I think the more taboo word, or conversation if you will, would be race. We don't like to talk about it, we don't like to analyze it, and we sure as shit don't like to recognize it's importance on the normal person's decision making process. It's why people just wanted the recent democratic primaries to just be over, so we can all stop pretending that race didn't play the biggest part in that decision.
The reason I am bringing this up is because of two separate occasions over the past five days I saw examples of the lowest forms of the two most dominate races in this country.
On Saturday four friends and myself went out to Wildwood for a night of boardwalk, and bar / restaurant hopping. We ended up at this rest. called Juan Pallos. Mexican place, it was just okay, their quesadillas were lacking, but their tortillas were on point! anyway, after we were done at Juan Pallios, we started walking back towards our buddy's place where our car was parked. On the way, there were about 10 black guys and few Latino girls hanging out on a car. One of them put his hands in the air and tried to elicit a high five from one of my friend's girlfriend, who was with us. He was a bit too pushy, and my friend was full of patron, so he stepped in and told the black guy to go fuck himself, and to stay away from his girl. This prompted a block-long walk where three black guys just yelled at us while we kept walking and me and another friend telling them to relax, and that it was a non issue while my buddy and his girl went ahead. Instead of trailing back and letting it go, the instigator black guy ran ahead and punched my buddy in the neck. He then ran back to us an apologized. He was obvs. trying to impress his friends, and rectify the situation with us, although there were more than them, we weren't necessarily backing away from them.
After all this we got back to our place, and our car, and everyone calmed down. I thought this was hilarious, but everyone was pretty angry and or upset. Everything calmed down and we finished the night and went home. It was pretty terrible that we even had to deal with this sort of thing to begin with on an otherwise pretty sweet night, but it happens.
My other instance happened just yesterday. I was leaving the Wawa in Birches West, and as I was about to enter my car I see about four or five Mexican guys walking across the street and towards the Wawa, as they are about to enter the pavement the Wawa is on, a car full of four white guys drives up, slows down, and one of the guys takes out a megaphone, and goes "Go back to Mexico." It was loud (megaphone duh) and direct, and it was the most rude terrible thing I have ever seen for no reason. I looked over at the five Mexican guys, and you can tell they weren't happy about it, but they kept walking to Wawa, totally used to that kind of thing happening to them. My whole car ride back to my house I was full of anger, I hated those kids for doing that, I hated that they found it so funny, and by the way they executed this prank it seemed like they had done it a million times before, I hated Washington Township for producing such over spoiled trash that would do such things. I was full of hate and it made me think of race. It made me think of Saturday night, and how those black guys felt threatened by us, or how we felt scared because they guys coming after us were black. These Mexican guys didn't feel threatened by their megaphoned attackers, but you'd be stupid to think their feelings weren't hurt. The white guys in the car feel threatened by the Mexicans, just because of the color of their skin and the way they say our words different.
All of these races, scarred of each other, threatened by one another.
And I just kept thinking the same thing over and over again when I was driving home after seeing the Mexican instance at the Wawa.
Maybe we aren't so different after all.
