JB Smoove, writer and actor best known for Curb Your Enthusiasm and Real Husbands of Hollywood (and to the true film buff, Pootie Tang), appeared on the LA Times podcast “Can’t Stop Watching” recently. During his interview with host Yvonne Villareal she asked him to share his thoughts on the current political and social reckoning regarding America’s enduring racial caste troubles. He shared an anecdote that I felt in my bones.
I present it here, cut for length:
When I was younger I was terrified of the police. Because I’ve seen them in action. I might have been 12 years old — maybe 12 years old. I had a bike shop I used to always go to. And what happened was, I had to take my bike there to get it fixed, I dropped my bike off. This is how it affects you — this is crazy. So I came out of the bike shop, turned right. Had my little ticket to pick my bike up late … I seen a old white woman walking down the sidewalk. You know how the concrete raises — it raised up a little bit. This woman tripped and fell flat on her face and stuff flew out of her purse and she was laying there and her nose was busted and I froze.
Know what I didn’t see for 10 seconds? I didn’t even see her face. All I saw was the purse open, stuff all over the place and you know what I was thinking in my brain — this is how fast I was thinking, even at 12 years old — “If I walk over there and help this woman, whose face is bloody, they’re going to think I pushed her down and tried to take her purse.”
Or — she was so old — what if she didn’t remember tripping? What if she said “I don’t know what happened.”
I panicked, I turned around and walked back into the bike shop. And I stood just past the doorway. I just stood there shaking.
That’s how it feels.
White supremacy is a disease (engineered by capitalism) that first attacks human decency. It is so lethal a virus that it paralyzes kind-hearted people from living according to their principles. It’s pathogens are rage, grievance, fear, violence, self-pity and its symptoms are violence (yep, twice), dishonesty, double-speak, mass incarceration, redlining, xenophobia, isolation, armed militias, conspiracies, political corruption, voter suppression, etc.
Here’s another, more recent example:
In a sleepy town in sleepy Michigan, Takelia Hill and her daughter Makayla Green were exiting a Chipotle in Orion Township on July 1st. As they did so Makayla, who is Black, was bumped into by a white woman, Jilian Wuestenberg, who was entering with her husband Eric.
According to Green, when she asked for an apology from Wuestenberg she was met with “cussing” and accusations that she (Green) was “invading” her (Wuestenberg’s) space.
Ms. Hill immediately began recording the altercation (because you know: America 2020) — again, this was verbal — which was then joined by the husband, Eric. After some words were exchanged the couple got in their car, began to back out and nearly hit Hill, who tapped on the back window to alert them to her presence.
Wuestenberg responded by pulling a loaded pistol on them. She took up a tactical position and sighted in as if she was going to shoot.
Perhaps the specter of two Black women and a cellphone were too terrifying to bear for the 32-year-old Wuestenberg. Particularly in front of Chipotle, suburban America’s consolation prize.
The video quality is none-too-bad as it was shot in broad daylight — you can see every frightened wrinkle in her face — and the audio is equally good. So good that Wuestenberg can be heard saying, as the couple drives away in their SUV, “white people aren’t racist. I care about you.”
The police were called and, in perhaps the most amazing sign of progress, they took the away the couple’s guns (they had concealed carry permits) and, as of this writing, charged them with assault.
“White people aren’t racist. I care about you.”
The inversion of meaning in this insultingly obvious fiction isn’t worth discussing. People who seek out concealed carry permits and then pull guns on Black women with their daughters outside of mediocre fast food chains are so devoid of self-awareness that their protests are utterly hollow.
Paranoia, self-pity, a staggering lack of self-awareness, double-speak and rage. Jillian Wuestenberg might be the Queen of Karens after this one.
(Side note: I am confident I can predict every news show watched in the Wuestenberg household with pinpoint accuracy)
That we are a nation plagued by paranoid and armed whites is not news — this kind of person has been the racist glue holding the country’s economic exploitation of everyone together for 400 years.
What is new is that Black Lives Matter is changing the perception of America for white Americans. It is perhaps the largest social movement in the history of the United States of America. And while it has direct policy aims (reduce police budgets, demilitarize the police, prosecute killer cops, prosecute false reporters) it is largely cultural.
Thusly, the police response and swift outcry against a gross overreaction to a simple misunderstanding in this Michigan case.
And cultural it must be, because America’s problems lay in a culture of lies, fear of one another, grotesque income inequality, obfuscation of our true history, idolization of horrible people, tribalism, selfishness and a rampant fetishization of violence. It is eating us all alive. What other kind of society could produce images of a woman brandishing a deadly weapon at women and children because they exchanged a few words (while screaming that she “cares about” them)? What society produces cops who are so comfortable murdering Black people on camera that they hardly seem to notice when a man dies under their knee?
Black Lives Matter is pointing directly at the Karens of America and more importantly an indifferent white America and saying, “look at what you are. Racism and inequity have paralyzed us. It is destroying your humanity to the core and it is killing our people in the streets. Look at yourselves. Don’t turn away.”
James Baldwin wrote about all this with terrifying precision almost 60 years ago. I suggest that everyone read his essays right now.
I have never believed that political leaders are the answer to a nation’s problems. They are people of a culture and the best they can do is reflect that culture. For generations we have asked them to solve problems they simply cannot.
In many respects the supporters of both Obama and his successor asked the impossible of their champions. Some of us wanted Pres. Obama to end racism, bring about economic equity and a litany of other progressive changes. As if he wasn’t beholden to the law, or a recalcitrant House, or the voters themselves. His successor’s supporters want their champion to punish anyone who isn’t them. To give them free reign to terrorize, plunder, restrict and segregate. And if he can’t do that at least give them back their sense of moral superiority by demonizing the victims of the system that rewards them.
Politics is the language of compromise and ownership. Which is another way of saying the settling of grievances. But America’s true sickness is in its rank and file, not its political leadership.
This must end if the world of humans — and I’m not exaggerating — is to survive and thrive.
The Oakland county (Michigan, not Cali) police took guns away from two dangerous people in the case of the Wuestenbergs. I can think of no better use of police time and resources.
That the world is growing to revile Karen in all her forms is a positive step toward the dismantling of toxic whiteness. She has always been here, shrilly calling for blood to assuage her self-pitying paranoia.
Perhaps we’ll turn our sights on the propaganda machines that motive her next. But the malignancy that so perverted Wuestenberg is the same malignancy that froze JB Smoove all those years ago. We see in each other only the terrible danger that comes with close contact. So we freeze, or we arm ourselves and go looking for the embodiment of our anguish.
But our anguish is wholly manufactured. We must stop nurturing it by first calling it out — especially when we have little motivation to do so.
I’ve felt it myself. We all have. Perhaps if we keep taking weapons away from Karens and keep telling our stories and marching and voting … perhaps we have a chance.