The Inscrutable Black Redneck

Yesterday I stopped in to the local mini-storage place to buy a bundle of boxes for a moving job I am doing. Just ahead of me was a well-groomed black woman, no older than forty.

She asked the clerk to help her find a hand-cart, then launched into a complaint about how she'd been treated three days earlier. Listen in:

"Who was working here Saturday?"

"Well, there are two people working in the office on weekends..."

"I'm not talking about that Afro-American woman who was here; she always treats me nice. I'm talking about that Euro-American [I swear to God, that's what she said] woman. She did me a favor, getting me a storage unit on short notice, I know, but I just didn't like the way she talked to me. I'm going to come back here and talk to her about that, and this time she'd better treat me nice, or there might be trouble."

At this point I could not help intervening. In part because the woman she was complaining about is  one of the most unflappable, upbeat people you could hope to meet, and in part because I needed to complete my purchase and move on with my day. Excusing myself into the conversation, I remarked that what this woman had said sounded remarkably like a threat, and that perhaps the clerk ought to warn her boss to be on the alert for trouble. Predictably, that shifted the focus of the attack to me, the woman now getting shrill and demanding to know whether I worked for the company, etcetera. In an even tone of voice the clerk told her I was a long-time customer of the place, of very high standing, and a personal friend of the woman being complained about. After a bit of huffing and puffing, and looking me over from head to toe, as though she was trying to memorize my description (enough so that I offered her a business card), the woman flounced out of the place. As she left, she shouted over her shoulder, "Jena Six!"

I am at an absolute loss to understand what message this little ejaculation was intended to convey, since it was so far out of context with anything that had been said up to that point. I can only assume it was some sort of weirdly abstract threat directed at me; perhaps that I should expect Al Sharpton and a few thousand angry liberals to show up on my doorstep.

Apparently, the woman is one of those people--the ones who push race into every possible encounter, hoping to use it for leverage when she's wrong on the facts. Reflecting on the "Euro-American" remark (and I swear, I have never before heard a white person referred to thus), I formed a mental picture of this woman as a huge locomotive, with her race-resentment shoved out in front of her like a cow-catcher.

And as I have written on other occasions, I'm always amazed to hear this kind of stuff from someone who is obviously too young to have been turned away from a lunch counter, relegated to the back of the bus, or forced to use a "colored" water fountain.

The shame of this kind of behavior is that it becomes to easy to make it into a racial generalization, when the truth is simply that this woman is a racist and a jerk.

tags: jena six  racism  

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