"My father used to say, in dealing with racists, you had rattlesnakes and you had water moccasins (his analogy). The rattlers were the ones who hollered “Nigger!” every time they saw your ass… OTOH, the water moccasin...is a sneaky SOB that gives no warning when it’s going to strike. They lull you to a sense of safety...and, WHAM!, you’re snakebit...you think someone’s not a bigot and then they drop that hammer on you - and you never knew what hit you.” JackAndJillPolitics dot com(1) , referring to white utterance of the unmentionable.

What’s interesting here is how, once the cottonmouth hisses, the time before the hammer came down gets dumped down the memory hole.

Presumably one can’t be lulled to safety if one’s delicate sense of racial identity is under attack. Does this person really believe the undercover bigot was, against their will, actively lulling the “victim” into a false sense of safety by not engaging in any racist or bigoted behavior? All so the bigot can bring the hammer down at some precise preordained moment?

Not engaging in racist or bigoted behavior is just a set up for the real crime, saying the word that dare not speak its name?

Sure.

Clearly for this person white people aren’t thinking sentient beings but mere props in a never-ending racial ethnic soap opera.

I was twenty years old the first time a black guy called me a nigger.

I was so shocked I looked behind me to see who the guy was talking to. He found that uproariously funny.

I hadn’t realized I had lulled the guy into a false sense of safety.

It wasn’t the last time.

I worked in the bar business for a few years. Some of those years were spent in Chicago. (I lost a bet.)

There were essentially two kinds of bars/clubs in Chicago; two o’clock and four. The two o’clock closed at two AM and stayed open an extra hour on Saturdays. The Four stayed open till five AM on Saturdays. I worked the door and as a bartender in the four o’clock bars.

As a doorman whoever you let in you have to remove if they prove to be unruly. That being the case, I refused entry to a fair number of people for a variety of reasons. Some of them were black.

No one likes to be refused admittance to a drinking/dancing establishment. People dealt with this in different ways, but for black folks, it was nearly always a matter of racism. Even if the guy was vomiting on my shoes.

As a bartender with no doorman I exercised my right to refuse service to anyone. With alacrity.

Again, people dealt with the rejection in a number of ways, but in this instance, there were too many black faces in the bar already for the racism charge to work. In fact the black regulars would assure the aggrieved that that wasn’t the case.

Toward the end of my Chicago bartending days I was on a couple of dart teams. Good teams. We won a city championship and placed second and third a couple times.

This particular team consisted of three or four white guys, a couple of black guys and a Japanese guy. A Japanegro as the black guys called him.

These were guys I spent a considerable amount of time with over a two-year period. Shooting in matches, shooting practice darts, drinking, going to other bars and practice shooting, playing for cash, the occasional fight, hanging out all night and so on. Inevitably we would get together on the major holidays like Christmas and New Years after the family obligations were seen to.

It’s a dart thing.

During a practice shoot in August 2001 I made the unforgivable mistake of calling one of my errant darts a nigger.

Randall, the Japanegro and Ray, a black team mate, both insisted I could not use the word.

”You used the word on me last week Ray. I can’t use it on my dart?” I asked.

They both sat there shaking their heads and sniping at me. I apologized, life went on but things were never the same with Ray and I.

Like the cottonmouth, I was guilty of lulling Ray into a false sense of safety and letting the hammer down.

That one word had completely negated (for Ray) years of decent and, if I may say, honorable behavior in my dealings with the public and Ray himself.

A pity that a mere word can make a group of people totally deny reality just to keep their sense of grievance alive.

Particularly when that same group will defend a Jerimiah Wright or Louis Farrakhan by insisting that the good works performed by those individuals more than offsets the poison they spread. 

How come it’s racism for white folks and an unfortunate choice of words for blacks?

And who gave blacks the right to make those kinds of decisions for the rest of us?

David Tatosian

Sources:

1) http://jackandjillpolitics.com/2009/03/just-call-us-the-n-word-already-and-get-it-over-with/