Crashing down

**Warning: This post contains explicit language. Parental guidance is highly suggested...if you care.

I just finished watching the movie Crash not even 30 minutes ago. The last time I cried that hard, I was mourning over my city.

In summary, the movie stirred the shit out of my emotions because it dealt with racism, a subject that is on the top of my list of subjects that make me fucking angry. I never knew that racism was going to be the main theme of the film. It's not like I would not have rented it if i knew, I simply would have been better prepared.

For those of you readers who haven't seen it, rent it. Borrow it. Buy it. I just highly recommend that you get your hands on it.

There were so many disturbing scenes. Many of them makes you reflect on your own life and the experiences that you have had.

One thing I couldn't get out of my mind is my own views. As I stated above, I hate racism with a passion. I strongly dislike people who will simply not open their eyes and see that there is more to life than stereotypical labels. I was shocked to learn about a side of my dad that I never knew existed when, years ago, my parents and I had a casual conversation about dating. After I jokingly stated that there were times when I wanted to date a black guy just to peeve off my somewhat racist grandma. My dad countered with "she's not the one you need to worry about" quite sternly and very seriously. I was speechless. I gave a look to my mom, with her only explanation of my dad's view (which even surprised my mom) was that he was his mother's son. I can't exactly say that makes things any better.

The older I get, the more I realize that society plants the seed for these racist views. I mean that more in the sense of communities. I'm surrounded by a lot of white folk who speak of black people as if they are a disease. Here's an example:

I grew up in the Westminister subdivision down here in LA. My parents bought it less than a year before I was born. I loved growing up there. It was a cultural haven, with a mixture of white, black and Asian people living on our street. (Though I must point out, there really was that many families the were white, maybe 1/3.) The neighborhood was great. It was like a big family. Unfortunately, only five years after being born, a hurricane blew in and flooded the entire subdivision. about 1/3 (no, not the white 1/3, silly) of the neighborhood said the heck with it and moved out. We stayed and watched over the next 15 years a decline in our neighborhoods character. It no longer was diverse, with more black families moving in. The people that moved in didn't seem to be considerate or heck, not even nice. A man called the police on my dad b/c my dad went over to the guy's house to ask him to watch his trash. (It mysteriously kept appearing in our backyard. The guy lived behind us.) We all realized after that, the neighborhood we knew was no more. What kind of neighborhood is it when you can't even settle your problems without the police being involved? We moved about two years after. We lived there for 23 years, and the only thing we were going to miss was our next door neighbor who were there since day one.

Now every once in awhile I get asked where I grew up from my customers at the local restaurant I work at. Now get this, every single time I tell them Westminister, there eyes bug out and the question always arises from their lips, "Isn't that a black neighborhood?" You can here in their voices a "WTF were you doing living there?" The same theory is always told to me that the neighborhood went downhill b/c of "the blacks" moved in. I swear, they talk about them as if they were roaches, those mother-fucking bastards. How small minded can you get?

My upbringing was a combination of people of different cultures, extremely open-minded, and a combination of subtle racists. I seen comedy sketches of a black guy going undercover in the white world simply to see they act different when white is the only color around. Sadly, that is true in some places. I live in a city that has those crowds of people that think just b/c I'm white, I must think the same way they do.

I just wish that people werent so hung up on skin color and statistics. America refers to anyone who's not white to be a minority, when I don' think that's the case at all. It's us open-minded folk, who see what's going on around here. Those of us that can't seem to figure out when it will all end. It probably never will because we mainly live in a close-minded neighborhood.