, the only thing missing is the original tags hanging off of his hat and a spinning basketball on his finger. Oh, wait, he’s probably busy licking those fingers.

So, Australians, I call bullshit.

There’s a fine line between using race semi-constructively to understand the world, and bona-fide racism. I know this because Ethnic Avenue dead-ends right before that line—Racist Parkway. On the other hand, the Australians seem to have no problem taking a bloomin’ kangaroo leap over that line, as evidenced by a recent KFC commercial creating quite a stir around the Internets.

I have to admit there’s something remotely amusing and, at first glance, harmless about pacifying a group of rowdy black people with an enormous bucket of chicken—the so-called “KFC crowd pleaser” (though we all know they wanted to call it the “black-people silencer”). But the more I watch the commercial, the more I realize the racism is in the details: the Aussie rubbing his face in exasperation; the black people (reportedly from the West Indies) dancing around happily and inconsiderately; the loaded “awkward situation” euphemism.

An interesting variation on this theme comes courtesy of our foot-shuffling, pen-flicking Korean friends.

We all know there are different types of racism. There’s rednecks-dragging-you-from-a-pick-up-truck racism. There’s abruptly-lock-your-automatic-car-doors racism. There’s your-membership-application-has-mysteriously-been-rejected racism. And there’s everything below that. So as these things go, resurrecting an old, tired stereotype is relatively low on the racist (and, frankly, originality) scale. After all, black people do seem to have a special relationship with chicken because, as Dave Chappelle famously put it, “it’s fuckin’ delicious.”

The temptation, of course, is to compare these commercials and declare one of them the more racist of the two. The Korean version certainly has some nice touches that favor it to win that contest: an attempted Korean barbecue abduction, cannibalistic savages hungrily devouring fried chicken, a theatrical protagonist performing Eastern magic. But the Australian one benefits from the automatically more condescending accent, and an overall douchier ass-wipe delivering the lines. So it’s definitely a toss-up.

What do you think?