We joke on here about how racist and homophobic and whatnot we are all the time, as a kind of a “We’re so EDGY and COOL, the MAN can’t hold us down!” poser fag thing here and bringing the “realness” unfiltered…but sometimes I’m reminded of how racist I (in particular) really am.

I took my car in for a regular tune-up like two months ago, dropping the car off at the dealer before work in the morning and taking a bus the rest of the way to the subway station. After work, I crowd into a bus at Eglinton to go pick up my car, and I’m sitting against the window, next to a black guy – about my age, polite guy from what I could tell, well groomed, casually dressed. You know, white tee, baggy jeans…by his dress, I’d say he was thugging out…perhaps like, 30%. Not more so than any random Lids employee. So whatever, he’s just another human being to me, because I’m the Helen Keller of skin colour, I watch Roots everyday, and I’m certainly not scared that he’s some sort of gangbanger, looking to shiv me for crack money. No problem!

My stop comes, and I gotta move past him to get out. So I’m like “‘cuse me man” (the “man” is for added blackness, which helps me better communicate with him because he is black, and I didn’t think it was quite necessary to use “dawg” instead yet) and he goes “no problem, man”, gets up, lets me past, I go “‘preciate it, man” (always use contractions and omit the first syllable whenever possible when talking to black people to show that you aren’t a square) and I’m off the bus. Five minutes later I’m in my car, twenty more minutes I’m at home, and two months later I’m sitting here now.

A complete non-event.

Except…when I woke up this morning, I found myself randomly thinking back about that bus trip, wondering if I did everything correctly, whether I violated any social protocol or anything like that. I’m wondering whether I said “‘preciate it, man” loud enough, or if I mumbled it, and he didn’t hear me. And if he would have been upset if he didn’t hear me tell him I appreciated him letting me past to get off the bus at my stop.

Why? Because I’m worried that I have now bad standing in his gang – the street gang that every black person in the world intrinsically belongs to, the international black gang they automatically join upon birth by default, genetic birthright. Like I’ve somehow managed to insult the entire global morphogenetic field of black people by not properly expressing my gratitude for this guy shuffling half a foot over so that I could get off a bus. And that I’ll pay for it eventually down the line…either by being a victim of a drive-by or the subject of a scathing diss track or something.

I think these things; these are real thoughts that have gone through my head and crossed my mind. I mean, to be fair, I’d just woken up, I’m groggy, I don’t know what sort of boot-up process my brain does when I start up in the morning. I have all sorts of random crap running through my brain in the first ten minutes of consciousness everyday, like what if today is the Zombie Apocalypse, if the cashier at A&W gave me the correct change when I ate there last week, if putting a Sailor Moon sticker on my new softball bat would be cool…all sorts of things, nonsense I have no control over.

But I know, deep down in my heart of hearts…that I really am worried that I violated some pseudo-rule of social protocol in my three line exchange to this random black guy that happened TWO MONTHS AGO, and that I am really now targeted for retribution by black people everywhere. I think I’m being gang stalked by black people everywhere, and I have no idea whether I’m a batshit insane paranoid psycho now or not.

That might be a little bit racist.

So this is obviously a small personality trait I should look into correcting, but you know how it is – nobody’s perfect. We all have irrational tics and likes and dislikes about everything. He’s scared of heights, you like anchovies on your pizza, I think every black person in the world is a criminal out to get me. I mean, Jess hates olives. Could I hold that against her any more than she could hold my irrational fear and prejudice against black people against me? Of course not.

But in an act of good faith, to show how much my goal of bettering myself as a human being means to me…I pledge to never again eat at McDonald’s, because of their racist advertising campaigns.

(Here’s an actual ad.)

“Have you guys ever see Birth Of A Nation? That is…oh! I watched it.”
“Is that, uh…Bruce Willis…and…”
“Uh, Naomi Watts.”
“It that…it?”
“I don’t even – I don’t even think that’s…a movie.”