you start to have to explain using their terms which is a slippery slope
I faced an interesting challenge along those lines last summer during a work day. My work has me in clients’ homes day in and day out, and usually during the day if anyone is around it is the lady of the house, and I am prone to try and make conversation with them, as I have been doing with mostly women for many years now. You’d be amazed what a guy in blue jeans with his hands dirty comes to find out about wives and mothers when he’s there all day fixing up their bathroom or putting in some new windows…..
This lady and her husband are Hispanic, he a Mexican-born emigre and naturalized citizen and now a successful owner-operator who delivers grain to stockyards in his own big rig, while she is a Chicana gal born down in Alpine, Texas. When I met them they had owned one of the nicer homes in this small town for several years, along with the entire city block it sits on which also contains the little trailer park they have been running for a long time. They had started out with an old single-wide and worked on it themselves for years as they raised their sons, and now the sons were grown and doing quite well as truckers themselves, and the old single-wide was now a large and immaculate family home with beautiful brick and lovely fixtures and furnishings, and I was there to build them a nice new covered back porch.
In short, this couple is neither poor, underprivileged nor marginalized (whatever that means). They happen to be Hispanic, and dark-skinned, bilingual and part of a very large circle of Spanish-speaking acquaintances in town of Chicano, Mexicano and a few Cubano folks (most of whom own homes, earn quite adequate incomes in various agribusiness pursuits, and have nice stuff like brand-new pickups and forty-foot travel trailers, etc.)
Like most of my clientele, they make and have more money than I do, are absolutely stable and contributing members of the community as held against my rare and tenuous bachelor lifestyle within it, and I have no call at all to be looking down on them or assessing them on the basis of any suppositions I might have about their ethnicity. I am not the sort who goes looking for people with an immigrant past, for instance, so I can self-promote my global concerns to them talking about affordable housing and whatnot, which I have seen plenty of avowedly PC liberals do and consider it among the most condescending and patronizing forms of racism there is.
This lady and I were just passing the time one day, and somehow the topic of the recent election had come up. I didn’t consider it any of my business to interrogate her about her political preferences, but one way or another the angle of how she viewed the defeat of a woman versus the ascendancy of a man who had got caught talking dirty with his pals came up. She made one remark or another to the effect that she didn’t have a lot of use for either one of them, which seems the local consensus here in mostly Republican country but a place with plenty of Democrat voters too; it’s just that neither tend to wear their political brand loyalties on their sleeves or display them on their lawns, as the greater preference is to treat neighbors like neighbors and everybody do their best to coexist. Crops and kids and livestock and bottom lines in small family businesses in a rural farm town have a way of outweighing the political squabbles of the larger world, which seem alien and insignificant by comparison around here.
I did venture the comment that a lot of folks hereabouts seemed relieved just to have the term of the prior president finally come to an end, as I had gathered he was never any popular figure (to say the least) among these folks.
To my surprise, she replied in two words: “they’re racist.”
But her tone was not one of condemnation nor suggested any torch-bearing urges toward ridding the world or her adoptive hometown of racism, more like just a mild exasperation regarding a known and historic constant in her eyes, a Hispanic lady in what was not so long ago an almost all-white little town (Hispanics outnumber the Anglos in every grade in the schools here and have for years, but I didn’t bring that up…..)
Without missing a stride or altering my tone an iota (after all, she hadn’t said I was racist, she had only suggested that not liking the nation’s only black president meant those who didn’t around here, were), I offered my own view, knowing full well what a spring-loaded moment had come upon me. But the hazard was nothing to do with my being at risk of being charged with a thought crime, only that this lady was my client, I was in her home and in her good graces, and it was incumbent on me to field her remark tactfully but at the same time not act like one of those pandering white liberals and start listing all the things I approved of about Mexican people, which any Mexican who has lived in the US for any length of time has been subjected to plenty, and in my observations understandably find it boring, juvenile and obvious, not to mention insincere.
So I said something along the lines of “oh, I don’t know about that. A lot of folks I know or do business with have talked about how they didn’t care for Obama because he is basically a socialist, and a lot of people around here just don’t trust the federal government getting too powerful and sticking its nose into people’s lives; some might think personally that a black man doesn’t belong in the office, but nobody has ever said that to me. Those same folks would make some pretty harsh comments about Bill Clinton too, and I know some farmers who are STILL mad at Jimmy Carter because they’d lost money on the grain embargo to the Soviets forty years ago…..”
The moment passed, no harm done, no offenses taken or alleged, and before long we were talking about Bermuda versus fescue grass seed or some such. They do have one of the prettiest lawns in town…..
