I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Here I was last night, all fly with a beautiful (white) female friend, getting into a cab on my way to the Pink Party (an annual fundraiser a friend of mine throws to support the Canadian Breast Cancer foundation) and some Nazi poser decided to start shit with me.
I must give him credit though, he repeated his words and even though his feet were backpedalling faster than Lance Armstrong, his mouth and the hatred (and fear) in his eyes were going strong.I feigned as if I was going to throw a punch at him and he jumped backwards into the door of my neighbourhood Burger King.
"That’s what I thought" I said to him…"You’re a fucking pussy" and turned away to get back to where I was going…he wasn’t worth my time or the subsequent shit storm that would ensue after I beat him to a pulp. But then he raised the ante even more.
I called him out for the coward he was…at which point, his pride flared up…and kudos again to him…he launched and spit square in my face. For real. (I must say though that as “Swaggy” as it may be, that was the first time I wished I was wearing glasses with lenses in them, then at least I wouldn’t have gotten an eyeful of Nazi hate juice. lol.)
As firey as I am, I really don’t like fighting…but growing up the way I grew up and in the places I grew up, I had to fight. All the time. Life made me not afraid of confrontation. Quite the opposite actually. I discovered my “voice” at a late age…and it was an angry one. Confrontations quickly became escalated whenever I was around because that was the only way I knew how to assert myself and claim my personal power. That’s the trait that had some people saying I was a headcase and earned me the nickname “Kenny Battle” on the street. lol.
Anyways, some people are assholes and the one thing I did enjoy about my time bouncing was that I’d be able to mete out some justice to some overly entitled asshole every now and then, which I always justified by saying “I’m giving you the beating your parents clearly didn’t or else you wouldn’t have turned out to be such a piece of shit” OR as Ghengis Khan so eloquently put it hundreds of years ago“I am the punishment of God…If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.” lol.
But this was different, here I was about to tussle with someone who just violated me in perhaps the most vile way possible. As a bouncer you’re given a certain benefit of the doubt when things get physical…as a civilian, not so much…I moved in on him.
I’ve been training in martial arts since I was 10 years old. I outweighed this Neo-Nazi poser by at least 50 pounds, and there was a hot, bewildered chick watching…My pride kicked in as well. I had to whip this guy’s ass. Now mind you, this confrontation started at the curb of a sidewalk and by this point he had already backed up damn near to the order desk of my neighbourhood Burger King.
I would have liked to punch him square in the face or even kicked him in the head, but I know the dangers of street fighting and how one bad landing can send someone to the hospital, on its face this angry douchebag wasn’t a threat to me, this was not life or death, which is the only time I believe one should fight, so I opted for the light spanking and not a full beatdown.
I threw a couple low roundhouses to his mid thigh, the second one sent him flying into some people who were eating (my apologies ya’ll). Having the presence of mind I had, and knowing what the bystanders were probably seeing (Big angry Black guy about to beat the shit out of someone), I made sure to use a technique the cops use quite often; anytime you watch TV or see Cops taking someone down and you hear them yelling “Stop resisting” whether that person is or not, 9/10 they are doing for the witnesses watching. "Well, the cop was screaming stop resisting, so I guess the guy was". I just kept yelling out “Call me a Nigger and spit on me, eh?”
And what I love even MORE was that homeboy stuck to his guns and kept calling me a Nigger as he was backpedaling and then started throwing in “White Power”. Brawling in public isn’t a good look for anyone who’s 30 something, especially not when you’re with a drop dead (Shellshocked) gorgeous girl and you are on your way to a high profile charity event.
A number of thoughts went through my mind, but the most prevalent one was “regardless of how justifed I may be, if I knock this guy out, there’s a good chance my Black ass is going to jail”. And that’s the crux of the situation and the thing that bothers me most about this incident last night. We often hear about “White Privelege” and Racism and think of them as abstract concepts…and they are…for everyone except “us”.
When someone asks me what exactly it is, I tell them simply “The benefit of the doubt”. The benefit of the doubt can mean the difference between a couple of white kids at a skatepark smoking a joint being told to “Go home before you go to jail” and a group of Black kids playing Basketball doing the same and getting a criminal record. It’s happened to me.
Racism is a vile, pathetic thing. All forms of hatred are. They stem from the same stinking place, a misplaced delusion that you are somehow “better” than another person who was born a different ethnicity than you. You’re claiming “Pride” for something you had nothing to do with…who your parents were. Frankly, I think its pathetic. But its very real. And very dangerous.
Here I was, having every reason to beat the living daylights out of someone, but holding back because I “know my place” in this society. 1913 or 2013, shit still hasn’t changed. There are way too many of us who are so conditioned that we know it all too well.
Black men are still locked up and persecuted for crimes at a greater rate than their white counterparts for the same crime. Fact.
Black people are refused jobs, aid and opportunities that are given to white people of the same qualifications. Fact.
MY most recent relationship, the woman I loved and was with for 2 years refused to tell her parents about our relationship because I was “Black” (even though she was Irish and I spent many a night trying to explain to her that in her Grandparents day, The Irish weren’t even considered white) Fact.
Someone I once considered a good friend lost it on me because of a PERCEIVED slight and told me I was a “Ghetto Monkey Nigger”. Fact.
These are things you deal with being “Black” in N. America.
The first time I even knew what racism was, I cried myself to sleep. I was 8 years old and watched a PBS documentary on the Civil Rights era…I realized that everything they were talking about was only 20 yrs or so ago…and it terrified me. I couldn’t believe people would be that mean to each other over something as trivial as skin colour. But here I am, in 2013 and I’m not 8 years old. I’m in my thirties. I’m 6’3, 220lbs and pretty extensively trained in the fighting arts. I had just been insulted and assaulted…and all I could think was “I better not hurt this guy too badly, because I know how it is”.
"I know how it is"…And that’s what has me sad.
Not some “Nazi Poser” and his hatred…but the fact that in 2013, at the most visceral level…this society has me so conditioned that even though I was the victim, I knew that me acting how I wanted to act could blow up in my face.
I KNOW that the same cops that I would call could turn on me…I KNOW that this society is so inherently unfair that at the end of the day, my options are to not be a man and walk away or risk possibly being punished for defending myself against a white, blue eyed dude who spit in my face as I was minding my business and heading to a charity function.
In short, I know my place. And that’s not a good feeling.
Kenny