Imagine it readers. Someone saying aloud, no hint of humor, “I respect white people!” Imagine that bullshit.
Now, turn that around and imagine you’re hearing what you’ve heard a thousand times from the lips of a white person speaking about this or that minority group. Or women. [Parenthetically, I think males, especially white males, are the minority in the US gender-wise. I haven’t checked the statistics, but I recall somewhere women live longer than men because they don’t have the stresses, wars to fight, and don’t have to do the hard, dangerous work all us men do just for the fun of it.]
Anyway, think of it. Suppose you were a self-respecting US citizen of color, and some white person said to you, “Hey man, I respect blacks.” Do you suppose he’ll just figuratively roll his eyes back into his head and grunt? Or will he say, “Just what the hell are you talking about you freaking lying hypocrite? You believing your own bullshit again?” Because it ain’t like he’s been living on the moon. He’s living in the world where the prisons are full of black males, where black males are gang banging, selling black women off to prostitution, and strutting around being proud of it.
How the hell could anyone except some stupid white person insult, dehumanize decent black people who aren’t doing those things by saying he/she ‘respects’ generic, stereotyped, cardboard cutout blacks?
Same with Hispanics. The only Hispanics a person could claim to respect and mean it across the board are the ones illegally crossing the US/Mexico Border to work their asses off for peanuts doing anything lazy assed US citizens don’t want to do. But just saying, “I respect Hispanics,” is to stereotype them in a way any fool knows is a blasted lie because it simply isn’t possible in the real Universe.
It’s a similar with Native Americans. That’s because the insult is compounded, squared and cubed. Probably 90% of people guilty of even thinking such assinine thoughts have never even spoken to anything remotely akin to whatever the hell they think a Native American is.
There ain’t any such thing, is what I’m saying. No such thing. No such thing. There are Lakota, Zuni, Navajo, Mojave, Mescalero. As different from one another as a NYC black trumpet-player living in Greenwich Village is from a bayou Coonass in Louisiana.
About the only thing descendants of aboriginal tribesmen in North America have in common is white people and Mexicans and blacks. Every Rez is full of people who know how stupid white people, Mexicans and blacks are. The Rez is full of stupid people too, but mostly they don’t know it. But they could be a lot stupider than they are and still recognize how stupid white people, Mexicans and black people are.
And they’re damned well sick of being dehumanized by being respected by them.
Remember where you heard it first.
Old Jules
So Far From Heaven 