Flirtations with Racism

1. Today I was giving this dude I work with (similar to me; white, glasses, facial hair, likes punk rock and metal) a ride and when we got into my car i was shocked to see that the music playing was Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us back. I had an instant moment where i freaked out and was like, did I do too much self-disclosure to a co-worker. does he think that i am secretly a black militant, or perhaps a Muslim? I hesitated to turn the music off instantly, and that would be the source of my next freak out. It didn't matter what I was playing; like I said, he was similar to me, culturally and also in terms of pop cultural frames of reference, so that meant he was down with the PE(" now every single bitch wanna see me"). But then I worried that my initial urge to turn the music off revealed the truly racist person that I am. Sure, my brain said inside my head, you'll listen to hip-hop in my car when you're alone, but bring another white person into the mix and you switch to bland jangly indie pop. And then I worried that my initial impulse to switch the music stemmed from my unconsciously thinking that because he is white, he must hate rap, thus making me and him both racist. this is the way my mind works. In the end, I played the first five tracks and switched it. That seemed safe. So am i racist or what?

2. I'm in the car with a black consumer at work, and i am just randomly flipping through radio stations. I land on a lil wayne track that i like but don't know the words to, so i can't like rap along or anything, so my participation seems perhaps like a stupid white liberal nod to solidarity (again, not saying there is any reason to interpret these events as I have; this is my purely subjective experience, and probably no one thinks I'm racist, and probably I'm not (though actually writing this sentence made me think that, yes, i am racist), so feel free to read this shit for entertainment purposes. I am just a neurotic, self-doubting, everything-else-doubting bro, yknow) and then I go to change the station, hesitate, and then fuck! actually do change it, and then I of course instantly worry that my changing the station revealed my true racist self, earlier when you were both singing along to the song, he was loving you, and then you changed the fucking station. Might as well join the KKK, you fucking RACIST. That's what i heard in my mind. And this is what I am stressing out about, all the time; nothing. And my work has taught me that ultimately most people spend a vast amount of their time freaking out about nothing, and I'm no different, so stop fucking freaking out about nonsense. But once I acknowledge that I'm freaking out about, and then I start to worry that I freak out over nothing, and then before I know it I am freaking out about how I am freaking out about nothing (and even this simple acknowledgment of my freaking out is proof that I know its senseless, but i'm still doing it in the moment). And this is what I love about humans, ultimately: our ability to contradict ourselves. Not every species of animal can do that. our ability to hold two positions in direct opposition to each other, and to argue them both, is an extension of our basic ability to feel conflicting emotions about ourselves, and the world around us. You might not know it but this is a pretty FUCKING AWESOME aspect of humanity and I urge you to start doubting everything, including my telling you how FUCKING AWESOME skepticism is. I am determined to just dive into the gray areas and doubt everything and then start to believe it all and believe none of it all in reaction to the believing and it's beautiful. So what i hope to catalogue here in a series of vignettes about my anxieties about my own racist tendencies. I'll start by stating that I do not believe I am a racist, at all, because I understand race in terms of biological and cultural roots and think that we the only differences that exist between us are purely man-made constructs, and a basic misunderstanding of evolution and biology in general. But maybe I'll feel differently about all this by the time I'm done. (I will never be done)