My mother would often tell me about the first time she ever saw a black person in the flesh. “I felt like I was seeing an exotic animal, the kind you only read about in text books,” she would often say about the black people she saw in Van Nuys, whose appearance she no could no longer recall, shortly after touching down in the United States. “I had to take a picture and send it back to my parents. They had only seen black people in American movies.”
For historical reasons peculiar to it, my parents’ home country was spared the large influx of Africans visited upon the rest of the Americas. The sight of a black person in the streets of the old country was a head-turning sight even well into the 1990s. I still recall my first time visiting there as a young boy, and watching people at the cafes and restaurants in a fashionable part of my mother’s hometown craning their heads, eyes goggled, at the sight of a black American tourist casually walking down the street.
I innocently asked my aunt why everyone stared so. “By God!,” she told me. “Imagine how you would feel about seeing a simian out of its cage!”
Latin America, until very recently, had been rather cavalier about ethnic sensitivities. Comedy sketches with performers in blackface, long taboo in American and European media, was a common sight on Spanish-language television until maybe about 15 years ago. No more. Even brown people, it seems, have been instructed to feign guilt for the misfortunes befallen upon their even duskier compatriots. As ever with Latin Americans toadying to their glamorous Anglo neighbors up north, it is monkey see, monkey do. Race-baiting and guilt are in; blackface is definitely “cancelled”.
As it turned out, despite living in Southern California, black people were hardly a fixture of my childhood, too. Even into my adolescence they rarely appeared. I had one music teacher who was black, another who was a young track counselor. That was all. No friends or peers—save for my fifth grade year, there simply were not any to be found. For a brief moment in the early 1990s, the district I was in received a sudden surge of black residents fleeing recently torched South Central Los Angeles. A short time later, they seemingly vanished overnight. My neighborhood, I would learn many years later, had proven inhospitable to its newly arrived black residents. Hispanic street gangs and the Mexican Mafia were still a couple of decades away from achieving “woke” enlightenment.
Despite their rarity in my daily life, concern for black people had been inculcated into me by my schoolteachers from an early age. I was in first grade when the original Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was celebrated, and the weeks leading up to it were filled with all kinds of activities and instructional film strips about him and the 1960s civil rights movement. There was even a song we learned about him and his struggle, though its lyrics are now lost to the oblivion of memory. (Curiously, I still remember its stout, lightly syncopated 4/4 melody in F major, though.) Each year, Black History Month would unleash a cascade of projects, busywork, and reading about black Americans, well-meaning, if often confused in execution. (I recall how my young white 4th grade teacher had our class make cornbread in order to celebrate “African-American cuisine”.) The results were an enduring sympathy for an unjustly downtrodden race that had somehow endured the unendurable, and a burning desire to become what would later be coined as their “ally”.
Nevertheless, it really was not until I had begun working my first job at age 18 that regular interactions with black people became the norm for me. Like many Americans, fast food was the stage of my initial journeyman years, and across that stage walked a broad panoply of humanity. The little shop I worked for then was ensconced within an office building, so the clientèle was mostly professionals. A few blocks away was one of the country’s top universities, a quiet institution not exactly known for partying, so a number of their students and staff also stopped by. Generally speaking, it was a tranquil and happy time, which even grazed my heart with the first singeing of adult love.
During a particularly busy lunch rush a month or so into the job, I was attending to my usual position as cashier: hurriedly ringing people up, taking their money, returning their change, while my co-workers prepared their food. One of my customers that afternoon was a black woman, an office worker of what some would describe as “high yellow” complexion in her 30s. She ordered her meal, presented her money to me, which I then promptly took. A moment later, I placed her change in a money tray, then slipped it over to her, and thanked her for her patronage. As I made my way over to the next customer, her nasal voice suddenly cut towards me.
“Uh-uh—excuse me? Did you just do what I think you just did?”
Confused, I stepped back over to her and asked if there was anything wrong with the sandwich. “No,” she answered, “there’s something wrong with you. Is it because you’re racist?”
The word “racist” suddenly drew the eyes in the busy line at the restaurant towards my direction. I felt as if I were beginning to drown in the collar of my work shirt. Stammering a reply, my lips, now trembling, had only strength enough to issue a timid “what?”
Unbeknownst and unimagined by me, she had taken umbrage at the fact that I had returned her change in the money tray, rather than place it directly in her hand. I apologized, tried explaining that I was simply following my training guidelines, and that not only was no offense intended, but that as an ethnic minority myself, I could not be racist. It would be an understatement to say that I was unprepared for her reply.
“You spics are racists, too. Don’t act like it’s not true.” Turning louder, she began demanding her money back, but to also have her sandwich on the house. I meekly acquiesced to her demand, but even so continued her tirade, loudly berating me in front of staff and customers.
“Give me your corporate number, beaner boy. Because I will let them know. I won’t stand for what you did. And I’m telling all my friends and co-workers not to come here.”
As you may well guess, her huffing and puffing ultimately came to naught. Whether a complaint was lodged or not, I never heard about it. But during that moment, humiliated as I was, that incident left me rattled enough that I felt it necessary to clock out for the day. Why would she say that to me? Why would she accuse me of racism? If only she knew how deeply in solidarity I was with black people.
Over the next few months, there were other incidents that began to puncture my once spotless ideal of blacks. It happened quite often when black customers would ask me to “hook them up” (i.e. add extra toppings and ingredients without extra charge). When I explained that I could not do so without charging them more, they more often than not would reply with some variation of: “Is it because I’m black?”
Another time, a black female customer, incensed that I would not add extra everything to her meal without charge started munching on some potato chips without paying for them. A Mexican co-worker asked her to stop unless she was going to pay, only to have the bag of chips tossed into her face.
“The fuck some wetback bitch like you telling me shit?”
Prior to encountering them in the flesh (one is tempted to say “in the wild”), I had in my mind an idealized black people: dignified, industrious, good at heart, unjustly maligned, and ready to succeed given a fair opportunity to do so.
The reality was, to my profound disappointment, often the extreme opposite: vulgar, violent, and eager to exploit their purported historical disadvantages for petty short-term gains.
As another presidential election looms, the fact that reparations are being seriously discussed by a number of major Democratic Party candidates can only be described as mystifying. Though slavery is regrettable, it no longer exists as living memory. No black person alive today has ever experienced its injustice, nor can any justifiably claim to be even indirectly affected by it. What about reparations for Hispanic immigrants, many who indeed have directly experienced the brute force of American military and diplomatic meddling? What about Asians also displaced by American military and diplomatic, and whose parents and grandparents were incinerated alive in this country’s pointless wars of aggression in the last century? Or Middle Easterners who currently suffer from that cruelty now?
Yet their short-term snubbing may prove to be a long-term gain. Hispanics, Asians, and Middle Easterners are simply too busy working to think about reparations. They may still be too busy working later this century once whites finally decline into a minority, with the power of white guilt waning correspondingly. Blacks, meanwhile, may find themselves needing to beg elsewhere for a “hook up”.
