little whip had a very interesting and provocative article here which I didn’t catch up to until the thread had been Godwin’d several times over. Frankly many of the hysterical screeds that people were passing off as comments to her well written and honest article made me wish I had more trolling ratings to hand out every day.

While I do most often find myself in groups that consists mostly of whites (hmmm out of 9 people in my van 5 are white, 1 is Choctaw, 1 is black, 1 is mixed, and one is Middle Eastern of some nature…still the group is mostly white) I am certainly not uncomfortable around non-white folks. I have lived almost half my adult life in Asia and have dealt with non-whites everyday of my Army career with very little friction despite coming from an area of the country that is damn near exclusively white (they don’t call it the Great White North for nothing).

I remember distinctly having my first real conversation with a black man at Basic Training, it went like this : (honest accounting, but I will put on my flame suit anyways)

PVT McCune “Hey man, can I have that last piece of fried chicken?”

PVT Greywar “Sure, I want the roast beef anyways.”

PVT McCune “Cool, I can’t help myself when it comes to fried chicken.” (looks at me expectantly)

PVT Greywar “Why?” (had never heard the stereotype)

PVT McCune “Because I’m black yo!” (puzzled that I didn’t get it)

I did have several encounters during basic training with something that did make me feel uncomfortable though…. A culture, not a race. The culture of Me-ism. The culture that said that no-one else in the world has any right to any consideration whatsoever. These were the folks who would not shut up at night after a long day of Basic with an early morning the next day unless you got out of your bunk and beat their ass or at least made a convincing threat to do so. This was the culture that said it is ok to talk on your fucking phone during a movie, or to play your stereo at jet engine levels in the barracks at 2 a.m., or to treat local citizens like retards because you would be leaving the country in 12 months or less, or to demand that they be allowed to do less work than other people in the platoon.

Who were the perpetrators of these offenses? That hated group the Inner City-ites. Generally speaking these folks were in fact non-white but only generally. I immediately ran into white folks with the exact same problems from this same origin : the American Inner City.

This exposure was greatly lessened as I left Basic Training to attend language training at the Defense Language Institute. This school was overwhelmingly white in the 1990’s and the non-whites I met were by and large considerate of others.

By the time I was in my second Korea tour however my larger exposure to this culture of Me-ism has once again planted the seeds of doubt in my mind. These doubts were banished by my buddy Roy and airframe mechanic for Avtel (the maintainers for the RC-7 aircraft). Roy and his wife are from the Bahamas (she has the accent he doesn’t) and are both black. He and I were drinking beer and watching the news at his house when some news piece ran with totally ridiculous commentary from a rapper about how he needed his “props” and that the “man” was keeping his “peeps” down. Roy face screwed up like he had just smelled something awful and he said “These goddamn American Blacks give all the rest of the world’s blacks a bad name!” I took he opportunity to tell him that I didn’t think it was the blacks exactly but the inner-city hip-hop culture that was responsible. I pointed out that we both had American black friends who did not act this way and eventually he agreed with me.

Am I more comfortable in the company of whites? No, but I am more comfortable in the company of people who are not self-centered retards. Little whip made no bones about this in her article. She made it clear that it was not that all blacks were bad but that the majority of the one she had met in the inner city were culturally incompatible with her. For stating this honestly her blog was inundated with half-witted replies and accusations of Nazism.

Let me make this clear, anyone who Godwin’s this article will be permanently blacklisted and the offending comment will be deleted after getting a trolling rating. This is my blog and these are my rules. If you feel the need to tell me I am a Nazi or to photoshop me into a Grand Dragon of the KKK outfit do it on your own blog.