One of the things I am realizing the older I get, is that I know nothing. That is not to say I'm a dumb person. I always had decent grades in school and I have more street smarts than my "printer paper" white skin should allow. What is very quickly becoming more and more apparent, is that we as people are not all created equal like I was taught from an early age. Our life is molded by our experiences. That two people who grew up next door to each other can have extremely opposing views on very serious subjects. Now, that may seem like something I should have known, and I thought I did. But let me explain what I've learned in the past few years.
I need to establish a few things. I grew up in a very wealthy town. The student parking lot looked more like a luxury car dealership than a high school parking lot. I grew up very privileged compared to most people. In my town however, I was one of the poorer families. This meant I grew up in a modest house, not a mansion. My parents had regular cars, not luxury cars. And our vacations were to Disney World, not Europe. While I was growing up I did wish that we had more money. It would have been nice if my parents were able to buy me a car when I got my license, like a lot of my friends parents were. Instead, I drove my mom's minivan to my job at CVS every Friday-Sunday. I remember sweeping the stock room on the evening of July 4th when I knew most of my friends were out enjoying a BBQ. When I scraped together $2,000 my dad took me to a used car lot. It was one of the ones where someone pulled up to an empty grass lot one day, used a trailer as an office and parked a bunch of shit boxes in the grass. The best car I could afford was a 1997 Chevy Cavalier, Rally Sport Edition. The paint was peeling off the hood, the doors would freeze shut (or open) if it got too cold, and the horn didn't work. Believe it or not, I still love that car. I know it inside out. I wish I still had it. I love it because it reminds me of how hard I need to work.
I told you that because I wanted to tweet something last night. That might not make sense but it will. For those of you who don't care about the Oscar's, you may not know but Sean Penn made a joke as he awarded Alejandro González Iñárritu his Oscar for Best Picture. The joke was about Iñárritu getting a green card. If Kim Kardashian thought her picture broke the Internet, this joke was an atomic bomb dropped on social media. People were outraged. "How dare he?" "He's a racist!" You can imagine all of the tweets and Facebook posts. In fairness, I didn't check the response on Myspace. I was balls deep into an Anarchy Edibles Rice Crispy treat so I fell asleep way before this happened but I woke up a couple hours after. While checking Twitter I noticed something. A large portion of the offended people were white, and most of the responses I saw from Hispanic people either thought it was funny or didn't seem to care. I wanted to tweet something to the effect of: "Sure seems to be a lot of offended white people. Maybe Hispanic people aren't upset because they are too busy working multiple jobs to support their families to care." I decided not to tweet it. I did that because I wasn't in the mood to deal with the inevitable replies that thought my tweet was racist, the joke was racist, or any other negative response you can think of. This really pissed me off. More at myself than at any potential negative tweeter. If I'm going to be, as Matt Fulchiron called me, a "radio personality" I can't worry about the response to what I say. Within reason, I shouldn't have a filter. I shouldn't worry about what Joey thinks, what my family thinks, or what listeners think. This is something I need to work on, and I don't think I'm alone.
A lot of the white people who were so offended by the joke are trying to make up for their white privilege. Why else would they be so upset by a joke about a Hispanic person getting a green card? Most of them probably don't care. As a white person I can say the idea of white privilege is completely new to me. Of course I've heard the term before, and of course I know it is easier going through life as a white person. But before I started dating Paula, who is Mexican, the idea never played any role in my life. Over the past year and a half Paula and I have talked about it a lot. She never gets mad at me about it, she doesn't hate white people, and she only calls me white devil in private. What we talk about is her personal experience and some of the times she has felt the effects of white privilege. I am constantly blown away. My race plays no role in my daily life. I never thought about it while I was applying for college or jobs. I have never had to justify my life choices to anyone who think I am selling out. This is something that, a lot of minorities have to deal with. I am only two years older than Paula. In a world where everyone is created equal we would have a very similar story. But if she lived in the house that I grew up in, took the vacations I took, or had the things I had, she would not have consider herself poor. She grew up 10 miles from Beverly Hills, a town not too far off from my hometown. Instead of BMW's she took the bus. Instead of a modest house, she grew up in a small apartment that had no A/C. I've made my point.
What annoyed me so much about the thought of white people tweeting at me that I'm racist or I don't know what I'm talking about because of white privilege is that they don't know what that means. I still don't really know what it means. I probably never will. I do know, that even if Sean Penn is racist. Even if Alejandro González Iñárritu got upset at the joke. I would bet that Iñárritu is more upset that the story's are about a joke, rather than the film he made. I didn't see "Birdman," I've actually heard its not that great of a movie. But would the same people who are mad at Sean Penn be mad at him if he made a Jewish joke? Would they be mad if another Hispanic person made the same joke Penn made? I would bet they wouldn't be. I bet Iñárritu wouldn't give a fuck about a chubby Jewish guy's tweet. And if you do, you're part of the problem, not the solution.
