How Not to Get Shot

by D. L. Hughley

  I know some of you white folks are feeling defensive now. You’re saying “I didn’t do it! It was a long time ago. It’s not my fault.”

  I’m not saying it’s anybody’s fault, but I’m pointing out that in order for us to heal, we can’t just “let it go.” You have to take a look at everything you think is normal, that I know isn’t. Shit that’s just “history” and tradition to you, often means I’m being denigrated. Defending the name “Redskins” when you know how deplorable it is? You want us to let things go, then you let go first. All this stuff you hold dear is to keep niggers in their place. Whether it’s on the plantation or on Martin Luther King Boulevard, it’s always existed. You’ve always wanted us to stay where we belong and stay out of where we don’t.

  You want to keep statues up because of history and tradition. Tradition is important. At your wedding, you say your vows and have a first dance as a couple. Traditionally, you get silver on your twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. That’s nice. And you know I better get a birthday cake and presents on my birthday. I’m a fan of tradition. But maybe not all traditions, maybe not all history is worth honoring.

  Put it this way: If somebody sold your kids, where would you want to put that statue? Where should it go?

  Everybody’s mad at Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players because they’re protesting police brutality by not standing during the National Anthem. Trump wants to make it about respecting our flag and about patriotism. But let’s not forget the history of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “The Star-Spangled Banner” was a poem that Francis Scott Key, an anti-abolitionist, wrote. Only later did it become our anthem—but we only sing the first verse because the third verse isn’t so nice to black people. Go ahead and google it. I’ll wait. Key wrote it during the War of 1812, when the British troops offered freedom to enslaved black Americans if they’d fight on their side, which is just what they did. A group of former slaves fought on the British side, whooped Key’s ass, and he wanted to kill them. In the third verse, he says:

  And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,

  That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion

  A home and a Country should leave us no more?

  Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.

  No refuge could save the hireling and slave

  From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,

  And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave

  O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

  Key was celebrating the death of black Americans. Now why the fuck would black Americans defend their own slavery against the British? Morgan State University political science professor Jason Johnson recently wrote on “The Root of our National Anthem,” “It is one of the most racist, pro-slavery, anti-black songs in the American lexicon. . . . ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is as much a patriotic song as it is a diss track to black people who had the audacity to fight for their freedom.” And why do we criticize Colin Kaepernick for not standing up during this song today? If we’re going to do the National Anthem, let’s do the whole thing. Let’s not whitewash it. We can’t just cut out the shit that don’t work for you. Francis Scott Key would be shocked if he saw niggers playing football. Most white people don’t know that history. My daddy did. He’d never let us stand for it. I’d say, “But everybody’s gonna laugh at me.” But still, he’d say you sit down and you pray but don’t put your hand over your heart and stand up. He knew it. Kaepernick knows it. Just ’cause white people are ignorant of their history don’t mean it’s not there. We’ll let it go, if you will.

  Racist Shit Is Hiding All Over the Place

  But hey—what’s more American than “The Star-Spangled Banner”? Maybe getting a wonderful summer ice cream from the ice cream truck. That’s nice. Oh shit, am I gonna ruin ice cream? No! It’s just that that that ice cream truck song used to be called “Nigger Love a Watermelon Ha! Ha! Ha!” Go ahead and google it. Ice cream parlors played minstrel songs of the day and when they started driving ice cream trucks around, they kept the racist soundtrack. Know your history. Clearly the instrumental version drums up sales better these days, because no little black kids are gonna come running for the truck if it is playing the lyrics:

  Nigger love a watermelon ha ha, ha ha!

  Nigger love a watermelon ha ha, ha ha!

  For here, they’re made with a half a pound of coal

  There’s nothing like a watermelon for a hungry coon

  You know what, make it a vanilla.

  And it goes without saying that songs like “Oh! Susanna,” “Jimmy Crack Corn,” and “Dixie” were all popular blackface minstrel songs. Suffice it to say there’s no good songs from the 1800s for black people.

  And the word “picnic”: this is a word that originally derived from gatherings held to lynch blacks: “Pick a Nigger.” White people would pick a black person to hang and then gather to watch. The origin of this word is in some dispute—even my cowriter, a nice white guy named Doug, brought up that others have traced the origins of “picnic” to a French word “pique-nique” for a gathering where people bring food. Yeah, I wrote a book with a dude named Doug. I can’t believe it, either. That’s not the point. What we’re trying to get to is this: even Google has its limits. Take the word “nigger”: People tell you it’s a river in Niger. Or that it’s just Spanish for “black.” People will justify the word by wrapping it up in all sorts of history and modifications and disputed origins. They’ll say, “Well, it has many derivations.”

  White people have constructed the way we talk about things for so long, if there’s a dispute I say that the tie goes to the runner. “Picnic” might be French, or it might be because people ate some chow while they strung someone up—but tie goes to the runner. In this case, the nigga writing the book.

  Look: white people are always trying to gloss over history. A few months ago NBC News had a report that said that they had found Thomas Jefferson’s mistress Sally Hemings’s apartment at Monticello. “Mistress,” huh? She wasn’t his mistress. She was his slave that he fucked. That wasn’t an apartment; that was dressed-up slave quarters. See? People are always trying to blunt the force of how racist we’ve been in this country. Thomas Jefferson fucked a black woman, impregnated her, and owned her kids. When your daddy won’t free your son, that’s messed up. And this guy’s on our money—two-dollar bills and nickels.

  And everyone got mad about Kaepernick tweeting an image of a police badge and a slave catcher’s badge with the caption “You Can’t Ignore Your History—Always Remember Who They Are.” People can get mad, but he was telling the truth: throughout the South, that’s exactly how police departments started. Police in the South were in charge of maintaining the economic order, especially retaining the “property” of slave owners. After the Civil War, the cops were back in action making sure that blacks were staying in their place. That’s the direct lineage of the police. That star is no accident; it’s not a mistake. It’s a reminder.

  So white people think we inject race into everything, but somehow they don’t seem to realize they’ve built their whole world around racial superiority, from the bottom up. It’s kind of like the air they breathe—they don’t notice. They just forgot. Nobody changed anything, they just forgot where they put their Francis Scott Keys.

  25

  How to Not Play the Race Card

  “Every two to four years, the left, the Democrats, the media, divide Americans by playing the race card every single election.”

  —Sean Hannity, August 24, 2017

  Black folks might not have much power, but they do hold one card in their deck that white people hate—the race card. Whenever race comes up in a conversation, black people get accused of “playing the race card.”

  The race card feels like a wild card to white people that makes any conversation perilous. This magical card makes it an unfair fight: it injects race into a conversation about policing or history or education. “
I was just talking about how being a police officer is hard work,” they cry. “And you had to play the race card!” Unfortunately, the race card never trumps your gun.

  White people don’t want to believe race is a factor in a shooting even when it clearly is. They want to believe that race was the furthest thing from an officer’s mind. At the same time, they’ll defend the officer by saying he was scared because he was in a “rough neighborhood.” Huh. If you’re afraid of the so-called rough neighborhood, you know who lives there. It doesn’t make sense to say that race was the furthest thing from the officer’s mind.

  So that’s what white people think about the race card. We have it and we both know why we have it. We know that race is a factor in many, many things that white people would rather not acknowledge. But they think that black people jump to conclusions, decide things are about race before that’s a reasonable conclusion. If we want to understand white people, let’s drop the race card and practice not playing it.

  Don’t See Color, Just Like White People

  White people say: “I don’t see color.” And that’s true, in a way: they don’t want to see color in lots of things where color is clearly a problem. White people search for almost any other explanation for something. If race wasn’t a factor, what was? Let’s drop the race card and walk in some white shoes for a minute.

  TOPIC: A police officer shot and killed Michael Brown. Why?

  “RACE CARD”: Because he was black and the cop was clearly racist based on his testimony in court, when he used clearly racist imagery. Plus the entire power structure of Ferguson was set up to punish black people for minor offenses, fine them, put them in prison, and subjugate them.

  WHITE PEOPLE: No! Come on, now. The police officer killed Michael Brown because he was a dangerous criminal who tried to grab the officer’s gun. Officer Darren Wilson was scared, not because Michael Brown was black, but because he was big! Michael Brown was six feet four inches tall. Very scary and intimidating to a six-four Wilson.

  TOPIC: Republicans push to restrict voting with voter ID laws and less early voting in heavily Democratic districts. Why?

  “RACE CARD”: Because they are trying to suppress a large black voting base that votes heavily Democratic. Strict voter ID laws are meant to weed out black voters just like old Jim Crow voter laws did. It’s racism, plain and simple, meant to perpetuate white supremacy.

  WHITE PEOPLE: No, no, no. This is about the integrity of the vote! How do we ensure that there is not widespread voter fraud without strict ID laws? Let’s make sure that three to five million sneaky illegals do not come in and secretly vote in multiple districts across the United States in a giant conspiracy like Donald Trump alleged. How do we know that this isn’t true? I mean, besides the fact that Donald Trump said it. Luckily, Trump appointed Kris Kobach to head up an election integrity commission to ensure that this doesn’t happen (again). Kobach was the right man for the job because he led similar efforts in his home state of Kansas, where he uncovered at least six cases of voter fraud. Now, sure most of these were just old white people who fucked up and voted twice, but we’d never know that if we didn’t look into it. Sadly for Kobach, in January 2018, Trump abruptly disbanded the commission; from the New York Times (throwing just a little shade here): “Mr. Trump did not acknowledge the commission’s inability to find evidence of fraud.”

  TOPIC: Confederate monuments, statues, and flags are still up. Why?

  “RACE CARD”: They were put up after the Civil War to make sure blacks knew that white people were still in charge—they’re pure symbols of white supremacy and there’s no fucking way you can even argue that the race card doesn’t belong here. The Civil War was LITERALLY ABOUT FUCKING RACE.

  WHITE PEOPLE: Sure, sure—there’s no denying that the Civil War was about slavery. But it was also about economics and states’ rights!

  “RACE CARD”: Yeah, the states’ rights to fucking own people and the economics of getting free fucking labor.

  WHITE PEOPLE: Okay, but it’s a matter of emphasis. Shouldn’t we honor our history? Many brave American—er, Confederate—soldiers lost their lives for a cause—

  “RACE CARD”: Slavery

  WHITE PEOPLE:—a cause that meant a lot to them. The South is not all about slavery and don’t forget that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson also had slaves. Should we take down statues of them? Where does it stop? And if we don’t know where it will stop, let’s not start!

  The White Race Card

  So you like your race card, huh? Well, what if I told you that now white people get a race card, too? Crazy, huh? But a poll of Trump voters after the election found that almost half of them thought that whites faced “a lot of discrimination.” In reaction to the Republican Party’s discussion of bringing more Hispanics into the party, Mo Brooks, an Alabama representative, put it this way in 2014: “This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party.”

  The white supremacist fringe has taken this a step further, warning that America is facing a “white genocide.” Somehow black people, Jews, and other nefarious liberal forces have conspired to get rid of white people. I guess I missed that meeting. But these crazy ideas get a boost from some prominent supporters, like when President Trump retweeted Twitter user “@WhiteGenocideTM.”

  Old white guys think they’re facing more discrimination than black people. And now Trump’s attorney general is investigating affirmative action admissions policies that they think discriminate against white people.

  Wow—white supremacy, white power, and a white race card. Things are looking up for white people!

  Who Gets to Decide What’s Racist?

  Who here has ever been called “nigger”? Raise your hand.

  Who here has ever been followed by the police just because they were black? Raise your hand.

  Who here has ever been stopped by the police because you were black and with three other black people? Raise your hand.

  Who here has been told, “You’re nice, handsome, or smart for a black person”? Raise your hand.

  Who here has been told, “You’re so different from the rest of them”? Raise your hand.

  Who here has had anybody ever ask, “Can I touch your hair?” Raise your hand.

  So that settles it. If you’re not raising your hand, you don’t get to decide what’s racist. We do.

  26

  End White-on-White Crime!

  It’s an alarming statistic: according to the FBI, 83 percent of white murder victims were killed by white people. White violence against other whites is a national problem that is going unaddressed.

  Recently there was a spike in the murder rates in 2015 and 2016, after a decline of twenty-five years. In our biggest cities, this increase is even starker: the murder rate increased 20 percent in cities with over 1 million people. Needless to say, the biggest increase was in Chicago, where whites are the majority race.

  White leaders have only paid lip service to addressing this violence. White attorney general Jeff Sessions said, “For the sake of all Americans, we must confront and turn back the rising tide of violent crime. And we must do it together.” Together? Where is the white response to this majority-white crime?

  In 2016 alone, there were 2,854 deaths of whites at the hands of other whites. No other race comes close to killing as many whites as whites do. This is 280 more white-on-white murders than the previous year. At what point do white people start to grapple with a sick violence that seems unique to their culture?

  Maybe whites should spend less time trying to reform the police departments who are just trying to stop criminals and spend more time policing their own behavior. I hear lots of white people decrying the use of force in police brutality cases, but I never hear them decrying white-on-white crime.

  Only when white people come to terms with the white-on-white crime problem can we finally tackle the even more pernicious problem of male-on-male crime, which grows year after year.

 
27

  How to Make White Food

  While we’re talking about becoming nonthreatening, here’s some tips on nonthreatening food. Barbecue tastes good, but smells dangerous. White people are known for food that doesn’t offend:

  Potato salad

  Lobster rolls

  Hot dogs

  Mac and cheese

  Chicken pot pie

  Meat loaf

  But if you want to be extra careful, avoid allergens like gluten that might offend. Gluten is like the black people of food—food without it doesn’t have as much flavor, but white people still like it. Not everyone who eats gluten-free food even has a gluten allergy . . . they just feel more comfortable not eating gluten. It’s fine for some people to eat gluten; that’s their choice.

  Gluten-free Blueberry Muffin Recipe

  2 eggs, separate but equal

  2 cups gluten-free flour

  2 teaspoons baking powder

  ½ cup softened butter

  ¾ cup sugar

  ½ cup milk

  2 cups blueberries

  ¼ cup mix of cinnamon and sugar for topping

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease muffin tin like you’re making a donation to the RNC.

  2. Mix the dry ingredients like you’re integrating a high school

  3. Beat butter and sugar together like you are the cops beating Rodney King. Add the eggs. Keep beating.

  4. Add the dry ingredients, mix until thick. Add milk and vanilla extract. Keep mixing.