Token Negro

I remember standing outside a bar, way downtown in alphabet city. It's around Christmas time and I'm on my way home after a long day of drinking.

I'm exhausted. Not so much from the whiskey I pounded all day. Oh no, it was the exercise of staying patient with folks who tacitly, yet insistently, kept telling me “you don't belong."

I'll give you and example. In the afternoon session of the holiday party, a young man whom I hadn't seen in some years approached me. The holiday party serves as a sort of reunion of sorts, and we are genuinely happy to see one another. A few moments of smalltalk reveals that he was in finance, like so many of the alumna of this group of people, and he ruefully adds that on this Saturday, two days before Christmas Eve, he actually has return to work. I give him the appropriate condolences, and yuk it up, saying that his bonus would more than make up for the inconvenience.

After a few laughs, and swigs of our respective drinks, we're out of things to say. As I go to excuse myself to get some of the fried food across the room (and ditch what was becoming and awkward exchange), my old friend launches himself into a joke.

My addled brain really isn't listening to the set up. Something about Helen Keller somehow gaining the ability to see. It's cumbersomely told, and by the end of it, a few other alumna of the organization have joined our “discussion."

The joke ended with Helen Keller saying something like “ I'm black, the world's black, everything's black, I HATE BLACK!"

Some folks laughed, believing the joke to be genuinely funny. Others laughed because of the terrible way that the joke was delivered. Oh Billy.

“That's fucking racist," I hear myself say, as the guffaws around me hit as nervous pitch. They can't tell if I'm joking or if I'm truly outraged.

My old friend smiles in his aloof manner and begins telling the joke again, as though in the second telling, I'll more clearly see that the joke is alright.

He misses the point. The setup is immaterial. Its his conclusion that is a kick to the stomach.  Somehow, the joke equates being blind to seeing everything in black, which we're given to understand, would be TERRIBLE.

The takeaway: even individuals who have never seen color know that black is ugly or somehow awful. “I HATE black!"

Somehow I untangled myself from that conversation, that afternoon. I knew that they believed that, as usual, I had taken a perfectly reasonable conversation and distorted it into a racial “thing." My reputation as a racial rabble rouser preceded me.

These sorts of incidents peppered the afternoon and evening. As I begin to walk away from the bar, I'm called back my wirey fellow.

“Hey man," says that the kid, smoking a cigarette and unabashedly drinking a beer outside. I knew this man when he was a little boy. Though I haven't seen him in years,  I know he's gained a reputation for partying hard.

“Leaving kinda early, huh?"

I was drunk and annoyed. I wanted him to be absolutely clear that I  wasn't leaving because I lacked the capacity to have fun. I wanted him to understand that for hours that I HAD been at the party, I had endured the weight of tokenism, and that I had stayed well longer than I should.

“I hate white people," I say descriptively.

At that moment, I did.