Monday, December 3, 2007

Chauncey DeVega says: You, my friend, are an asshole



When I was in elementary school I was an expert in the art of skipping school. I knew how to produce a cough that would echo with perfect pitch and cadence, how to miss the school bus, how to make my mom pity me, just how long to put the thermometer near the light bulb to heat it up (and no it wasn't a rectal thermometer). I even escalated so far as to pretend to throw myself down the stairs of the duplex we lived in--but, my dad was too smart to fall for that ploy (being a slip and fall expert himself), so he didn't buy it.

In college, my black nationalist friends and I had a plan we called "operation hamhock." In operation hamhock, my black, latino, and sympathetic white radical compatriots would stage our own series of racist graffiti incidents and wear Klan robes and jump upon designated Tom Negroes and beat some sense into them. We would have been agent-provocateurs, the spooks who sat by the door who pushed our conservative, insular, white college to change for the better. Guess what? we had the good sense not to do it. Apparently, the idiot who "lynched" himself didn't have the good sense to not pursue this foolishness.

The hulk is very, very, angry right now because you lied and by doing so undermined all people of color who legitimately suffer under and are impacted by white racism. If the hulk could get you in a phone booth, and sodomize you with a hot curling iron, he would:

2 comments:

Cyril Crozier said...

In all seriousness there were several hoaxes of hate crimes in the nineties and early 2000s, many of which took place on college campuses with essentially the same intent that you mentioned in irony. There was a black student at Emory who wrote racist graffiti in her own dorm room, a white female student who claimed to be assualted by racist thugs for having a black boyfriend, a Jewish student who got caught drawing swastikas - basically hoaxes that were so transparently contrived that they warranted deserved skepticism from the start.

What is disgusting about these hoaxes, as you mentioned, is that they trivalize those who do suffer from racism, antisemitism, and homophobia. Also, it allows people to think of racism as something that exists amongst a few, evil boogy men; the kind of psychos who hang nooses and burn crosses, NOT as something insidious and embedded in our society, culture, and everyday life.

gordon gartrelle said...

That's a great point, pug. Stay tuned, we will have more detailed thoughts on this phenomenon in the future.