To be a minority performer especially interacting in such an intimate way with patrons is especially traumatizing in these times. Customer privilege has racist overtones not just sexist ones. Many customers have used my presence as a trigger to start sidelong discussions of politics, police tactics, questions of how the white customers are treating me (as if the white questioner assumes all his brethren to practically be Klan members). This is the info I'd LOVE to hand them since they don't do their research but expect me to be their cheerful topless educator and apologist for all black/minority anger:
{snip}
The so-called ghetto was created and not accidentally. It was designed as a virtual holding pen—a concentration camp were we to insist upon honest language—within which impoverished persons of color would be contained. It was created by generations of housing discrimination, which limited where its residents could live. It was created by decade after decade of white riots against black people whenever they would move into white neighborhoods. It was created by deindustrialization and the flight of good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas.And all of that is violence too. It is the kind of violence that the powerful, and only they, can manifest. One needn’t throw a Molotov cocktail through a window when one can knock down the building using a bulldozer or crane operated with public money. One need not loot a store when one can loot the residents of the community as happened in Ferguson—giving out tickets to black folks for minor infractions so as to rack up huge fines and fees, thereby funding city government on the backs of the poor. Zoning laws, eminent domain, redlining, predatory lending, stop-and-frisk: all of these are forms of violence, however much white America fails to understand that. They do violence to the opportunities and dreams of millions, living in neighborhoods most of us have never visited. Indeed, in neighborhoods we consider so God-forsaken that we even have a phone app now to help us avoid them.
As I was saying, it is bad enough that we think it appropriate to admonish persons of color about violence or to say that it “never works”—especially when in fact it does. We are, after all, here, are we not? Living proof that violence works and quite well at that, thank you very much. What is worse, as per Baldwin, is our insistence that we bear no responsibility for the conditions that have brought about the current crisis, and that indeed we need not even know about those conditions. That innocence, as Baldwin expressed it, was the crime, because it betrays a non-chalance that ensures the perpetuation of all the injustices against which those presumed to be uncivilized are rebelling. {snip} http://www.salon.com/2015/05/08/whit...ow_it_partner/
So I'm not interested in distancing myself from rioters, nor am I interested in denouncing Michael Brown or saying your dwindling patience with the poor, black, women, or whoever is okey-dokey. You won't be getting a pass to do whatever you want with me no matter how much you play the gatekeeper to white male acceptance if I 'just trust you' and 'relax' and 'get into it'. Fuck off.
In short : Stop asking random hospitality workers/tipped workers a bunch of incendiary questions you don't want the answer to and stop holding the goddamn sale hostage to your quasi classist, sexist, racist diatribe, you douchebag!



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