Stupefying Racism

Jesse at Pandagon describes an incident of racism that was so horrible, it left him mute.

Last Thursday I was at a store in Delaware, buying "spirits", shall we say. I had two bottles in my hand - one Skyy, one Grey Goose. A clerk comes up to me, as I'm picking between fairly expensive vodkas, and asks me if I'd like to know where the malt liquor is. The first thing that came to mind was Dave Chappelle's joke from "Killing Me Softly": Have you ever had something so racist happen to you that you just can't say anything? I couldn't, and stutteringly waved him off as my friend came up with the cart.

I posted this originally in Pandagon's comments, but I think I should repeat it here. One of my more memorable exposures to stupefying racism was back when I was doing theater in high school. We were doing a production of The Diary of Anne Frank because it was the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII that year. I was working on the stage crew for it, building sets and whatnot.

One afternoon, while painting some flats in the shop after school, our Drama teacher comes by with a table she got for the set. It was an old, flea-market type find.

"Great table" I said.

"Yeah," she said, "They wanted 10 dollars for it, but I Jewed 'em down to five."

I literally dropped my paintbrush. Here I was, building what was supposed to represent the last, desperate hiding place of a Jewish family that was brutally murdered by anti-semites, and my authority figure walks in flinging epithets like that around. Astonishing.