are all Monsters related? do they all look alike?

In the Tony-award winning musical Avenue Q, currently running on Broadway, Brian defends his Japanese wife, who has just asked him to take out the “lecycraburs”. Princeton, Kate Monster, and Gary Coleman ("yes, that Gary Coleman") ask him what that means and then break into laughter when he translates “recyclables”. Brian bristles:

Hey! Don’t laugh at her! How many languages do you speak?

he sings. The others suggest that he lighten up. Kate Monster sings

Oh, come off it, Brian! Everyone’s a little bit racist.

I’m not, Brian insists, and to prove it he asks the musical question

How many Oriental wives have you got?

We saw the play at the John Golden Theatre on Broadway last Saturday night, and even before Princeton and Brian’s wife, Christmas Eve, called him out on his use of the “offensive” term “oriental,” I knew that Brian was, in fact, “a little bit racist.” I knew it in part because I am exactly the same sort of thirtysomething white liberal as Brian, and guys like us always think that we’re inoculated against racism by our Asian-American wives or (in my case) half-Hispanic sons. And I’d found out in Chinatown that week that I, too, was a little bit racist.

As I walked down Canal Street, I heard very little English. Feeling like I was in a foreign country, I walked into a grocery store. I wanted to buy some sauces and spices but couldn’t read the labels of most of the jars. I finally found a couple that had English translations and went to the counter to buy those. Since my fiancée’s sinuses were bothering her, I also wanted to buy some Advil Cold & Sinus, which was behind the counter.

Naturally, I asked for it by speaking in a loud voice, pointing, and holding up two fingers to indicate how many I wanted.

“Okay, two Advil Cold & Sinuses, there ya go,” the clerk said, tossing them in the bag. I felt like a freakin’ Ugly American Idiot stereotype.

So I saw Brian’s foot entering his mouth from a mile away.

After Chinatown and Little Italy, I rode the subway up to Harlem to see the Apollo. I figured that Harlem, like the rest of Manhattan, was into an advanced stage of gentrification. So I gleefully snapped pictures of historical sites and actually managed to walk about sixteen blocks into West Harlem before noticing that I hadn’t seen another white face in some time.

I didn’t bother me; I just noticed it. And I actually felt a little bit less racist, since I know dozens of ‘necks who would have noticed far, far earlier.

At one point, I was taking a picture of the sign of a Jamaican food restaurant. (Since the S.O. was in conference sessions and I wanted here to share my day, and since I had a gig on my SD card, I took pictures like a Japanese touris– I took a lot of pictures.) I snapped the photo of the restaurant, and an African-American woman on the sidewalk started yelling at me. “You’re not takin’ my picture, are you?” she shouted.

“No, no,” I said smiling and gesturing. “I’m just taking a picture of that sign. So I can remember to come back.” Meaning that I thought the food might be good.

At that point the woman went a little berserk. “You don’t need to come back!” she screamed. “They ain’t done nothin’. You don’t need to come back at all. They ain’t done nothin’ wrong.”

“Okay,” I said and shuffled away. I was a little confused until I realized that I was wearing the polo shirt with the official C.I.A. logo that Prodigal Son had once given me. Suddenly her paranoid reaction snapped into place. I was the only white boy in that part of Harlem, and I was wearing an official C.I.A. polo shirt. Obviously, I was going to bring a world of hurt with me.

Everyone’s a little bit racist, it’s true.
But everyone is just about as
racist as you.

Fortunately, both the African-American women and I were only a little bit racist. As Princeton says,

Everyone makes judgments based on race. Not big judgments like who to hire or who to buy a newspaper from, just little judgments . . .

Everyone’s a little bit racist, it’s true.
But everyone is just about as racist as you.
If we all could just admit
That we are racist a little bit
And everyone
Stopped being so P.C.,
Maybe we could
Live in – harmony!

We liberals are often guilty of making racism a constant issue while piously believing ourselves immune. Some conservatives are guilty of actually being racist while loudly denying the fact. Others are guilty of enabling racist friends and allies, using code words, or cynically using racism as a political tool. And racism continues to derive political and social power through the duality posed by Avenue Q: “No one’s really color-blind,” but “we all know that it’s wrong.” And the musical’s solution, that “just admitting it” will help us get along may be glib—but, hell, nothing else has worked. In any event, liberals, who value the expansion of human freedom, should understand the liberation in admitting imperfection.

It’s also appropriate that this dead-on indictment of the state of Race in millennial America comes in a Gen-X written and produced musical parodying the Sesame Street of our youth. It was the well-intentioned adult liberals of the Sesame Street era who told kids of my generation that Racism had been solved and would no longer be bothering us.

They couldn’t have been more wrong.

spacedark

all photographs taken by spacedark except the Avenue Q publicity still