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(Mis)understanding

So, I was stuck in traffic the other day, and I was sick of my John Mayer CD. I found that there are only so many times you can listen to a man sing "Your baahdy is a wohndeland" on a sweltering afternoon -- and being stuck in your car with no end in sight to the parking lot status of the freeway only exacerbated the problem. I was slipping through the stations on my XM radio, and accidentally stopped the scan on some hip-hop music. There was a lot of thumping, and bumping, and girls going "Oooh, aaaah" in the background. A black man was mumbling his way through his rap lyrics, and I couldn't really understand much of it. One phrase I did pick up on was, "Yo nigga, hey nigga." At first, my PC alarms went "whoop, whoop, whoop" inside my head. But then I realized it was a black man calling himself and other black men the word they had banned from the dictionary twenty years before. I listened some more, and after some more mumbling, and swearing, and thump-bump-oooh-aaah, I heard "we niggas", and I was hit with an understanding.

I was so surprised, I had to loosen up my tie and collar, and turn up the AC. I felt my PC knee-jerk reactions coming unwired, as I worked to regain my bearings. The cars in front of me started moving again, and someone behind me honked, so I had to start moving. I took the next exit off.

I was thinking that a cool drink would be a wonderful thing right about then, but I didn't see any plazas, and no convenience stores where I could get something chilled, and sit in my car in the parking lot and reflect. After a couple of blocks, however, I saw a group of young black men, in their late teens. They were wearing their typical costumes with ball caps on crooked, or toques (even in the sweltering afternoon), and baggy pants, undershirts worn tight. They seemed to be having a good time, laughing and being boisterous like young men do. I pulled up just ahead of them, straightened my tie, and got out of the car. I thought I could kill two birds with one stone, by getting directions to the nearest store, and testing out my new understanding of white-black relations.

As I came around the front of my Volvo, they stopped with their boisterous play, and turned as one to look at me. I raised my arm and hailed them in a friendly voice. I felt so good, knowing that now, things had changed, and I didn't have to be so careful in my speech any more.

"Hey there, niggers! Could any of you young nigger men tell my where I might buy some lemonade, or perhaps some iced tea?!"

It turned out that I didn't have quite the understanding of the situation that I thought I had. The word 'nigger', which I thought had been brought back from the dictionary's PC graveyard, free for all to use in friendly terms, was still to be used only in very limited terms. Those terms do not, I discovered, turn out to include white men speaking to black men.

In any case, to gloss over most of the unpleasantness that ensued, I'll only say that they gave me a choice. They would either beat me senseless, or I could eat my own underwear, right there on the street. Looking back on the whole thing, I think maybe I should have taken the beating.

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