Parents Just Don’t Understand

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

I was in a Santa Ana body shop a few years back, keeping company with another customer. He was a homely and gigantic black man with hams for shoulders that were cruelly squeezed by his sharp suit. He’d been a professional football player—for someone lame, like the Cardinals, probably—but sold insurance now and lived in Irvine. We were chat-chat-chatting, and he was so wise and generous and warm, and the longer he talked, the handsomer he became. It was like I had my own real-life version of filmdom’s Magical Negro, but it wasn’t Will Smith or Morgan Freeman being unthreateningly asexual while showing you how to live closer to the earth (and carrying your golf bag). By the end of the hour, I was ready to marry him and make beautiful babies, or just hand him my panties. Six of one ...

And so we were talking about our children, and I was laughing about my son and his twin obsessions of hip-hop and basketball and doing an impression of his speech, which is mumbly and lightly ghetto-inflected, and that’s when I explained mirthfully how I tell him, “But honey, you’re white!”

And the man I loved smiled politely and soon after went back to Irvine and we never married nor had beautiful babies or even got my panties off.

What I’d meant but hadn’t said out loud was that I didn’t want his black and Latino friends (in other words, all his friends) to think he was a poseur, that’s all, honest. Maybe it’s better since Marshall Mathers became Eminem, but in my day, it was only Rob Van Winkle transforming into Vanilla Ice.

Vanilla Ice did not have street cred!

Now my son is the only white boy at L.A. High. His friends have a name for him: They call him White Boy. It’s how he introduces himself on the phone when he’s calling a girl. “Hey, it’s White Boy,” he says, and then I can’t hear the rest because he’s mumbling. Oh, sweetheart!

Last week Andrew Sullivan posted a video from BET that’s a couple of years old already but is just going viral. It’s called “Read a Book,” and is filthy and hilarious. It tells children, in between many motherfuckin’s and niggas, to read a book (not a sports page, not a magazine, but a book nigga/a fucking book nigga) and to brush their teeth and to wear deodorant (It’s called Speed Stick/It’s not expensive!) and to buy some land (fuck spinning rims!) etc. It is full of really excellent advice. Then Sullivan posted a follow-up clip of the makers of the video getting grilled on CNN. “You are a provocateur,” snarled the host. “That’s what you are!” The makers of the video—who, yes, were young(ish) hip black guys—explained that they were mocking what BET serves up with its music videos every single day and giving tips for good living at the very same time. “Satire needs to be funny!” another guest complained.

I had someone say the exact opposite of the same thing to me outside the Canyon Inn in Yorba Linda once. He was a pretty young thing who first claimed he worked with special needs kids and then said he was working on a satirical novel about World War II. “Oh, are you funny?” I asked him. “No,” he said. “Satire doesn’t need to be funny.” Then he explained that his work is more in the vein of Orwell, “like 1982.”

Oh, my.

Who else doesn’t think “Read a Book” is funny? Lots and lots of people. If you google it, you come up with, for instance, this statement by Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition:

The video is plenteously scornful and insulting, but not of crassness. The video insults reading, personal hygiene, family values and frugality. “Read a Book” heaps scorn on positive values and (un)intentionally celebrates ignorance. The narrator is obviously illiterate, unkempt and disrespectful. So who takes his advice seriously?”

That’s right, Rainbow PUSH Coalition! Kids are always on the lookout for respectfulness! Most especially, of their elders!

Kristyn Meyer, meanwhile, wrote a 25-page thesis on the vid. I can’t tell if she thought it was funny or not, because the abstract of her paper says this: “Relying heavily upon satirical representations of African Americans, hip-hop, and rhetorics of sanitation and uplift, ‘Read a Book’ demonstrates and introduces the notion of ‘terministic intratextuality.’” I think she liked it?

But here’s the thing: back to the Rainbow Coalition’s complaint, “Who takes this advice seriously?” Well, my son, for one. My son takes it seriously. We watched it together, and then every time I shouted at him to read a motherfucking book, he went in his room and read not a sports page, not a magazine, but a book. A fucking book!

It is the most effective bit of parenting help I’ve yet had the pleasure to encounter.

“I can think of 4,000 things I’d spend money on before I spent it on spinning rims,” my little brother once swore, making terrible fun of my sweet boy. I couldn’t think of 4,000 things period, so I sensibly demurred there were only at least several hundred things I’d buy first. (The only reason I even have four hubcaps is my mom made me buy one, so as to not be quite such a slob. I don’t see why you need any, much less more than three.) Do you think my son is going to listen to me or my brother? Or my mother? Please. The only way I will ever get him to stop imagining the glorious day he’ll put spinning rims on his future Escalade is if a giant cartoon black man tells him to, with plentiful curses and a terrific beat. It’s starting to get in his head, I think, the fucking lameness of spinning rims, when you could be spending your pennies on a Starbucks Mochachino for some pretty urban girl from your high school instead.

Land can wait a while yet, White Boy, but get those priorities sorted out. And Speed Stick? It’s not expensive.

Comments

Comments closed.