[Promoted by Chris]
The other night, I had the privilege of entertaining an old friend. It is his first visit to the US, but as he and I have reluctantly acknowledged the truth of the old Mexican adage, “the years do not pass in vain,” after a day of sight-seeing, we both wished our combined young folks well as they went out to paint the town red and gratefully sank down to some Pillow Appreciation combined with Order In and Televiewing.
There was an interesting show on one of the discover and learn or something channels, about some very nice people who live in a remote area of one of the islands today called Indonesia, and after a commercial break during which re refilled our teacups and said how much we would like to go there and meet these friendly folks, a message appeared on the screen, warning us that the program we were watching “contained indigenous nudity” and therefore might not be appropriate for all viewers or something to that effect.
My guest and I exchanged bewildered looks. WTF?
Indigenous nudity? Perhaps because neither of us can boast a background devoid enough of diversity, nor steeped enough in the appalling and twisted Calvinism that forms the basis for so much of mainstream America’s worldview, we had not really noticed much about the sartorial practices of the people on the show, though we had admired their bling, we had mostly been impressed with how nice they were to each other and the visiting TV people, and how everyone we saw seemed like somebody we would like to get to know, go and visit, sit around in the evening and talk to, and learn from.
We could not imagine exactly for whom this program might not be appropriate. Somebody who is allergic to nice friendly people, maybe? And what exactly is meant by “indigenous nudity?” In our own simple and child-like way of thinking, we had not been aware that there were these divisions or gradations in the nature of nudity.
We had in our ignorance, supposed, if we thought about it much, which I can’t say that we do, that nudity is nudity, and that the fellow explaining to the TV people how excellent canoes are made from the trunk of a particular tree enjoys the same nudity as does, for example, Donald Trump or tom Hanks, that is to say, that nudity for one would be identical to nudity for the other, the only differences having to do with individual physical characteristics, while the quality of nudity itself would be identical.
But now we were being asked to make this distinction. Indigenous nudity versus the nudity of immigrants? Of the sons of invaders?
My guest nodded wisely. The distinction, he said, is in white versus non-white. He changed the channel, and the screen immediately filled with the doings of Paris Hilton. Paris turned around, and we saw that the area immediately above the line of her blue jeans was blurred out. However there had been no message warning us of this, just discreetly and quietly blurring out of the coin slot area. No need for explanations, understanding is understood.
If you do not instinctively understand why indigenous nudity is a different thing than other, specifically, white, peoples’ nudity, and why it requires a warning screen, and why a white girl’s coin slot must be blurred or pixelated out with no warning screen, then the chances are that you are not a white American, or if you are, then you are a very strange one, who will need special instruction should you ever wish to apply for a job with a future and health insurance in a large office building.
When most mainstream Americans discuss racism, they will begin by emphasizing how free of it they are.
While the traditional “some of my best friends” has morphed into subtler incarnations, this reflects not actually a diminuition in the racism level itself, but an increased awareness that racism is a bad thing, the speaker must endeavor to emphasize his own devoidness of it.
However, when we make bold to peek into the everyday lives of that proverbial “average mainstream American,” we find that in 2006, he is not much more likely than his grandfather to engage in much non-work related social interaction with people whose ethnicity diverges from that traditional mainstream American Euro-melange.
With some notable and delightful exceptions, most middle and upper-middle class neighborhoods in the US are remarkably ethnically homogeneous. Remarkable because today, when one puts together all the traditional American minority groups, in most urban and metropolitan areas, their total will exceed in numbers will exceed the Euro-Merican total, thus that there still exist so many “white” hoods would not be possible without a concerted effort.
There was a news report the other day regarding one aspect of this, the majority of real estate agents, someone’s study found, do in fact “steer” homebuyers to neighborhoods where the prevalent ethnicity of the residents matches that of the would-be homebuyer.
Thus, white home buyers will be told that neighborhood A has “good schools,” which is the understood code for “schools where most of the students are white,” whereas inquiries about a listing in neighborhood B will be answered with the caveat that the schools are not so good, the code for “schools with a large number of non-white students.” Some may vary the message, characterizing the area as “very diverse,” which is will be a huge red flag to the discerning white house hunter, while not sounding quite as off-putting to the more “liberal” client, and is also very useful when dispensing lowdown on hoods to childless homebuyers, or those whose children are already away at college.
In another televiewing experience, the producers had two families, one black, one white, made up to resemble the other race, and go out into the world.
The father of the black family, made up to look like a white man, got a job as a bartender in almost all-white community, something of an anomaly in Southern California, as was acknowledged to him by the regulars, as the struck up a conversation with the new barkeep.
Proud and pleased they were to have almost miraculously maintained their little neighborhood as a sort of white enclave, a safe haven devoid of the alarming diversity that seemed to be taking over the region like mold in a New Orleans basement.
This remarkable feat, his customers informed the astonished bartender, meant that one could raise one kids here without, you know, worrying.
It is indeed a worrisome time for mainstream Americans with school aged children. Just as everyone thought the Afro-American Question had been settled, with some of them living in very nice areas, very nice, nicer than some of the you know, regular nice neighborhoods, just when they thought it was safe, here come the Mexicans, bringing the chilling threat of bilingualism, talked to a lady the other day, came home one day and found her daughter talking on the telephone – in Spanish! Well, she got her out of that public school and into a nice private one they next day, said she’d rob Peter to pay Paul if she had to, but well, you can just imagine. Now she is not prejudiced understand, any more than I am, of course not, I was just saying the other day, America did a good thing when we got rid of all that. I mean Martin Luther King is a real hero for all the kids, no matter what color they are. And Oprah, well, I think it is just wonderful the success she has had, and I don’t mind saying so. So we are not talking about prejudiced people, but, well the other day we went over the bridge to get some of that filo dough, you know those little layers they use in I think it’s Turkey, anyway we got there, and what do you think, almost all the signs in Spanish now. I’m talking about signs on the streets. Not in their houses or on their TV, you know they’ve got their own TV, anyway we went in there, and would you believe the girl that sold us the filo dough was Spanish? We could not take one step on that street without hearing people speaking it, and that used to be a fairly nice area, it always was diverse, you know, but now, I don’t know, but we are going to have to do something.
The Spanish language TV stations, it must be noted, neither warn viewers of indigenous nudity nor blur out coin slots. Even the coin slots of white girls.
