Yeah. We were having one of our rare phone conversations (he’s 5 years younger than me at 45, married with a kid for the last 12 years, got ulcers and a truck and a gruntwork job, and hasn’t been out of West Virginia very much), just talking lightweight rebop about this and that, dogs and music and baseball and food, and commiserating about the price of pot and encroaching age, when somehow he brought it up, referring to himself *en passant *as “a card carrying member of the Aryan Nation–but I ain’t a goddamn skinhead!”
He’s always had a wide streak of the redneck in him, my kid brother (let’s call him Don for the purposes of this story); he’s also , as do I, got a somewhat warped and shock-happy sense of humor. So I figured he was trying to yank my chain and just shined that on at first --saying “Aw bullshit you are, Donny-dude. Aryan my pasty-white gay ass. Yeah it’s too bad you got the National Alliance and Zendick Farm settin up shop a county over from you, ain’t it? ‘N’ you talk about us being freaks *out here?*Hell’s ole meatax, Donny-boy, I’d be embarrassed to admit I lived back there if I was you, my man!”
He didn’t let me let it go at that, though. Started in about how *he *was a racist who admits it up front but we had the Crips and Bloods and M13 out here in California (I live in SF) and they hated white people’s very guts because of their color, and wasn’t that racist too? I tried to straighten him out on that, but then he asks me if, say he was to come out to visit me and go running around in Chinatown, wouldn’t they kick his ass for being a white guy?
“In Chinatown?” I squawked “You got to be kidding, man.”
“Well [insert DLuxN8r-13’s given name here] I don’t know whether it’s Frisco you live in now, or Oakland, but ain’t there these ghetto ass neighborhoods with M13s and Crips and shit where I’d get my ass killed if anyone saw me there, because I’m white? And ain’t that racism?”
“THere ain’t nobody out here gonna kill you because yer white, Don! Rob you, yeah, that can happen, but it ain’t racial shit.”
He kept on arguing variations on the being-attacked-for-being-Caucasian motif. After a moment I just yelled into the handset “Okay, okay dude, point fuckin’ taken. Look, Don, I really do not want to be arguing racial politics and shit with you, okay? You know it’s not something I’m gonna be chill about, and I ain’t gonna think the way you do ever, and we’ll both just fucking get pissed off…”
"Well, as long as you see m’point, DLux…"I sighed a deep and dirty sigh, and brought the conversation to a merciful halt. Say hi to the wife ‘n’ kid for me, and like that. And I hung up.
This has definitely upset me a tidj–even though we have 3000 miles and two decades separating us, and even though it’s not a total shock to hear him talking such ignorant bullshit, still…my kid brother, a White Power supremacist. Day-amn. You sure can get shook up by talking to the kinfolks sometimes.
