I was reading a blogpost by the great and wonderful and wise Ta'Nehisi Coates over at Atlantic and in the course of writing about something else he had this great line about how all his black friends have loads of white friends and all his white friends have one black friend. Outside of just being kind of witty, I thought how true it was.
Think about when you're watching some mainstream sitcom on the TV, it's not at all unusual to have one black guy hanging out with a bunch of white people, but how often is it the opposite? I mean, it struck me watching Pysch last night (shut up, I love that show and both those boys are super cute), that Shawn has been the lone white guy with Gus's friends and family on a few occasions. And it's notable, I think, that this struck me as something unusual.
So, I'm a white lady and can only extrapolate, but I imagine it can be a total drag to be the one black friend. I mean, how often do you get called upon to arbitrate: "racism sucks, but I'm cool, right?" One of the many cool things about having Barack Obama as our president, is that he flat out refuses to be that guy. You say to him "racism is everywhere! but I'm cool right?" And he says "Um, yeah, so, how 'bout them Sox?" In other words, "I am not Morgan Freeman in any of those movies. Work it out yourself."
So, in the interest of working it out let's take a look at a couple of virals and you can tell me if I'm right or if I'm cuckoo for cocoa puffs or not. Actually, these things may not be mutually exclusive, but still.
Viral One:
As soon as I'm off the phone with a great deal of my customers I'm prone to turning to a colleague, cussing a blue streak and gesticulating wildly. But I doubt a youtube of me doing that would ever go viral.
How about if we switch it up and look at this:
Now, let's swap out the race there and does this still seem like the a hilarious, joyful way to kick off a wedding? Or would it then be, you know, "ghetto?"
In a phrase, I'm not saying, I'm just sayin...
