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"Easy" - Some People Just Don't Get It: Racism Is Not Something to "Explain Away"

This guy -- see "V Smoothe" comments several "Easy" posts below -- keeps sending comments basically trying to explain away what happened to me at "Easy." The owner sent an appology, but since I've learned this guy hangs out there, I'll not return to Easy at all. I have neither the time nor the inclination to deal with people like that.

He's part of the problem; he doesn't understand what modern racism is and how many African Americans endure subtle forms of racism every day. Perhaps from him. He claims to know the employee who should have been fired for the way he treated me, and if this is the case, it seems to be as if he's trying to justify his actions without seeing a thing.

Moreover, he's just effectively undone the work the owner of the establishment did in making me feel comfortable about the idea of returning to "Easy" -- forget it.

A 1998 poll conducted by the San Francisco Chronicle seems still to apply here in 2006. It reported that 62 percent of African American residents experienced an example of racism in restaurants and stores, where only 10 percent of whites, 32 percent of Asians and 41 percent of Latinos did. Notice that the percentage increases as the color of the skin darkens. That's not by accident.

A person who only identified herself as an "white woman Adams Point resident" chimed in to explain away the incident -- and she wasn't in the room at all. This is crazy. What sickens me more than anything is that if I tell anyone who's black about this, I get a sympathetic ear, yet the rate of white or non-black Oaklanders who seem to "get it" ranges about 50 percent - a coin flip.

That's nuts. What's lost in all this from the "explainers" is that not one -- not one person - bothered to ask me what happened; they just fire off with their steady stream of "maybes" as in "Maybe he this,..." Geez. As Woody Allen would say "It's like talking to the Wailing Wall!! They just had to rush in with these wild attempts at revisionist history as if to protect one more person-not-of-color from being tagged with a race problem. What's disturbing is how typical this practice is becoming. Perhaps the person needs to change. From my point of view, and the view of the woman standing next to me, the guy had a massive problem as he zeroed in on me -- and I was just wating for my credit card.

How many times do I have to state that?

I think the only way for me to fight this is to go from blogging to vlogging about it. But I'm going to fight it. Oakland should not be permitted to turn in this ugly direction. Not one bit.

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