Freddogg Off The Chain

Photo is of lonely black dog in a world of white. I captured him outside a repair garage in Georgetown Delaware called 4N Car because no one writing checks can spell foreign.

If you are white then you have heard other whites use the word ‘nigger’ in conversation at points in you life. I don’t know what other races get into when they are in homogeneous groupings but I’m pretty sure that educated and non bigoted peoples of all ethnicities and racial configurations have heard it all. And the question is “do you respond and give a lecture or just recognize it for what it is and thereby keep your access like a double agent otherwise how do you learn that racism is inbreed in some people like a Appalachian family tree.

Revisionist story telling serves no useful person. White racist don’t say N word to each other they say nigger. Once at Wawa I said to a Plummer friend “This coffee is fucked up.” I didn’t say F word upped figuring he was real blue collar guy but he came back at me,” Please don’t use that language around me” and I had no where to go because he was right and I was really fucked up.

Back in 1977 I sat down with a teaching friend a generation older in a faculty dining room for lunch. My friend who was just the greatest most thoroughly Christian person I ever knew, soft spoken and hard of hearing, gentle but tough to the center core of his soul.

Some asshole science guy sits down, checks the room for bugs, and in whispered tones begins to tell a racist joke which includes a white guy, a Jew and to use his word, a nigger.

So the non funny joke drones on to the end and of course the black guy is the punch line except he ain’t no black guy, he’s a ‘nigger.’

After the joke where this racist teacher is hunched over his flying saucer all proud of himself I look at my friend and say,”Go ahead and tell him.”

“Three of my grandchildren are black,”Dick said in a calm voice.

“Got anymore jokes,”I said. “And what makes you assume that all white people share your ignorance? You got caught Mr. Paranoid. How do you like us now?"

Much was made of the recent Obama speech on race and it was good but I could give my own speech but I refuse to talk in code letters because that isn’t anymore more real than a blow up disco dancer.

Play the parent for a moment because this happened to me. A five year old boy wets his hair and combs it carefully with a pompadour in the front. He walks out of the bathroom looks at me and asked in all sincerity,” Hey Dad! Do you think I look like a fagot?”

“Straight up little man.”

Freddogg