Monday, December 12, 2016

My (First) Trump AmeriKKKa Moment


No wonder Jesus hasn't come back.

A week and a half after the election, I sat on my bike and waited for the light to turn green at the intersection of Broadway and Grand Avenue. Downtown Oakland. Friday morning. One foot was planted on the curb, the other on my left pedal when an old—and I mean old—white man started to trudge across the street in my direction. He was the only person traversing the crosswalk in either direction. Broadway and Grand is a major intersection, so the crosswalk is at least nine feet wide—and he had it all to himself. But what did he do, when he was halfway across Broadway? He hugged the big fat white line demarcating the crosswalk, where vehicles are supposed to line behind to make space for pedestrians. My front bike tire was right over the line. At most, it was maybe two inches over the line, but this man stared at me from across the street and walked straight at me. In the eleven years I have been cycling on a near daily basis to commute to work, this has never happened before. I didn’t know how to react. As he glared at me, I furrowed my eyebrow, stared down at my front tire to confirm that it wasn’t obstructing him from walking up the curb ramp. It didn’t. He had gone out of his way to walk within inches of my bike tire. I didn’t give move. And I didn’t say a thing to him because I was so stunned by his behavior. He just continued to walk down the sidewalk.

Over that weekend, I wondered if he was just some cranky old fuck who has a thing about bicycles hovering anywhere near a pedestrian crosswalk. But on my morning bike ride the following Monday, I looked at the crosswalk’s ample spacing. I studied the curb ramp and saw how wide it was—and how far it was from where I had stood on my bike that Friday morning. That’s when I knew this was one of those quietly racist incidents that white people have become adept at in this country.

Since the election, I’ve read a handful of other similarly peculiar incidents on my Facebook feed between white folks and people of color. Every day there seems to be a new story. A new incident. Like this woman in Chicago (what a surprise) who yelled at black Michaels employees. Or this piece of shit for a human being who threatened Standing Rock tribe members in North Dakota. Although I already have a fairly low opinion of humans, it makes me sad to hear and read about this shit. Basically, some white people are going fucking crazy now that Trump’s the president-elect. Like they can get it up after years of not being able to get hard.

Now that I know the score—even in Oakland, California of all places—I’m prepared for a next time.

And I’m not going to stay quiet.

And I’m not giving a goddamn fucking inch.

(And the next time some dumb cunt pulls shit like this, I’m going to be the one to yell, GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM! (If they even know where they came from.) My blood’s been on this hemisphere longer if they want to play that stupid game of first dibs on something inherently boundary-less like our Mother Earth.)

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