• Sammy’s twenty-first birthday. 🥳
  • Another episode in Chicago North Side bigotry: Talking to a local house paint seller about music in Chicago, and him replying, jovially, “Let’s keep the rappers on the South Side [of Chicago], right?”
    • I said, “That’s a super racist thing to say,” and he went the peace-preserving and cowardly “I was totally joking” route.
    • Which, on one hand, makes his racism seem shallow — as if it’s only about trying to build camaraderie with other white guys like Jason, who was there, and me. But I know it’s not shallow. Or that we can’t allow ourselves to see it as shallow — because he can actually hurt people.
    • And how any shallowness is belied, anyway, by the full-blown, paternalistic insidiousness of it: “let’s keep [them away].”
    • I was unsurprised but angry and disappointed, especially because he had asked about upcoming Chicago artists earlier in the week, I had told him about Sen Morimoto, and he had actually gone home and listened. So I thought, Here’s an open-minded paint seller. It turned out his mind only seemed open, to me, because I’m white.