As I write this, my sister-in-law and her live-in boyfriend are visiting. They’re in the other room. “Parbatee,” the sister-in-law, and “Joe,” the boyfriend, were previously married to other people, and have been together four or five years, now. As Parbatee is my wife’s sister, she’s a Trinidadian Indian; Joe is Italian. Like many New York Italians, Joe could pass for a Jew, which is what I long assumed him to be. When I said something about him being Jewish last year, and he corrected me, he didn’t seem flattered. Whatever.
Parbatee and Joe live way out on eastern Long Island, in Suffolk County, a 90-minute drive from Queens. And I very well know why he lives so far away from The City. Black people upset him.
A few minutes ago, he told me, “I don’t agree with you about black people.”
You don’t agree with yourself, I responded (my responses are without quotation marks).
“I like black people. I was just on 54th Street [there is more than one 54th Street in Queens], and three black people said ‘Hello’ to me.”
Well, then, I invite you to move here.
“No, that’s not why I don’t live here, I just don’t like living in The City.”
Of course, you don’t.
“Do people bother you around here?”
My neighbors don’t, but none of them are black. (I forgot to mention that I do occasionally have confrontations with blacks and Hispanics who either came to the neighborhood for the purpose of harassing whites, or who were here to do a job, and saw an opportunity to make it a "twofer.")
The street Joe was talking about, with the friendly black folks, is one of a set of streets in projects so violent that many local cabbies, fearing they are being set up for a robbery, refuse to go to to pick up fares. (I never asked if that rule holds 24/7 or just at night.) My sister-in-law went there to see a doctor, but had Joe known of the street’s reputation, it’s unlikely he would have taken her there.
I pointed out what he had said a few years ago, and he simply denied it.
(It turns out he hadn’t said it to my face; it was my sister-in-law who—when Joe was wasn’t around—had said that he gets so upset about blacks that he can’t even talk about them, let alone live and work around them. And mind you, Joe is a bright, worldly man, who has worked in the past as a bouncer for a club. He’s not a tenured, “progressive” professor, leading a sheltered, privileged life, racially harassing white kids.)
But today, he even gave me that line about there being good and bad people in each race. And he’s not even a socialist! As a matter of metaphysics, of course he’s right. But what are the odds of me getting murdered by a white, as opposed to a black assailant?
Hell, even most black folks my wife knows don’t want to live around black people! Of course, they’re all West Indians who have failed to “assimilate” to black American norms. Many of their kids feel differently; I call them, “North Indians.”
Most black Americans think that white people sit around all day complaining in private about them, because that’s what blacks do regarding whites, and they project their vices onto whites. (Like their constant hoaxes claiming that whites called them the “n”-word, because each hoaxer uses “the most obscene word in the English language” 1,000 times a day.) Heck, to my knowledge, whites are the only group that doesn’t obsess in private over blacks. (I am convinced, however, that blacks want whites to privately obsess over them, i.e., to never have a moment’s relief from black racism.)
Since the black fantasy is obviously true about yours truly—except that I talk more about race publicly than I do privately—does that mean that, like James Watson, I have black blood in me? (Actually, that claim was more likely a hoax pulled by a company that does expensive analyses of people’s genomes, in order to gain favorable publicity at Watson’s expense.) Or is this a case of “race does not exist,” and genetics thus has no influence on behavior, so that I must have picked up my behavior from being around blacks so much? Without a guide, it’s so hard to know which dishonest talking point to use in a given situation!
Unlike blacks, who typically insist that they are experts on everything white, where whites are concerned, I can only speak to what I have actually seen, heard, and read. And according to that, blacks’ beliefs about whites are the diametric opposite of the truth about most whites. Old-line white coppers, for instance, would typically come home to their lily-white neighborhoods after a hard day’s work, and talk about anything but “the job.” They saw it as a man’s duty to deal with life’s ugly realities, and to protect his family’s lives, sanity, and moral balance from said realities. Such a way of life is both moral and prudent, which are, unfortunately, foreign concepts to most American blacks.
On the other hand, 30-50 years ago, unless a white was already a socialist or a communist, he wouldn’t have cause to have a private conversation with another white in which he would act as stupidly or as dishonestly as Joe did.
Even today, with old-timers, it’s still like that. Almost three years ago, I wrote about a conversation I’d had with an Irish neighbor, a retired nurse who must be about 78 by now. She was talking about why she’d had to sell her home during the mid-1960s and move her family out of their East Flatbush, Brooklyn neighborhood, which only a few years earlier had been as safe as they come. Shortly after the first black families moved in, the burglaries—which had previously been unheard of—started. (No, burglaries are not essential aspects of urban life.) But the black burglars didn’t just climb in through rear windows in the dead of night; they were kicking front doors in, in broad daylight. During a friendly conversation during a quiet morning on our peaceful street she said, “The problem is … you know what the problem is.”
A generation ago, whatever they might have felt obliged to say in public, whites didn’t feel the need to lie, much less act superior about it, in private.
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