Where are the black friends?

[thesummerqueen]

Parse that shit, lol.

This made me laugh pretty hard. Now I have asthma problems.

My dad is like this - pretty fuckin' racist (and classist, for all his redneck Romanian peasant roots) and yet all throughout most of my parents' marriage, and a good portion of his Army career, one of the two friends he stuck with was black. They got shipped overseas together, lived there together, the two of them would take all the kids fishing together, etc. I remember them sitting on the dock kvetching about wives 'coddling' us kids (by coddling, I now know meant 'keeping us alive' vs their 'shit yeah, go try that' attitudes, lol).

The boys on the HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast talked about this a lot too, considering good ol' HP's racist and classist leanings. The funny thing about racists is that they're always shitty to a point, and then they "know" someone who's the sole exception. Xenophobia seems to be really just a fear of "the other" and it doesn't always matter what the race of the other person is - and 60 years ago white people were being shitty to other whites as well. But the minute they get to know that one black guy, or that one gay guy, or whatever... Well, then THAT one dude isn't so bad. It's just all the rest, who they aren't personally acquainted with. The Podcast guys thought it was hysterical to read all the terrible things HP wrote, yet see the contradictions as he included an elderly black couple he was friends with into one of his novellas in a kindly fashion, or the fact that he married an Eastern European Jew (I mean, can you blame him...we're awesome), or the fact that his best friend Sam Loveman was gay, etc.

Hell, that's why people will often say, upon finding out that someone is an atheist, "oh but you seem so nice!" Damn stereotypes.