BUSTED! Stephen Colbert Violates the Suburban Strip Mall Diversity Code

(+) BUSTED! Stephen Colbert Violates the Suburban Strip-Mall Diversity Code
May 12, 2006 at 11:07:22 America/Los_Angeles


(This isn’t exactly a metadiary, but was inspired in part by the recent rash of them both here and at the frat house. It’s not really about Stephen Colbert, either.;-) However, it does address an issue I see playing a significant role in almost every flame war, every banning controversy and every trifling or not so trifling dispute that erupts in our beloved (community) blogosphere. Furthermore, the diary has gotten totally out of control lengthwise. Sorry. As always, food for thought. Hats off to those who get through it, to those who don’t: you are forgiven and entirely justified in checking out long before the lede.)

Let’s just start with what should be obvious: people's assessments of what is "polite," "appropriate," "provocative" -- whatever--are NEVER going to be the same. And yet, this is ultimately the underlying theme I see in just about every blogwar I’ve ever witnessed. We are a country of many cultures, and not all cultures within this society have the same standard: this is what diversity is about. Difference. And being able to live with that difference without getting one’s undies twisted twenty times over at the slightest transgression of the “missed manners” mark.

Every come to Metajesus meeting in the blogosphere centers on the issue of "community standards", and the going line is always, "sure, we welcome you to our community, but you must accept our "community standards."

I challenge that prerequisite to acceptance by a community. Think about what it says: yeah, sure, we’d like to hear what you have to say, but you must package it in terms that we deem acceptable—especially if you seek to address this community with some grievance, some issue, some cause that we do not consider “our own.” It’s about like inviting someone who speaks only French and saying, “Sure, we’d like to hear what you have to say about freedom fries, and how these have had a detrimental effect on you and your community, but, by golly, don’t expect us to learn French—you come on back when you have that English polished up a bit, ya hear?” In an American context, it’s like asking the “culturally othered” to coat their every word in a “pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top”-discourse—lest one be dismissed as “bitter,” "drunk"--or worse.

My hackles go up whenever these blogs trumpet the self-congratulatory “strength in diversity” tune because, while there may be diversity of party-affiliation, diversity of economic status, (a smidgeon of) racial and ethnic diversity, (a bigger smidgeon of) gender diversity, there is no REAL diversity of community standards allowed to coexist side by side. It is perhaps the difference between a wild prairie and a manicured suburban lawn. The manicured suburban lawn is the “garden standard” for dominant culture, where even standard garden variety dandelions are disruptive—and must be weeded out, eradicated. And the thistle, the relentless thorn-in-the-side-sticking weed with its roots planted firmly the ground over there, right along the property line of the front-yard forty: hell, fumigate the fuck out of it! Hail Herbicide!

I call it strip-mall diversity: you may buy a burger at McDonalds, Wendy’s, BurgerKing or White Castle, what you may not do is walk into one of those establishments and scream at the top of your lungs: YOU MOTHERFUCKING BEEFEATERS ARE DESTROYING THE PLANET WITH YOUR GLUTTONY AND GREED!!!!!

That would be rude. You would be considered crazy, delusional—you may even be at risk of arrest. No one will bother to ask whether what you said was true, or whether there might have been some mitigating circumstance to justify your violation of the suburban strip-mall diversity code. You’ll be off to the batshitloony bin, no questions asked. This standard prevents us from engaging in outrageous acts of courage and kindness. Like this one.

But let’s say an Argentine immigrant is sitting there (either in the establishment as a customer or just outside the door holding a paper cup with some chump change in it, basking in the unreflected glory of having dared to dream the American dream and having a nightmare instead). He can barely contain himself. Silently, he is cheering on the guy who just walked into the Burger King and screamed. “Bout time somebody has the fucking guts to tell it like it is!” he is thinking to himself. And no, he doesn’t think it was rude. It was honest. It was, from his perspective absolutely justified and absolutely appropriate. It may have even been the only appropriate response--from his perspective.

This is a very big problem in America, and it is partly a geographic one: unlike most other places in the world, here you can get in a car and drive 20 hours without having to switch languages, without having to switch currency, without having to “do in Rome as the Romans do.” You can stop at a Starbucks or any number of other retail establishments at the beginning of your journey in New York, and when you get to San Francisco, lo and behold, you can stop at the very same store, speaking the very same language and pay with the very same currency at the very same strip mall. That fact alone sets America’s relationship to “diversity” apart from just about everyone else’s. And those geographic areas that do not conform to the strip mall standard—Indian reservations, the “Hood”, Chinatowns and Latin quarters, etc.—are cordoned off into separate and outrageously unequal enclaves, more often than not, into areas, to cite Russell Means, “Where White Men Fear to Tread.” So even where true diversity of culture does exist in this country—that is, those communities whose community standards depart substantially from the suburban strip-mall standard--are isolated from the rest, allowing outsiders to those communities to spend entire lifetimes without ever so much as coming in contact with members of those communities in their communities—and thus to remain utterly oblivious to the standards that prevail in those enclaves. Whatever encounters the strip-mall suburbanites have with “those people” take place on the proverbial “other side of the tracks,”—be it in corporate board rooms, factory assembly lines, the classroom, public bathrooms, or wherever. Contact between people who live where white men fear to tread and where the suburban strip-mall standard prevails will occur under the terms of the strip-mall standard. You may not SCREAM the truth to power. You may only “speak” it, preferably in a squeaky, high-pitched ‘have-a-nice-day’ voice. Barring that, a whisper. DO NOT SHOUT! no matter how much it makes you wanna holler!

Here is a real-life example of what I mean:

Inner city school. Student population 100% economically disadvantaged--75-80% African American; teacher/staff population 90% middle-to-upper-middle class suburban American.

A group of 6th graders, 6 Black, one white, are sitting around watching some Boyz from the Hood-type video during their scheduled “free time.” In retrospect I know what I hadn’t known before: only one of those kids had the feeling he was “getting away with something.” According to the standards of their community, the remaining 6 were “behaving.” Very well, actually. Only the white kid was engaging in behavior that was apparently unacceptable to his community standards (i.e., listening to foul language!).

The white kid’s mother enters the room. Sees what’s going on. Is shocked. Shocked, I tell you. Goes to the VCR and yanks the video from the machine. Her action is entirely acceptable according to the standards set by her community, her worldview—indeed, her world, i.e., the dominant culture. But, from the perspective of the six remaining students, she has just engaged in totally unacceptable behavior. First of all, the tape in question was the private property of one of the black students, and, for students like this who have very little by way of “property,” every little bit is more or less sacred. In their eyes, she just “stole” their personal property—and for what?—they weren’t doing anything wrong. If they had been, they would have at least expected her—as an adult—to respond with some form of “disciplinary” action. But in this case, it wasn’t like they had to sneak that video out of the house in the morning: it may have even been a gift from a parent, or an uncle. She was “violating” them, and only a fool would believe that the sense of violation was not aggravated by the fact that she was white.

What ensued was something which, from my perspective and from the perspective of most adults in my community, was entirely justified (though not necessarily recommended or condoned because unlike the children, we know that there are some things these other communities “just aint never gonna get,” so it is sometimes indeed best to stick your asscheeks together, bite your tongue, and silently recite to yourself ten “Hail Missus and Massahs!”): one of these kids, forgetting the rules for survival in this environment, says: “what the fuck you doing bitch?” The rest of the kids joined in, offering similarly inappropriate commentary.

OK. There it is. Yep. Clearly, they crossed the line. And even in my community, no one would question the notion that they did. Bad news. Bad behavior. Totally inappropriate. Smack down time. And yet, where did this problem actually start? What caused this kid to cross the line: to me it is clear—the white kid’s mom who came in that room, bundled up in the iron-clad standards of her world and worldview, seriously violated the community standards of the majority of people there. She had no business so much as touching that tape. If anything, she should have yanked her kid out of the room and scolded him (“What’d I tell you, son, I don’t want you watching that kind of stuff.”). It is her right and responsibility to determine what she considers acceptable for her child. To impose that same standard on everyone else is nothing if not just plain rude. Her behavior was driven by a complete and total lack of awareness for the fact that she was in the minority in that environment and had no business imposing her community standards on those kids. But, of course, in the monochrome world of America, “white makes right.” And people still have to keep asking themselves why we can’t all just “get along.”

Needless to say, the kids were in deep shit. By the time I got involved, they were fuming.
“Man, Miss Lilian, it ain’t fair. It ain’t fucking fair. We wasn’t doin nothin wrong. We was just sittin’ there watching the movie, that bitch had no right to come in and steal that tape. Who the fuck she think she is. She can suck my dick!”

Ah, from the mouths of babes! That is a verbatim recount of what I encountered when I was called in to mediate in this dispute. Now, I suppose I was remiss in not writing the kid up for an additional two “fucks”, one “bitch” and the “she can suck my dick” which was probably worth TWO write-ups. But my motto has always been, “don’t sweat the small stuff” (unless the shit sticks tenaciously in your craw that even your dentist can't get it out!).

I looked at the kid. He’s the one the school had placed in “remedial” classes—until I started working with him, and realized the kid was not stupid, he was bored. And one reason he was bored was that he suffered from what I have since come to call “hyperintelligence.” Clearly, the kid was smarter than half the staff that was trying to teach him. About three weeks prior to this incident, I’d convinced the principal to give it a shot by placing him in the “gifted and talented” program. Course, after two years of being labeled “stupid” and going to the “dumbass class,” the kid was going to need more than a couple of weeks to recover from the indignation, demoralization and utter injustice of that situation. And this most recent incident was, to him, like adding insult to injury.

So instead of writing him up or otherwise reprimanding him for the two “fucks,” one “bitch” and the “she can suck my dick,” I just looked at him and said: “DeAndre, I don’t think it’s big enough for that.” Four of the six kids were girls—and my man DeAndre was definitely a Lady’s man: when my comment elicited giggles from the girls, DeAndre squirmed in his seat, and the red on his face could have outshined a rocket’s red glare!

Funny. In the remaining two years I spent working with that kid, I never heard another foul word from his mouth. Not one. Sad thing is, had anyone with the “community standards” of the dominate culture been standing at my back with the Puritan morality whip, I’d have been the one getting the write-up—these days, more likely a pink slip, if not a lawsuit!

So now I think I figured it out. I know what Stephen Colbert did wrong. Uh, rather, did right. He violated the suburban strip-mall diversity code. And that’s why I like him. Because actually, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my more or less lifelong role as an “embedded” non-Black member of Black communities, it is this: Black people know better than anyone how to tell someone to FUCK OFF without that person so much as noticing. This is the lesson of 500 years of having to stick your asscheeks together and walk on eggs just to get a seat at the table.

I don’t know where Colbert learned that lesson. All I know is that mofo’s got it down pat. And clearly, that’s what’s got his detractors’ undies bunched up.

(...and to put the moral of the story back into Metamode, my suggestion for a more peaceful coexistence and more “prairie style” sense of community would be, before you take offense, before you start throwing the “sanctimonious holier-than-thou fuckwads” and troll rates around, ask yourself some questions:

Would a German think this is rude?
Would this be considered “rude” in Dakar/Baghdad/Johannesburg?
Would a homeless person living on the street in a 99% African American community consider this statement “rude”? If so, would they applaud this anyway (perhaps because of its rudeness?), or would they be offended that the person who said it so much as dared to say this in this way?
Would this statement/behavior be considered “rude” universally: that is, in every time, place, situation, language, country, CONTINENT?
Would the black woman lawyer in the office next door—regardless of whether she’d have written something like this herself—might get a kick out of this (even if she might not admit it)?
Might there be someone, anyone, out there who—like the Argentine guy sitting outside the BurgerKing—might actually applaud this?
Is there some mitigating or aggravating circumstance that might merit this violation of our community standards (case in point: Ben Marble of Gofuckyourself Mr Cheney fame), or do we have to get the herbicide out and eradicate that disruptive little dandelion or that annoying thistle over there?

Those questions might help us put the suburban strip-mall diversity code behind us).