Twisted

Quick elaboration on previous post about people who are unable to straight-forwardly state their desires etc., I’m going to make a broad generalisation and it’ll be perfectly acceptable, because it’s about white people.  The reason I wrote that post (the “What I want” post) in the first place was my frustration with meeting all these people recently who were just totally incapable of saying the simplest things.  I finally noticed on the weekend that all these people had one thing in common: they were super whiteys. Really white, really uptight, definitely repressed, and completely and utterly unaware of how tightly wound they are.

I have two people in my life who have spent years going on and on about having to interact with this breed of whitey, and honestly I always thought they were being overly dramatic.  I’ve met some of the people they complained about, and from my brief encounters with them, I just thought they were extremely nice and polite, although perhaps overly conscientious and delicate about topics that were potentially taboo.  However, I get their frustration now. Oh, how I GET IT.

The thing about this particular brand of politeness is that everything comes out… twisted.  Everything, even “pass the salt” is an expression of their fear that they’ll reveal, like everyone else in the entire world, they care about themselves first.  It’s so bizarre- it’s like they have such a strong sense of entitlement they don’t know how to deal with it, so they do anything not to show it.  It’s kind of why political correctness is so uncomfortable, it’s not an act of respect as much as it is a display of fearfulness that they may actually have to engage with something that is outside their comfort zone.  Like throwing up their hands and going “it’s ok, I used the right word!”  I used to think that fear was kind of cute, but when you get down to it, the over-determined delicacy ruins the intent.  It is not fucking cute, it is annoying.