June 02, 2009

The story of one man’s contribution to multicuturalism.

Like all good immigrants, I came to this country determined to assimilate as quickly as possible. This was my second time immigrating. The first was in the 70s when I came from England to Quebec and mentally replaced the UK’s stringent caste system with Canada’s language obsession. Where limeys classified people by how posh their accent was, frogs classified them by which ones spoke French without an accent. Within a few years, I had suppressed my shameful, imperialist language and could parle français with the best of them.

America is too new to care about class and too unilingual to care about language. Their bag is diversity. I landed at Ellis Island with my papers in hand and asked what the perfect New Yorker would be like. “€œWell he wouldn”€™t be racist”€”that’s for sure,”€ I was told. I decided the best way to become a true New Yorker was to embrace diversity and make a real, live, black friend as soon as possible. 

It wasn”€™t easy. I don”€™t know if you”€™ve ever gone apartment hunting in Bushwick, but it’s not unusual for someone to stop her conversation, pull away from the payphone and yell, “€œWhat the fuck are you lookin”€™ at?”€ If you can make it up to the FOR RENT sign without a stranger saying, “€œOh I know you ain”€™t moving to this neighborhood,”€ you”€™re more tenacious than I.

I ended up in a predominantly white section of Brooklyn and focused on the blacks who didn”€™t mind leaving the Dark Borough. I met an African American DJ who was playing dancehall and struck up a conversation about the song because I was lucky enough to know it. After a few false starts, we became close pals, best friends even. It was heaven. When I heard squares being mocked for saying, “€œSome of my best friends are black,”€ I could laugh along with everyone else. My best friend is black and I don”€™t even talk about it. Ha! When we walked into a room of New Yorkers, I could feel the admiration wash over us. I was a new American and I was doing it right”€”beyond race.

This all came crashing down at a party a year later when I heard my black friend receive the most abusive phrase I had ever heard. It was worse than the N word, the opposite of it in fact. We were standing in the kitchen, commanding everyone’s attention with one of our brilliant comedy routines when a drunk, white girl rolled her eyes at my pal’s painfully normal accent. She said, “€œYou are the whitest black guy I”€™ve ever met.”€ At that moment, my egalitarian house of cards came crashing down, and I realized my black friend didn”€™t count. He was an “€œOreo,”€ and I was back to square one.

Real Americans, especially Democrats, tell us race is bullshit. They listen to all kinds of World Beat and will have dinner at more ethnic restaurants than you could ever hope to pronounce. Shit, Bill Clinton even has an office in Harlem. Can you dig it?

The only way I was going to ingratiate myself into this movement was to raise the bar and dive head long into my own self-hatred. I went past blacks and Hispanics and headed for an even more oppressed race”€”Native Americans.

From Gavin

Now, courting Indians makes courting blacks look like courting SPAM. All the First Peoples who trusted whites were killed off long ago, so we”€™re left with nothing but a very skeptical and uninterested population who would like nothing better than for us to get lost. I went to Pow Wows where I was ignored as the only white guy there, hung out on the rez”€”alone, and even endured a sweat lodge or two. (For the record, there is no suffering on earth greater than sitting in that damp, hot, tent, and I would not do it again for all the non-white friends in the world.) Eventually, I had ingratiated myself with one or two of them and even started dating a female Ho-Chunk. That’s when it hit me. A lot of people say they”€™ve done stuff for visible minorities, but how many of them have actually made some from scratch? If I married this woman, and we had babies, I could add members to her fledgling tribe. How’s that for diversity?

So I did it. We married in 2005 and have had two children since: Sophie Whiterabbit McInnes and Duncan Whitethunder McInnes.

From Gavin

Me and Sophie at her first Pow Wow. My Cleveland Indians hat was remarkably unpopular.

Like so many Americans, I had embraced the deep-seated diversity that makes this country great. It’s hard to believe just two generations ago almost no whites married outside of their race. Today it’s… wait, that can”€™t be right, around 3 percent!?

According to the Census Bureau, only about 5 million Americans today are made up of two or more races. That’s 1.7% of the population. With a national average of 2 kids per couple, that means it takes just 2.5 million couples to make that 5 million or, more specifically, 1.25 million whites. There’s 211 million whites in America. The Census figures claim 3.5% of couples are mixed but even that measly figure seems high. Remove the sad nerds who married Asian women and the progressive chubsters who married black guys, and you”€™re damn near zero. So, WTF? Is any other kind of interracial marriage legal? I thought being an American was about embracing diversity. I feel like John Belushi in Animal House when he yells, “€œWho’s with me?”€ and goes charging out of the frat house by himself.

Pee Wee Herman was once asked, “€œIf you love fruit salad so much, why don”€™t you marry it?”€ He accepted the challenge and despite his homosexuality, took a bowl of fruit salad as his bride. Americans will elect a black guy if he seems like a better candidate but when it comes down to something serious like marriage”€”ew. They love blacks less than Pee Wee loves fruit salad. Clinton does have an office in Harlem, true—but the few times he goes there, he’s completely surrounded by bodyguards. He spends the majority of his time at his estate in Chappaqua, the whitest hamlet in the country. American lefties are lucky I”€™m just kidding about giving two fucks what they think. I chose my squaw wife based on love. If I ended up in a bad situation just because I believed their lies about diversity, I would kick the shit out of each and every one of them.

The question I have to ask about this lie and the lying liars who lie it is, what else are they lying about?

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