What About the 'R-Word'?

Back before the show “Rescue Me” went completely off the rails, there was a great episode where Denis Leary and the boys in his firehouse were ordered to go to sensitivity training. The training session went awry when the racially-mixed fireman started keeping score on which ethnic group had the most offensive nicknames. They were talking volume and level of offense taken at the utterance of such epithets.

Me and my racially group of friends had these same kind of conversations, except that we weren’t racially mixed, we were a bunch of young dumb white guys. But I had black friends confirm our findings: there’s not really a racial epithet you can sling a white person’s way that carries the venom that a word used over-and-over-again by rappers carries for African-Americans. But my thinking has evolved.

There is a word you can call a white person that carries with it all sorts of horrible implications, and that word my friends is RACIST.

The R-word.

As always, I must take you back. To 1996. I was a newlywed working two jobs, and I became pretty good friends with one of my African-American co-workers at job number one. We were both fans of hip hop music, and used to swap mixed tapes. He turned me on to Jay-Z, and I passionately argued that the Beastie Boys were not to be trifled with. One day, we got into a discussion about the Source Magazine, and it’s response to the Tommy Hilfiger rumor. You remember, Hilfiger supposedly said that he didn’t like black people wearing his clothes. Hilfiger of course denied the veracity of the supposed quote, and it’s been debunked about a million times, but at the time, Source was shall we say, skeptical. For their writer, the surfacing of this rumor only confirmed what they had secretly suspected for a long time: Tommy was an R-word.

I of course found this absurd. I don’t know Tommy, but I was pretty sure that the color he cared about was green, as in Lorne. I mean, as in money.

But then my friend dropped the bombshell on me, explaining that he too suspected every white person he met was probably a racist. To his credit, he admitted that when I first started, he suspected that I was an R-word.

While I remained friends with him, I couldn’t help but feel hurt. I’d never been called a racist before – and I guess I still hadn’t, but the mere fact that someone hadn’t ruled it out got to me. So, I organized a protest, made plans to shoot a documentary about it, and contacted the best-dressed attorney I could find… Seriously, what I did was I brought it up to him later.

In discussing it with my buddy, I explained that, in essence, upon meeting me, he found me no different than Sheriff Ray Stuckey in “Mississippi Burning.” For all he knew, I was like Sheriff Ray Stuckey, he said. But when I met him, I thought, hey, there’s a black dude. I’m not so high and mighty as to say I don’t notice race – but when I saw him I certainly didn’t think, oh my Lord, it’s O-Dog from “Menace II Society!”

He saw my point, and I never did think that he was a bad guy for thinking the way he did. I don’t know everything about him, maybe he’s run into more than his fair share of racist rednecks, which I’m not claiming are in short supply. On the contrary, one of them is too many, which is why the Cannon’s stopped having family reunions. I kid (if my cousin’s husband is reading this, it’s a joke, dude. You know why we stopped having family reunions, right? Right?).

But had the guy not profiled me? Had he not made a judgment about me, based on his dealing with other honkeys (see, doesn’t even sting) in the workplace and elsewhere? While it definitely hurt my feelings, and it’s wrong, it wasn’t a game-changer for us. My quitting without notice and asking him to sneak my check off the bosses desk, well, that’s another story.

The R-word. I guess maybe there was a time when it wasn’t so powerful. But I was raised and taught that black people and white people are equal. So sometimes I wonder if guys like Sharpton and Jesse, you know, guys who write BLACK twice on a form, once for “race” and again for “occupation,” realize how brutal an insult the term can be. And on my more cynical days I think, yeah, they realize it.