Asheville, NC: Who's laughing?

Undocumented, underpaid, migrant labor was used to make this mouthwatering corn-fritter, not the henna-ed hands of that white guy with dreads at the farmers' market? What a zinger!!! Photo credit: Ashevile Travel Blog

stream of consciousness poem:

Being in Asheville is so...
beautiful
confusing
money
organic
white
lies
normal
bubble
disappointed
obvious
vegan
gluten-free
accessible
priviledge
everywhere
pseudo-liberal hippies
confusion
what's real?
whole grains
farms
work-trade
secret possibilities
hidden currents
normal abnormal
cool different
real different?
mountains
sunsets
clouds
dramatic
jokes cause we're uncomfortable
jokes cause we have to
running up mountains
running down mountains
yoga
cultural appropriNation
duh
is it funny?


I've been around a lot of jokes about the lack of people of color and the general homogeneity of whiteness here in Asheville, NC. It's an effort to make it funny, to acknowledge it, to let people know that you notice, to make you feel better about it cause you're in on how fucked up it is so you can't be a perpetrator of racism. I'm not sure it's very funny. It's good to acknowledge it, better than to pretend it's neutral or absent. But I can't help feeling that this is a handy little tool to make folks feel better about it instead of getting mad about it. Instead of asking hard questions about why that is; instead of doing something about it.


The people who I'm thinking of have excused racist behavior as "just a part of things." which, yea, is obviously true, but the whole point of bringing up how things are racist is to change the fact that they are a part of things, not to prove that alien's must be temporarily inhabiting the flesh of these usually-normal-but-suddenly-extraterrestrially-racist people. These jokes come from people who say things like "all people have a responsibility to know what compost is," clearly assuming middle-class, mildly-liberally-educated, and most likely white people. These are, I assure you, not bad people. They are just isolated in a white-dominated culture that teaches people how to think critically about earth practices but not how to think critically about modern race in the U.S.

These jokes come from me too, so what's that? Comedy can play a huge role in getting folks to talk about what they don't want to talk about. With all of the controversy around Daniel Tosh's fiercely defended rape jokes, it's clear that there's a real re-evaluation of the role of comedy needed in this country. Comedians have long held an important role in airing out dirty laundry, getting a nation to see what it wants to ignore. But it can also reify bullshit. So if I respond to someone's comment about a black person with "What? a black person in Asheville?" what does that do? My intention is to show how ridiculously homogenous it is here. The snarl of my lip is there because this upsets me. But am I actually just doing what white people have done for ages and ages - made jokes at the expense of people of color? normalize racism?

well shit. I'm going to have to think about this.