The ram wrote:It was a toughy between sym and duk but I opted for duk as he told me once that's he old, so he should know better! I assume sym to be 12 btw
You're the one who should know better. It's all fine to be full of hate and intolerance when you're 18 and running with the skinheads, but by the time you're 40 or 50 or whatever you are, you should have figured out that hate never created any positive change in the world. And by now, unless you're living in a bubble, you should have had enough life experience to know that under their skin all those people you hate have the same hopes and dreams and aspirations as you do.
I used to be a racist asshole too. It was just fear of the unknown. Growing up in all-white communities, I never had a chance to meet a black person until I was into my early teens. The only things I knew about black people I learned from watching the movie Zulu! It didn't help, I suppose, that when I first came to Canada the race riots were in full swing in the U.S., and they were all over the TV. When we had to go to the U.S., my father kept tear-gas grenades under the front seat in case the natives got restless. We'd lock the doors and roll up the windows going over the Peace Bridge and we didn't open them until we got down to Kentucky or some other white state.
In Grade 8, they brought a black exchange student into our class (from Liverpool, England, of all places) and we all got a chance to come up to the front and touch him to persuade ourselves that he was no different than us. For me, the process was a failure. His skin felt rubbery and cold and very alien to me, and it made me more racist rather than less.
The beginning of the transformation for me was in 1987, when I was working on the SkyDome project. There was this black guy who worked with me. He was from Biafra. He'd been on the losing side in the Nigerian Civil War and saw pretty much his entire village exterminated by government troops. If anyone had good reason to be bitter, it was him, but he wasn't bitter at all. He was happy to have lived through it, happy to be alive, and thankful that Canada had allowed him to make a new start. He was cheerful and honest and hardworking and pretty much the best man on the crew.
I learned three lessons from him. First, it was the first crack in my prejudices. It was impossible to maintain my racist asshole ideas about black people in the face of this hardworking guy who never shirked, never complained, never abused or slandered anyone. White guys on the crew were fabricating time sheets and stealing shit and making a game out of shortchanging the coffee truck, and the Biafran seemed like a saint beside them.
Second, I became ashamed of my ingratitude at being brought to Canada. All through my youth I hated living in Canada, I cursed my parents for dragging me here, and I dreamed of going back to Czechoslovakia. I'd had nothing but bad things to say about Canada. The Biafran was just so grateful to be here, so full of enthusiasm for all the good things Canada has to offer, I started to see what an asshole I had been. Slowly but surely I started to change.
Third, the Biafran was the first guy I'd met who talked about his wife with respect. The white guys on the crew had pet names for their wives like "that fat bitch" or "the Pig." They'd leave at the end of the day saying things like, "time to go home and see what The Pig has managed to burn for dinner!" The Biafran would say things like, "Time to go home and be reunited with my beautiful wife." It was a real eye-opener. It really stood on its head the things we are taught about how non-white people behave.
The next big step in my education was about a decade later, in the '90s. I'd gone home to Prague for a relative's wedding. The communists were gone and the place was becoming lawless. I saw a bunch of skinheads coming up the street, and there was this old gypsy woman in their path. "Out of our way, you black piece of dirt!" they taunted. (In Eastern Europe there are no real blacks, so the honorific gets passed on to the gypsies.) It was a huge sidewalk; they had all the room in the world to go around her, but that wasn't exactly the point. The lead skinhead drop-kicked her in the ass. She fell forward onto her face, and they all walked over her back as they continued on their merry way up the street, laughing and slapping each other's ugly boneheads as if they'd just done something brave and spectacular.
I sat on a bench for a long, long time. In Toronto I'd hung out with skinheads and Aryan Nations types and thought nothing of it. I didn't really subscribe to their bullshit, but I didn't oppose it, either. But to see this kind of thuggish behaviour in my old home town, the place that I thought of as the fountain of all that is good in the world, was utterly jarring. Jarring is the only word that I can think of. It stopped my worldview dead in its tracks. What I had witnessed was a completely pointless and senseless act of unprovoked aggression. I'm sure that woman was not a holy saint, but she had done absolutely nothing to those boys. They attacked her for no reason whatsoever except naked tribalism, completely unsupportable by any standard. They didn't even look back to see if she was alive. (She was.)
When you start to think about how much work goes into making a life for oneself, and how easy it is to shatter it, well, unprovoked attacks on anyone become unforgivable. I wasn't the same after that night.
Go forward another decade. In the early 2000s I was hauling trees and shrubs between various greenhouses. Now, around here greenhouses are either manned by locals (white) or by imported Mexicans on work visas. Hauling to these greenhouses, a pattern emerged very quickly. If I pulled up at a place that was manned by whites, it would take them four or five hours to unload the truck. If I was at a farm manned by Mexicans, they would have it offloaded in 60 to 90 minutes. These weren't isolated instances or flukes. This was a consistent pattern in a job that I did for probably three months a year for ten years running. 60 to 90 minutes for a crew of Mexicans to do the work that their white colleagues would do in four or five hours. The same truth was borne out over and over and over again at hundreds of farms and greenhouses that I went to.
In the popular folklore the Mexican is always fat, lazy and looking for a handout. In my experience, and a statistically-significant body of experience it is, he is the exact opposite. Nobody is more industrious or diligent. Without the Mexicans, North America would starve. When I listen to Americans sneering and slandering their Mexican labour force, I just get enraged. It would be one thing if the truth was
slightly different from the folklore. But it isn't slightly different. It's the exact diametric opposite.
I guess the final end of my long tale would be in March of 2013. I was hauling steel tubing, and I made a delivery at a fabricating plant in Detroit. One interesting thing about the plant was that it was the exact opposite of most American factories. In most American factories, the managers are white and the workers are black. Here it was the exact opposite -- all the managers were black and the workers were white. I half-expected that everything else would be backwards also. Maybe they would walk on the ceiling and the women would piss standing up. In fact, there was no difference between that plant and dozens of other steel fabricators that I'd delivered to. Everything was pretty much the same, all the workers did the same jobs and the banter was more or less the same. I'd already left my racist days pretty far behind, but I needed to see that plant. It really was normality incarnate.
That afternoon, before I left Detroit, I went for a walk down to a burger joint and got a burger. While I was standing in line, a black guy offered me a coupon that he wasn't using. Seating was limited, so I asked another black guy if I could share his table. He gladly offered me a chair. We talked about this and that, and everything was completely normal. I was the only white face in the burger joint. Hell, I was the only white face on that city block. Nobody knifed me or spat venom at me. I thought about 45 years earlier, driving through Detroit with the doors locked and the windows rolled up, my father fondling his tear-gas grenades. What a long way I had come. It felt good.
Hate only begets hate, but it is possible to leave it behind. I gather you've walked down a dark road for a long time, but it's never too late to turn around.
Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2018 10:12 am
Thot I'd check.
. thx for sharing.