There once was a white woman in Thailand

It was the winter of 1999, and my partner and I had taken a 3-week vacation to Southeast Asia, our first of many trips to the region. We had just spent a week in Hong Kong visiting friends before flying to Bangkok, Thailand. The city was so exotic. An intoxicating and toxic mix of people, pollution, industry, commerce, culture, cuisine and the sex trade. We were walking down Surawong Road near Patpong, the notorious market made famous during the Vietnam War as Thailand's throbbing, degenerate heart of the sex industry---a place where you can buy a knock-off Gucci watch (which I did) as easily as you can traffic a human for intercourse (that's for the memoirs darling).  The weather was hot.  Now I love hot. But Thai hot is hot as hell. Literally, it felt like hell. I never understood how the Thai people remained so aloof from their weather, walking around as they did all crisp and pulled together despite the staggering heat and humidity.

Thailand is a languid country so we walked at our leisure.  Down the street a ways I saw a white couple walking toward us. When you travel to countries where you're a racial minority other non-locals stick out and I assumed they were tourists like us. As we approached each other the woman looked up and spied my partner and me. There was an imperceptible tensing in her neck and her bright smiled hesitated. Her lips curled downward slightly. She quickly moved her handbag from her left hand (the hand closest to us) and moved it to her right shoulder while grabbing her husband's hand tightly. As a black man living in the U.S., I've experienced this on numerous occasions; white women gripping their bags more tightly as I approached, or crossing the street, or locking the car door (before automatic locks kept them safe), or holding their breath in elevators when it's just me and them. It's just another one of those tiny indignities you learn to ignore as an African-American male. But somehow, here, thousands of miles from home immersed in another people's culture, I was still perceived as a threat. A criminal.  As she passed us I blurted out over my left shoulder "Bitch, I did not fly six thousand miles to snatch your purse." Her face blanched. She was robbed of what color she had. Her husband turned back toward us with confusion and, in an instant, I was that black man. You know, the angry-for-no-reason black man.  Even here, on the opposite side of the globe from America, I was cast in the part racism had written for me over the last four centuries. But in that moment I didn't care. They quickly retreated and a few minutes later I was enjoying a Singha beer at a bar on Soi Cowboy.

Fourteen years later, I had another moment not unlike that one in Thailand.  Last week was the 50th Anniversary of The March on Washington---the only march that ever truly mattered to me and the march that changed the world. I was born after The March. I was too young to remember water hoses and viciously trained German Shepherds. I never sat at the back of a bus. I never went to a segregated school. I didn't cry when Dr. Martin Luther King died because I was barely three years old.  I was the first generation to reap the benefits of the work he, Medgar, Dorothy, Martin, Viola, Fannie Lou, Malcolm and others did. I never saw a sign that read "Colored Only." I had white teachers and I had white classmates and white friends. We went to Hanes Mall where we shopped together at The Merry-Go-Round and Thalheimers Department Store. We were supposed to be the generation that received a payout after that bounced check Dr. King famously spoke about was re-deposited. But somehow, as always, human beings get in the way of lofty Aquarian ideals.

This was a tough summer. The conservative Supreme Court of the United States finally fulfilled Judges Roberts' and Thomas' promise to nullify anything that looked like racial justice by dismantling a major part of the Voting Rights Act and further diluting Affirmative Action. Then, my home state of North Carolina enacted the most severe restrictions to access to voting in the last five decades, all under the guise of stopping "voter fraud" that Republican leaders described, oxymoronically, as "both rampant and undetected."  They claimed these restrictions had no sinister intent, but merely contained a law to make you show ID at the polls. That's all.  What they didn't announce was the law planned major cuts to early voting, closing polling stations in left-leaning colleges (a direct assault on the legality of young voters at historically black colleges and other institutions), banning publicly funded voter registration drives, banning same-day registration, and---my personal favorite---allowing for unlimited amounts of monetary contributions to state politicians from anonymous corporate donors. So, essentially, huge businesses like Walmart or the Koch Brothers or Art Pope's Super P.A.C. could secretly donate millions of dollars to politicians willing to work on their behalf without the voters of the Tarheel State having any rights whatsoever to that information.

And then there was the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman verdict. 'Nuff said.

It seemed the exoneration of a grinning George Zimmerman, Jr., who was on trial after he murdered an unarmed teenager, gave the right-wing the green light it needed to commence a blitzkrieg on everything black and male in America.  From Bill O'Reilly's Talking Points, where he laments that the plight of black America is due to deadbeat dads and Lil' Wayne lyrics, to Rush Limbaugh's go-to checklist of black-on-black crime, Al Sharpton and the ever-present Black Welfare Queen. They kept trying to stoke racial animus with their "versions" of Trayvon. White conservatives, swollen with self-rightenousness, bombarded FOX News and Briebart with what they thought was the Gretchenfrage of the moment:  What's Wrong with the Black Community? Tim Wise and Tom Scocca, two white men who are allies in the fight against racism had their say. But it was Joe Walsh's racially charged and detestable bastardization of the I Have a Dream speech that was my personal white-woman-in-Thailand moment.  This ousted Tea-Bagging jackass had the nerve to spew racist fuckery in what he, and the rest of what has become a thinly veiled cabal of right-wing bigots, think was a clever parody of Dr. King's words. So listen up assholes 'cause I'm only gonna say this once:

My parents chose the schools I went to because I lived in a good neighborhood.
I grew up with my father in a loving household.
I have never shot another black man.
I said "no" to gangs and drugs.
I graduated from high school.
I am not a father and if I were it would not be any of your business (didn't your wife accuse you of being behind on your child support in the tune of $117,00?).
My family has never been dependent on the government assistance.
And I am not alone in this. Millions of other black men are just like me.

Now that you have this information, I would like to ask white conservatives like Joe Walsh a few questions of my own: You love to quote Dr. King and claim you judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Then, why am I constantly followed in stores?--I don't steal and there's no need for me to shoplift.  Why was I pulled over by the police and asked what I was doing "riding around" in my own neighborhood?--I grew up here and have been living here more or less for more than 45 years.  Why did the Winston-Salem/ Forsyth County School Board try to track me into remedial classes (twice) even though I tested in the 95th percentile on most of the state's standardized aptitude tests? Why was I asked to submit to a drug test when I worked at Credit Suisse when the two white male applicants that were hired to work under my supervision were not? Why did that well-meaning white man I met at the bar while out drinking with friends try to give me that ridiculous, stereotypical jive handshake? As if he'd just watched a rerun of Sanford and Son. Why do you always tell me I'm so "well-spoken" as if that's a surprise? Why was I asked if I worked in the mailroom when I was coming out of that meeting in the conference room wearing a $700 Hugo Boss suit? Why did you call me a bum when i saw you drop a five dollar bill when you were exiting the subway and I was just trying to hand it back to you? Why was I directed to unskilled labor jobs when I went to the Winston-Salem's employment services agency after I finished college? (The counselor, and yes she she was white, didn't even bother to look at my resume at first).  And why do white women automatically hide their cellphones, iPads and necklaces (often attempting to be discreet, but failing) when they see me walking toward them?

So why, Joe Walsh, if I've done everything I was supposed to do am I STILL being treated like a criminal? I'll tell you why:  because you live in a world of fear and vitriol. A world filled with deflection. A world where your anger is vindicated not by your own shortcomings but by the idea that you are better than me. You don't want to help poor, black, indigent, underemployed, institutionalized black men. You want to use them as chips in your high stakes game of racial poker.  So you pour your hate on Trayvon Martin and others like him because the black president of the United States said he could have been Trayvon 35 years ago.  But what you're really fearful of is that Trayvon Martin could grow up and be president 35 years from now.  So the real reason you continue to criminalize me is because a forward-thinking, hard-working, smart, politically and socially aware black man is not your greatest dream but your worst nightmare.