A man at a bar called me a “dirty spic” this weekend.
Earlier this week, I was hanging out with some brown folk and a friend dropped in on us. “Who invited the white girl?” someone asked when my friend C went to go get herself a drink. Everyone at the table laughed.
This weekend, at the bar, when the man said that, I considered hitting him. I’m 5’3″ (with shoes on), I’m not a very big person. I have never actually punched someone. I debated whether or not to slap him. I settled with just yelling at him.
The guy was drunk. And he was clearly just being mean for the sake of mean. He almost got beat up at least two other times that evening. People pulled him away and took him outside. He continued making a scene outside.
He wore a Confederate Tshirt.
(The shirt doesn’t offend me. The guy wearing it did.)
In the car, on my way home, I kept trying to make sense of my anger. The man was not talking to me directly, he didn’t know me, in fact, he was just responding to his own ignorance.
“Calm down, Ese,” my friend had said when Confederate was about to fight another guy.
“Don’t call me an a**hole,” Confederate said back.
“I didn’t. I said ‘Ese,’ dude.”
“I’m not a f**king spic.”
And that’s when I got mad. “I’m a spic! What of it?”
“Shut up, you dirty spic.”
I am not angry, I told Brad in the car. I am not angry at this ignorant sad man. I am ashamed that I got so upset in the moment. I let those words have power. I let those words cinch my throat. I let this violent language in. I was complicit to his language.
It’s hard not to let that affect you.
“Who invited the white girl?” my friends had said earlier in the week. I raised my hand slowly. “I guess I did.”
And everyone laughed.
Stephen Colbert says he doesn’t see color. I don’t think I do either, I don’t define myself primarily against whiteness. 
I am not not white, but I’m not white. It’s complicated. But as I explained the comment to my White US American boyfriend Pete on the phone this morning, I couldn’t help but say “you don’t understand” when he compared the situation to bullying and name-calling. It’s not just name-calling. It’s reinforcing systematic and institutionalized racism. It’s delineating the difference between me and you; outlining that subconsciously, you are better, but you’re better because your skin color and your race.
I believe that we live in a world with publicly unacknowledged castes, I think socio-economics and race have privileged some and not others. But I do not think that privilege enables superiority. I think that those with privilege should use it to the betterment of others. You can’t really believe that you’re superior to someone else because they come from a different place than you. It’s just too arbitrary to actually warrant truth.
“I’m not a f**king spic,” the man said.
“Who invited the white girl,” they said.
I need to escape this dichotomy. This oppressor-oppressed either-here-or-there thing. I don’t want to be trapped in a Nietzschean cycle of being master or slave. I want to say, “just be.” But we define ourselves as victims.
“You just don’t understand,” I said to Pete on the phone. “You just don’t understand,” I said to Brad in the car. I have been victim tonight, I have been hurt by this man’s words. Why do I think they cannot understand? Because they’re not “spics”?
Yet, yet it was the “white girl,” that same girl from the earlier incident, C, who stormed into the bar to confront the man in the Confederate tshirt. She’s the one who stood up and thought it was worth extracting an apology. I held her back, I told her there was no need for violence, and provoking a violent man is provoking violence. I told her that we should just walk away. And she did. But I noticed that while C stormed in, Brad, my friend, and the other Rockabilly boys outside just watched the thing unfold. No one said anything. No one told Confederate he was ignorant and racist. No one tried to make him apologize.
That’s all I wanted really. Didn’t actually think I could take him in a fight. Didn’t actually think anyone should have.
Although, it was Rockabilly night at the bar. I’m sure his hair was flammable.
I always carry a lighter, you know.
I think that if someone wearing that shirt doesn’t understand why it offends people, they probably need another history lesson, and a sociology lesson. But really, I think most of them are just doing it to be a**holes. Growing up in a place where the confederate flag was displayed all the time, mostly in the rear windows of pickups (although WV is technically the north, culturally it’s more south in many ways) I’ve always been annoyed by those who stupidly say, “It’s just a symbol of states rights!” Since when do otherwise politically unaware idiots wear shirts about technical, complicated issues like State versus Federal powers? They do it because they want to offend people, be racist, then hide behind a stupid political excuse.
[...] Racial politics in Pittsburgh, from the MFA perspective. It’s like it’s the 70s. Or the 50s. Or maybe even the 30s. [...]
Maybe you could reclaim spic as a positive acronym…
Single-
Payer
Insurance
Coverage
…could be one.
Re: those anti-Hispanic comments I made in the bar last night. No, I wasn’t the Confederate shirt guy. Different night, different bar, different conversation, different set of racial slurs.
I was interrupted before I got to finish. The point I was eventually going to make is that an open and useful conversation about race requires honesty. Honesty is something that is so difficult to achieve in a classroom because there is an uneven power dynamic.
Students are aware that we can fail or otherwise academically punish them. They’re also aware that we’re older and have at our disposal a number of different ways to verbally eviscerate them.
Also, who isn’t wary of the old Professor’s trap “please, argue with me. I’m really interested in listening to an opposing viewpoint”? More often than not, an opposing opinion brings academic punishment and public humiliation. (In my experience, anyway.)
It seems like only a fool would discuss racial prejudice in a classroom with an instructor who is a person of color. Even hypotheticals “I think most anti-Hispanic prejudice arises from ______” would be radioactive.
I suppose there are some prejudices (such as homophobia, as in the story that C told afterwards) we can discuss because they’re less impactful on most students’ lives. Which, of course, is problematic. Who gets to prioritize or tier prejudices so we can discuss the least important one? I suppose it is only thorough certain gates that we can enter into a useful (meaning not vague or platitude-filled) discourse.
We read James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” in Comp and my students really loved the essay’s grace and honesty. It was also a useful “gateway” text because students could usually find something they could relate to, whether their relationships with their father, their response to the current time period in which they live, experiences with racism, poverty, etc. It seems like the problem with your current Comp text is that students have no way at all to relate to the readings. But I haven’t read the assignments, so I really don’t know.
(It’s kind of ironic and I suppose honesty is a problem tenure is supposed to fix. But even a tenured professor would be an idiot to speak freely about race: doing so risks social alienation and years of small departmental punishments that flare up during faculty hires and committee meetings.)
I agree with Pete Rock up there. States rights my ass. I’m totally cool with white people expressing pride in their culture. White people invented velcro and landed on the moon–how cool is that? I’m just not sure why the symbol of white pride has to be one that’s synonymous with violence, slavery, and oppression.
I agree with you, although I would argue that an honest conversation about race can happen in the classroom. I think the power dynamic can be that of teacher and student, and that relationship isn’t as static as people think. I prefer to think of my role as educator as facilitating these kinds of discussion. In my classroom, I “impose” (with my power) a neutral space. We couch everything in terms of composition. So we break down arguments without considering anything outside of reason and logic. Believe it or not, this circumlocution opens up an interesting space. When you are simply analyzing language, you can avoid the divisiveness of any topic, even race.
Even if it doesn’t actually work (maybe my students are just placating me, maybe I’m projecting a space that doesn’t/can’t exist), I think that the hope implicit in the statements above justifies my beliefs.
I didn’t think you were being racist. I figured you were making a point. You and Confederate Guy are in no way equivalents.
I came across this post somewhat indirectly and found myself responding with both anger and intrigue to the post and the comments after. The anger was not actually in response to the post, but to memories of white folks engaging in and/or minimizing the impact of racist epithets like, “spic.” I really appreciate Adri’s very direct, concise explanation of why those kinds of rhetorical acts cannot be simply dismissed as “name-calling” or “insults.” To be sure, they are certainly both, but so much more. And I find it frustrating to frequently have to explain this to (mostly) white people. For the record, I am a straight, white male. I recognize that I benefit from my privileges, including those class privileges derived from accumulating cultural capital during my lengthy tenure in the academy. What I find so upsetting is the resistance among whites to even consider their own privilege, much less ‘deconstruct’ (yeah, I stopped doing the academic thing back in the 90s, so my language is a bit dated) that privilege and then use it transform the conditions that make that privilege possible. The ironic thing is that I am now in a transition to a new career as a therapist, where I will no doubt have many white (even male) clients who are not as familiar with or as far along in the process of confronting their own and others’ racism. So I am really interested in how we encourage people (our students, our families, our friends, our colleagues, our various other social & significant others) to ‘get it’ the way that C apparently (and, as far as I know, I do not know who that person is; I am an accidental interlocutor here).
One thing I want to challenge (and not condemn, but to probe further) is this idea that we can have any kind of ‘neutral’ space. As the previous comments have suggested, the classroom is always/already (like I said, I am old school-ish – meaning quaint and antiquarian) inscribed & transected with lines of power. While a focus on reasoning, syntax, and grammar might very well be useful in teaching clarity and grace in writing (and I personally think that is true), I wonder if it is really true that we can meaningfully engage the problem(s) of racist discourse without specifically addressing and acknowledging our experience of & in relations of power. I don’t think that racist discourse is (just) a fallacy of reason. It is (also) a sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious exercise in power. And abstracting out that power seems to sidestep what I think is the most significant matter at stake: white privilege.
I understand that this is a very dicey area in which to work in an academic setting. As a person who recalls vividly the ‘culture’ wars in the academy in the 1990s, I can appreciate the departmental & disciplinary political realities that any professional in a university setting must consider when crafting a strategy for addressing racist discourse practices among students, colleagues and supervisors. And I do not doubt that people engaged in this struggle are aware that stakes are very similar in other professional and personal contexts, with a very few exceptions (of which, I am quite grateful, I have been the beneficiary). And I do not have anything like a solution or answer to that problem, except to suggest that continuing with the struggle is very important and (especially for white folks, and especially for those who are clued-in) a responsibility we cannot shirk out of professional or personal necessity.
I do want to say that I really appreciate that there are people out there like Adri, C, & those responding to this post who are actively engaged in confronting racist social formations and practices (there I go again with that outdated jargon). Please keep on keeping on.
Thanks for writing this…and saying what’s on your mind. Racism has been pushed to the forefront (yet again); and I hear and read a lot of things that just make me want to run into a hole somewhere. I’m a Black woman who has never been one to judge people on their skin color or cultural background. However the favor is not always returned.
Something I hear a lot now is “Oh if anyone criticizes Black people for anything it’s racism; but White people can be called anything and everything and just take it.” On the surface…their argument makes sense; you pinch me and I pull your ear (or something like that). However it is Black people (and other minorities) who always need to prove ourselves beyond the stereotype placed on our people. White people do not have to do that…and these folks that whine about reverse discrimination just don’t get that.
I guess it all comes back to the Golden Rule; treat others how you would like to be treated. That is a far cry from our present reality…but it definitely something we should work towards.
im not sure i am too happy with all this race obsessed rant titled (rockabillied).There appears to be an attempt to outline a form of American music in a purely racist way. This fellow plainly offended you but similar views are often held by people not remotley interested in rockabilly.it may interest you to know that lots of people who like rock n roll and rockabilly are actually individuals and hold diverse views on many subjects.Yes some people who like this music may be racist as you call it but a great many are not. if you ever attend a large weekend event in the UK you will see people from Japan,Australia,France, Germany etc as well as all the different parts of the British isles.It may also shock you that although i am working class i am not some sort of mindless moron , i hold an N.C, an H.N.D and a Univesity Degree.Rockabilly music tends to be the music of the rural white southern states and has connections through hillbilly music to the original people who settled in those parts from Scotland and Ireland.There are also connections to the rural blues and R&B of the equally poor black people from similar areas. Both is the music of the ordinary working class and I like it all.Dont blame the music or seek to force a connection we are not all the same as each other.I am However sorry this happened to you and i dont think any man should have behaved in this way especially towards a lady.
best wishes to you from Scotland.
Marty:
I think you’re misinterpreting me. I’m not saying that Rockabilly fans or Rockabilly music is in any way racist. I’m saying that at a Rockabilly show, a Rockabilly guy was racist. There’s a difference. My criticism is of him as an individual, not of the culture.
I enjoy Rockabilly (as I was at the show). I’m sorry for the confusion.