The Nineties were a different time, kids. It was the kind of era where, in the aftermath of horrifying riots in Los Angeles, David Alan Grier and Jim Carrey could appear in a sketch on the comedy program In Living Color as beating victims Rodney King and Reginald Denny, and declare, “Staying in school and staying off drugs is fine, but it ain’t gonna do you any good at all if you don’t have sense enough to stay in your car. See, we were stupid! We got out of our car. We didn’t use our heads and look what happened. We may have won the battle, but the early bird got the worm.”Ha ha, yeah that was funny, what the fuck tho.
You Millennials and Generation Z kids wonder why we in Generation X can be so tasteless and shocking in our humor and tastes? Try having your formulative years shaped by sketch comedy shows, National Lampoon’s, Gary Larson’s Far Side, and comedians like Sam Kinison...Don't leave, I'll skip the rest of the Grandpa part.
I can’t find it online, but I recall another In Living Color sketch that depicted whites rioting after a jury acquitted the attackers of Reginald Denny. The sketch was funny because of the inherent absurdity: Wealthy, comfortable white people don’t burn down their own neighborhoods, no matter how angry they are about any particular event.
But every group feels anger at some point, even if they don’t express it in an easily visible way.
After the L.A. riots and the O. J. Simpson case, a few cultural observers argued that wealthy, comfortable white people “rioted” in a different way.He explains by quoting Roger Boesche from the L.A. Times on all the service cuts and economic immiseration the black community suffered after the riots. In part:
So how do white people riot? They riot by eliminating affirmative action so that jobs and education will be more readily available to whites; by voting to deny services like education and health care to illegal immigrants; by declaring English as the official language and attacking bilingual education; by leaving 38 million people in poverty — 30.6 percent of all African Americans and 30.7 percent of all Latinos.Now, this sounds to me like a bad reaction to the riots that just kept the wounds festering and led to the present explosion, which has to be Geraghty's point, right? Ha ha ha, guess you never read his shit before! After some yap about how "there are probably quite a few Americans outraged by the sights of statues of Christopher Columbus or other figures from history being beheaded or pulled down" -- I guess he doesn't name them because they're all Confederates! -- Geraghty warns:
There will be a backlash to these actions, but not in the form of the “white people’s riot” that In Living Color imagined. That backlash may come at the ballot box, or it may come in some other indirect form. Some people aren’t interested in direct confrontation in the streets. They may simply prefer to express their opposition in a way that these protesters expect it least — businesses moving out, reluctance to hire, reluctance to visit a neighborhood, effectively abandoning a community. Not every wall that is built is physical and visible. But one way or another, the reaction is coming.Next to no black people are reading Bill Buckley's White Supremacist magazine. Geraghty's message is mainly going out to his honky rightwing readers who have seen the latest polls and are getting the sick feeling that they might not be able to just beat, gas, and shoot more protesters to get out of this fix. So I reckon it's meant as a comfort: Relax, we have ways of dealing with this -- we did it before, and we can do it again.
Thing is, the rest of us see this stuff too, and have our own reaction.
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