Not Much Has Changed

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

As part of my last extended US road trip in May of 2001, I got to perform one night at a club in Myrtle Beach, SC. This gig in itself was tedious to get to, as my driver/opening act, who met me at Atlanta Airport, was stopped just past Atlanta city limits for talking on his mobile phone while driving. This immediately turned for the worse, as there was debris along the side of the road so he couldn’t pull over right away. Suddenly it was sirens, bullhorns, frantic screaming, and when the young comic finally stopped the car, the cop leaped out of his car with gun drawn, shouting “Put your hands where I can see them!” This was followed by the usual “Walk slowly out of the car,” and the guy was hustled into the cop car’s back seat. I was also aroused out of the passenger seat, but not treated as roughly as the driver. The cop was seriously talking about taking the driver to jail for resisting arrest, but had a change of heart, which I can only attribute to the fact that both the comic and the cop were Black. Had it been a white cop, I’m quite sure there’d have been no gig.

With a ticket issued and a court date booked, we reached Myrtle Beach, still rather unnerved, about three hours later. That evening at the show, I saw the true colors of the land where the Confederate Flag still flies proudly. Opening the show and MC’ing was a local kid (who had the accent to prove it), probably barely over 21. As he’s getting past the pleasantries, he decided to be a little “daring.” “Any Black people hyar tanite?” he asked. “Uh oh,” I thought, “I don’t like where this is going.” “Well, Ah’m not a racist, but— (to which you know he’s going to say something that totally proves he IS),” then made a totally unfunny remark about how few Black magicians there are, and what great magicians they’d make, since they’re so good at making a television disappear. The fact that this got laughs made me slightly ill. The fact that he’d be bringing up on stage the only Black person in the room was akin to throwing the Christian to the lions. No one verbally expressed any hate when the Black comic was on stage, but they didn’t show him a lot of love, either. The racism wasn’t done, however, as the next up, a regional favorite, said something I hadn’t heard since I’d lived in Louisiana over 40 years before. He mentioned the Southern two-word phrase for the food commonly known as Brazil Nuts, which for the purpose of sanity and how much I hate a certain word, let’s just say the second word is “toes.” That also got a laugh.

What just occurred in Charleston, South Carolina a couple days ago really doesn’t surprise me, given the idea that young people like this Dylann Roof maniac or these redneck would-be comics from 14 years ago are and were so unafraid to show their ignorance. Not to mention finding an accepting audience for this vermin. It’s scary that an environment continues to spawn new generations of bigotry, and how it makes you think not that much progress has been made in the 150 years since the Emancipation Proclamation. It’s also scary that this way of thinking so overtook Mr. Roof, who seemed so convinced Black people were responsible for all the evils of the world that he felt compelled to launch a massacre in the one place where they would seemingly have felt safest.

While it upset me to see a certain “news” service take the “It’s an attack on Christianity” spin, I was more annoyed by the asshole NRA Board member from Texas claiming that it’s the preacher’s fault he and eight others are dead, because he’d voted for gun control (the preacher was also a member of the state legislature), and how if he’d allowed certain concealed weapons ordinances to go through, the victims would have had a defense against Dylan with a double n. Charles Cotton is this idiot’s name. Mr. Cotton, in a rare bit of humility, deleted his Twitter post and apologized.

Hard to say which is worse between gun worship and racism, but you put them together and suddenly it’s 1847 again, and all that Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King among others stood for apparently still pisses quite a few people off. I’ve gone on my soapbox countless times to say how much I hate guns, and will continue to do so. There is nothing anyone can say that would ever convince me to have something in my house that was invented for the primary purpose of killing and maiming. I’m still not sure whether I hate guns more than I hate racism, because racism is borne out of ignorance, while there truly are a few (and I’ve met some) intelligent people that own guns. But I do know that both are evil.

June 20th, 2015



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