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Showing posts from June, 2012

Homies, Vatos & White Trash

     Yesterday, I met a man who was far too young to be as racially ignorant as he seemed to be.   Or maybe he was just ignorant, I’m not sure which.   We had a business appointment, and he was very comfortable with me, so much so that his mouth seemed to have a bad case of the runs.   Though he had moved to California in High school, he professed to be a former New Yorker.   He still wore his New York accent, and it was a thick as if he’d just left there last year.                 As it often happens when I met a New York refugee, we quickly slipped into questioning mode.   I pulled my own accent out of my bag and slipped into it as comfortably as I might my favorite pair of jeans.   After the normal “where did you go to school” and “what part of town did you grown up in” questions, he started to ask the questions that, in other circumstances, gotten him a tongue lashing or a slap in the face.   Instead of becoming violent or exposing him to my long vocabulary of swear words, I too