Colorman Part 1

By Patrick Hall

Some Cultural-Political Field Notes of a 72-Year-Old Colored Man   Part 1
“If people can’t laugh or poke fun at themselves and others, avoid them like they’re the bubonic plague.”
Flip Wilson

First, some semi-random thoughts. The iconoclast in me has never totally accepted the supposed difference between the politically correct or woke term, “Person of Color”, as opposed to the older designation of referring to “Americans” who happen to be black, as Colored People.  Over the last five decades, the term has been expanded to include other non-Caucasian groups. Yet, isn’t white a color; or pinkest white, brownish-white, or tannish-white?  Shouldn’t white people also be incorporated within the pseudo-racial-ethnic taxonomy so dear to the woke-cultural-left as well as “real black people” like Ibram X. Kendi, Jim Clyburn(D-SC), Maxine Waters (D-CA), Professor Cornel West, the Rev Al Sharpton, and other diversity industry bigots?  But sometimes, I just can’t help myself, when I feel the urge to poke a stick in the eye of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion crowd. DEI constituents are essentially neo-segregationists. They have made issues of race and gender their new God or Pantheon.  They gave credence to age-old warnings to “avoid zealots they are generally humorless.”

With that said, during my adolescent years, when my friends and I got into one of our occasional scraps, we would call each other Niggers, Dagos/Wops, Crackers, Beaners, Jungle bunnies, Krauts, Spics, Japs, Ricans, dump-ass Polack, and a host of other colorful ethnic pejoratives. Many times, these same so-called “ethnic or racial slurs” were also used as terms of endearment, and a source of light-hearted ribbing or jokes. Of course, in the preceding decades, we have been told by our intellectual betters, and/or “culturally sensitivity busybodies”, that racial/ethnic jokes aren’t funny and are often hurtful.¹ 

Decades ago, out in Washington and Oregon, I attended what would be the first of many employers who sponsored Race and Cultural Sensitivity Workshops or Training Sessions. The facilitators of the workshops were a collection of local university academics, cultural diversity experts, and school psychologists. Their goal was to instruct us into the enigmatic and inscrutable mysteries of implicit racial, ethnic, and gender bias. Also, I believe it was the first time I heard the term “white privilege” employed to describe those of us who weren’t lucky enough to be christened “Persons of Color.” On the second day of one of these workshops, the presenters preached an almost hagiographic polemic against the use of ethnic humor. We listened patiently to the secular catechetics underpinning this egregious sin.  Sadly, several guilt-ridden-everything-is-white-peoples-fault types confessed their venial transgressions in this area.

Identity politics and cultural diversity tribalism, have hobbled, if not destroyed all real communication among Americans. Restraints on free speech or censorship have materialized as the clearest danger to those of us seeking to uphold the importance of free expression in our Republic.  College speech codes and safe spaces, frivolous but omnipresent lawsuits by groups such as the NAACP, ACLU, NOW, Black Lives Matter, The Southern Poverty Center, and the body politic of both Democrat and Republican Parties have all been complicit in limiting open speech, plebian dialogue and yes, the sometimes “messy and ambiguous” nature of unfettered communication in a pluralistic society.  It later gave birth to, or incubated political correctness and or woke culture we see today.

Nevertheless, back in the 1950s and 60s in the obligatory tussles with our German friends over in St Boniface Parish, we always managed to do our very best Sergeant Saunders, calling them Krauts.  Those were the days, before PC, Woke culture, and the pernicious chauvinism of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion alchemists, pushing identity politics. It preceded the rise of the racial entitlement state.  In retrospect, I must admit those weren’t the best moments as friends in the 1950s and 60s.  And of course, the situation in the segregated South during this same period was an abomination to many of us. This was despite our less-than-perfect ethnic semantics. Yet a characteristic of how we interacted was, that even with these shortcomings, we remained best of friends, notwithstanding the occasional punch to the head.

 Looking back on it, we were left to work things out among ourselves. Everything didn’t become the stuff of an ACLU discrimination lawsuit, Civil Rights investigation, or dubious if not “tiresome” accusations of racism, by BLM, NAACP, or Antifa.  My best friend’s father would often employ many ethnic and racial pejoratives as his favorite adjectives. However, knowing Mr. D for most of my life didn’t make him a Klan-supporting, white supremacist. Maybe a jerk at times, but hardly a Jim Crow-supporting racist. Mr. D would’ve been the first one to tear off the head of a white racist and crap down their throats, to protect anyone in the neighborhood. My point here is, that just because someone, say a relative, at your thanksgiving celebration table might use less than “racially sensitive” terminology; that hardly makes him or her a card-carrying member of the Klan. They might have been obtuse or doltish. In most cases, they probably didn’t give a hoot either way.
 
However, in Mr. D’s case, he didn’t give a rats-ass about somebody’s “feelings,” especially, if that individual seemed to live up to a stereotype. (That is human behavior many neo-liberals and the cultural left don’t wish to talk about.)  But it hardly made him, a “systemic- I’m-going-out-after-dinner-and-shoot-the-first-black-person-I-see-racist.”  
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1. See., What I Learned from a Prejudice Parrot