Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Clueless, with UPDATE
What is it with some of these old people? I’m talking about the 80-and-above crowd, the ones who think their prejudices are nothing more than cute eccentricities. Like my grandmother, who once told me, “I hate the Chinks, ever since they bombed Pearl Harbor.”
Or that old geez back in San Antonio — have I told you this story? — who regaled me and my Chinese resident with a ni**er joke. Our gaped-mouth expressions didn’t slow him down; damn it, he was ridin’ this one all the way to the punchline. Yee-haw!
Two patients in as many weeks have dropped the J-bomb on me. Not Jew, although that happens with fair regularity, too. Jap. One guy, dripping with pride, “shared” that he had told off his “Jap doctor”:
I told him, “I took care of you people in the War and I have no use for you now.” He just said, “We’re through here. ‘Bye.”
And another guy “shared” that his request for benefits had been denied “by a Jap.”
“I guess since I killed so many of ’em in the War, they’re getting back at me now.”
Uh-huh. Really.
I told him (unfortunately, sans hyperlink) that many Japanese-Americans had served their country bravely during the war. His response? “Yeah, well.”
When these bigots show me their colors, do I shoo them from the office? No. Do I deny them any of the benefits of my service? No. That would be unprofessional.
But will I go the extra mile for them? No effing way. I do what the doctor-patient relationship requires me to do and no more.
/rant.
In other news: Watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann tomorrow night. In his Special Comment, Keith is gonna call for the resignations of Bush and Cheney! His Special Comments are always worth watching again and again. Afterwards, I’ll try to find it on YouTube ASAP and post the link.
UPDATE!
Here it is: Olbermann’s ultimate rant, linked at Crooks and Liars.
D.
OMG Doug! I’ve had the same type of experience. Just last weekend my husband and I were helping out at the USO booth and one of the older members (70-80 years old) was telling us a story about a Filipino bank manager that recently made him angry. He commented about how he used to have to deal with them (Filipino’s) when he was in WWII and they were all crooked. He compared this bank manager with them, saying they were all the same. We were both surprised by his comment. The only thing I could think to say was that there are bad people in every race. My dad is the same way. He doesn’t give a rat’s booty what anyone else thinks, he says what he wants whether it’s PC or not. Racisim is alive and well it seems.
I hope it’s confined to the older generation so that when we’re that age, we won’t have to hear that bullshit any more. But I suspect it’s not that simple.
It was everywhere. Everybody thought like that a hundred years ago. Now we think of people like that as fossils… and they are. They’re they ossified remains of a culture.
We shouldn’t forget that in both the US and Canada, we shipped people off to concentration camps (that is what they were) because of their ancestry. Not just immigrants, but people of Japanese ancestry who were born here, who were American and Canadian citizens.
Cultural change takes a long time to cycle through. Consider the internment of the Japanese: I don’t believe that that could happen today. We are making progress. Things are a hell of a lot better than the were a hundred years ago.
It can’t happen again, eh? Well, maybe not . . . unless your skin is brown.
Halliburton Secures Homeland Security Contracts for Vast New Detention Camps
Scary stuff.
Things are better than they were 100 years ago – but I’m not sure that it would take that large of a shock to our system to push us over the precipice… Look what’s happened already.
OTOH, I’m pretty confident that some things won’t revert quite as readily. I remember a Thanksgiving dinner at my parents’ house some 15 years or so ago during which my grandmother caught sight of a dish of mixed nuts on the sideboard and blurted out, “Oh! Ni**er toes!”
She was instantly embarrassed, and sheepishly explained that that’s what they used to call Brazil nuts when she was growing up.
So while there probably are still people here in the US under the age of 80 or 90 who call Brazil nuts ‘ni**er toes’ – and without a twinge of guilt or embarrassment at that – I feel pretty safe in saying that their numbers get smaller and smaller every year. That kind of casual racism seems to get harder and harder to find, despite the best efforts of some.
*sigh* I remember as a teenager being horribly appalled by my grandfather bragging about the whites-only bars when he moved to Alabama–he thought it was clever that they got around anti-segregation laws by calling them private clubs.
In my more cynical moods, I think the reason I don’t hear younger people saying things like this isn’t that they’re not racist–it’s just that they still care what other people think.
I think there’s hope, but for the 80-90 crowd, it’s harder to get through their old brains.
Growing up, both of my parents [they’re both around 60] regularly used the n-word and various other ‘derogatory ethnic terms.’ Racism in small-town Missouri [where I grew up] is still alive and well, so it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that crap out of people my own age, too.
But, I’ve been able to kind of ‘educate’ my parents on their choice of words, and I’ve also helped them realize that it’s unfair to generalize an entire race by one example.
If guy’s an asshole, it’s because he’s a jerk of a person, not because of the color of his skin.
So my dad [who I never thought would stop using certain words] at least doesn’t say it around me, and I think he actually understands where I’m coming from, which is kinda more than I hoped for when I started talking to him about racism, you know?
Incidentally, I think I was an adult [or at least a teenager] before I found out the real name for Brazil nuts. How pathetic is that?
Some things boggle the mind, eh?