Versus the Volcano

Empathy is one thing, but there are lots of stories and events out there that ask the audience to go beyond that, to actually take a swipe at recognizing something genuinely alien; to comprehend the incomprehensible. I'm not just talking about wrestling remotely with the mind of a fucking lunatic warped into unfathomable action by a persecution complex and revenge fantasies. It's not really an abdication to fail at understanding premeditated mass murder. Any attempt to do so in the first place is probably less an intellectual exercise than a scramble to corral all the runaway implications so we can pretend that the likelihood of a repeat act is limited by the specific experiences of one person or one localized experience, so we can assure ourselves the next children randomly shot won't be our own and maybe we can get some fucking sleep.

I'm actively trying to avoid engaging the massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston for those reasons, because I know it's ultimately pointless. And painful. For the record, I'm not doing an awesome job of avoiding it so far.

What I was originally going to write about actually comes at some related issues from a slightly sideways approach vector. It's been a long week of some white person saying shit like “Look, I know the majority of y’all are not gonna get this, because the history is still so fresh in our country. But [the issue] isn’t about race. It’s about the culture you identify with. And can’t no one tell me what I can’t say.” This of course refers to the now famous case of Chester Hanks, aka Chet Haze, dipshit son of Tom Hanks (NorCal honky) and Rita Wilson (allegedly Greek, but not even Mediterranean olive-skinned, as I recall). If you get the Hanks kids mixed up, Chet is the one who was never on Dexter.

Chet got in trouble this past week because he, like many people, is under the impression that "free speech" means one might say what one likes at any and all times with no fear of challenge, ostracization or ridicule. He wants to n-bomb folks when he decides it's appropriate because he imagines himself to be a rapper of some degree. The Northwestern University student, the product of a private school upbringing in Pacific Palisades, the demographic breakdown of which is 90% white people and 10% live-in help for white people, naturally peppers his speech with the typical West L.A. patois one often hears in the mean streets north of Santa Monica, e.g. "My parents, they be like telling me to stay off social media period." I'm certain they be like that, Chester. I'm certain they be.

I'd like to do more with this, but the premise is all so obvious and hackneyed, Jamie Kennedy thought it was a good idea for a movie more than 10 years ago.

This all dovetails with the Rachel Dolezal black-like-me story,* but I've had a hard time finding anything deeper there than the adventures of a committed fabulist of the Brian Williams school. And the Chet Haze story, if you're focusing on the cultural appropriation, you're focusing on the wrong part of his statement, missing the crux: "And can't no one tell me what I can't say." It's boring, persistent entitlement of a very sad, very wealthy white kid trying anything to find an identity outside the shadow of an incredibly successful public father.

What Charleston brings into painful black-and-white relief, though, is that you can't co-opt race because it can never be less shallow than an act. It has to be, because you have the luxury of opting out, of growing out of it, or moving on to a different obsession or using up all the goodwill and patience of the nice people at the spray-tan parlor. Your perm will grow out, your streaky chemical skin-dye will fade and you can go back to your life where you add the G's back to the endin' of your words and you won't be beaten up by cops just because they feel like it or shot to death by assholes who think Rhodesia was a good idea.

I guess the most generous thing to say is that white people trying to get inside the black experience is a noble use of one's social energy, but only if it's done honestly and in a way that doesn't obviously benefit the exploiter. Otherwise, this touches on the deepest of our deep, a source of fear and insecurity, rage and murder. Race is a self-inflicted massive injury that should have killed us a long time ago as a country, but we somehow manage to survive by pretending there's nothing we can do about it, ever. It's like we've had our head impaled with a six-foot length of rebar and somehow still survive, walking and talking like nothing's amiss, opting not to see a doctor in favor of trying to hide it under a star-spangled top-hat.

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*Someone has already tried to explain to you how this is all the same as transgender issues, but please remember that those people are fuckers who don't read.