Even homelessness allows for anti-blackness

i had my dignity stolen from me recently. and when i mean recently, i mean less than 24 hours ago. not because i' done anything undignified, far from it, but because someone decided to call me a nigger. say all you want about sticks stones and the impotence of words, i have never felt them as ineffective as described...

I had just travelled to Atlanta on a consulting trip, where I worked hard doing something I enjoyed. It could be said that the work I did produced high levels of success for those who purchased my services. I'm getting to do one of the few means of money generation I've truly enjoyed, and feel like I'm being compensated in a way I can appreciate.

I was back home, and after sleeping in to a point where I was actually rested when I woke up, I meandered through my morning until I realized I needed to go to the bank to make a deposit and get a bite to eat, two relatively harmless actions. Shit that literally everyone with a bank account has done. So I get in the sled and begin the day...I go to the bank with little expectation of a day turning shitty with limited expectation...and my trip to the bank is uneventful: I deposit my work check and decide I want to get some ramen...which requires me to go across town and wait in a 30-45 minute line...so when I arrive and the line is REMARKABLY SHORT i think that everything is coming up Millhouse...

I wait and get my ramen (FB,GR) and am about to head home. I drive home down San Carlos Ave to the freeway, and while stopped at a stop-light, I see a homeless man. He's standing on the median of the road, with a sign (two sided- one side- his wife and kids, the other- solicitation for money), and I was moved. My guy Joel reminded me that my problem was allowing myself to be moved by White Suffering (he was nowhere near as explicit) and if I had followed his advice, I'd  have been straight...but I didn't...

...I was moved by the pictures of his kids, his two year old (I'm assuming) and his 8-year old, and he was married. The pictures of his wife and his family- it was clearly a happier time than this. Also, couple the fact that it's beginning to rain really hard outside, and that i had a little something extra in my pocket, and I made the decision I could help him: it seemed the only "right" thing to do. So I gathered my money (a $5, a couple of $1's and some loose change- not winning the lottery, just tryin to help) and rolled down the window. Usually, when you roll your window down around soliciting homeless, they are pretty quick to pick up any money, as the location doesn't allow for smalltalk or really anything but brutal logistics of exchanging money. So when my window had been rolled down for a few seconds, I assumed he hadn't seen/heard me roll down the window, and was thus not aware of the possibility of getting a few bucks. So I try to call for his attention....this is a verbatim conversation...

me: hey man, i have some money for you.

homeless man:  I don't take out handouts from niggers. You probably stole it from a white man...

Day shatters.

Homelessness validated by White Privilege. 

All of the good that i've done seems to be washed away by this man's hatred. The things that I think establish value for me are literally set ablaze by the incendiary (the irony of such a word is i'm not sure if i asked him why he'd chosen such incendiary language that he'd have even fucking known what i was saying. The words themselves were hard enough to put my head around, and maybe it's my arrogance and classism speaking, the audacity of telling a man who's trying to offer you money that his "nigger" money wasn't good enough  and that it must have been "stolen" from the white man....I wasn't alive at the time of my parents, obviously, every thing they told me with regard to their lives revolved around the idea that "nothing is defaulted your way" and to "expect the system to fuck you at every turn, which is why you need to be able to relocate nationally in 72 hours." I always thought complete evacuation in 72 hours was odd until i realize we did it..twice...different time...

And at that point I felt...empty. Entirely fucking empty. And it nearly killed me. I don't really have a clear recollection of obtaining the food that i ate for lunch other than to know that, based on what was in the photo, that i must have gone to Race Street Market to get a Grilled Lobster Tail and some Drawn Butter, and decided the to get a Fish and Clam Chowder meal as well. All not terrible choices, except that I'd already PICKED UP LUNCH, The Soy Sauce Ramen at Santouka with Special Pork, which was sitting in the car the entire time. I don't really recall the drive home, except that I must have stopped at a grocery store as I had items from there, as well as a donut shop, as I had two sugar donuts (this says way more about me than i probably want it to, but here we are). I don't really know how I even got back to being in my house in front of the television when i kind of flashed back to the last 30+ minutes of my life when i just went on auto-pilot and just accomplished tasks- not even tasks that necessarily had to be done, but they were things to do while i tried to not become so enraged that i would get back in my car and run that motherfucker down [aside: i'd never have done that, not because i wouldn't want to, but i'd not let the media play me out as the cold hearted motherfucker that ran over a homeless man, removing all the context and making me a black Pol Pot]. But here I was, back home. There's a full length mirror that's next to the couch in The Man Cave, which is where i was sitting, about to eat a glorious lobster tail and The Weight of it all just hit me. And i started bawling. I'm to this point not really sure why. But I do know that i felt worthless and pretty fucking hopeless, in a heap of my own emotions. 

I've had people way closer to me say way more hurtful things, in the heat of the moment, in jest and sometimes, just because. People, even ones you love, can be incorrigible ass-hats. That being said, I've experienced way more vitriol from the parents of a woman i was dating, from a teacher at my high school and from a woman in a Burger King that tried to mace me for whistling Superstition by Stevie. Each garnered a response, and most would say that the response was of larger magnitude than the initial claim (read: i was way more hurtful in response- not proud of it, probably one of my most significant character flaws-but at least I recognize it's there). But this time, I'm sitting at home, an emotional hot mess, and I couldn't figure out why. It was at that moment this popped in my head:

Why do I want to live in a place where an attempt to give money to a homeless man and his inflammatory response can make me feel like I'm worthless? I'd be better off if I was dead. 

I've never had that thought before. And it scared the shit out of me. Immediately into my head floods all the good things that are going on- an incredible wife and family, a strong support system of friends and acquaintances that i know care about me and a drive that says "fuck you" more than "i quit" and within a few minutes, my thoughts had gone from "maybe i'd be better off dead" to thinking "what do people do when they don't have that support system? what happens if the person they love is the root of their pain? what happens when they run out of "fuck you" and "i quit" is all they see left?"

In short, what happens to you if someone takes your dignity and you're not able to get it back. I imagine it would foster what looked to be illogical amounts of distrust and hostility to the victims toward those inflicting the pain...does that sound like anything familiar to you all?

In the future, I'll resolve this the way my guy Joel does- I'm just not giving to white homeless people. Someone else will get you. You'll be aight....