“In that pool of forty million, there are nonetheless many intelligent and well-socialized blacks. (I’ll use IWSB as an ad hoc abbreviation.) You should consciously seek opportunities to make friends with IWSBs. In addition to the ordinary pleasures of friendship, you will gain an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice.
(14) Be aware, however, that there is an issue of supply and demand here. Demand comes from organizations and businesses keen to display racial propriety by employing IWSBs, especially in positions at the interface with the general public—corporate sales reps, TV news presenters, press officers for government agencies, etc.—with corresponding depletion in less visible positions. There is also strong private demand from middle- and upper-class whites for personal bonds with IWSBs, for reasons given in the previous paragraph and also (next paragraph) as status markers.
(15) Unfortunately the demand is greater than the supply, so IWSBs are something of a luxury good, like antique furniture or corporate jets: boasted of by upper-class whites and wealthy organizations, coveted by the less prosperous. To be an IWSB in present-day US society is a height of felicity rarely before attained by any group of human beings in history. Try to curb your envy: it will be taken as prejudice (see paragraph 13).”
That article was indeed quite racist! I did not cry, but I did have that hollow feeling in your chest, like when the wind is knocked out of you but also your heart is gone and you’re not sure you’ll ever breathe again, and maybe you don’t want too. That is not a pleasant feel, bro!
Though it does send me to this uncomfortable place of wondering how many people I know who feel that way, deep down, or maybe not so deep. I’ve been told to my face that “I’m not one of them,” and that I’m “different,” in those exact words and as subtext, which is also a terrible feel. Because you know what. My family are “those types of people.” My friends are. People I know and love, and know more about who I am and where I come from, are not “IWSBs” and they still manage to be good wonderful people who deserve to reach the heights of felicity. I take stupid articles like this very personally, because it is. fucking. personal. When they say “black people,” they are talking about me, and my family and my loved ones, and I love the ability to compartmentalize like anyone who has googled upsetting things on the internet, but, Christ.
This is like people who look me in the face and ask if I’m related to Dick Cheney. Nope, but I am statistically more likely to steal your bag!
