One Day When I Was Walking, Walking to the Fair... (but not really)

Last Friday morning, as I walked the few blocks from the metro to my job, I was feeling myself HARD. Heads turned as sashayed down the street; my ensemble was on point (of course), and my 24” Indian Remy flowed beautifully in the early morning breeze. Birds were chirping, flowers were in full bloom. And it was payday! Couldn’t nobody tell me nothing! 

But my TGIF-induced euphoria soon came to an abrupt halt.

As I arrived at the corner of 19^th and Pennsylvania and waited for the light to change, a scruffy-looking homeless man approached me. He looked me up and down with disdain in his eyes and said snidely,

“Ya know, there’s a country that some U.S. troops set up for your kind back in the 1800s, called Liberia. Why don’t you go back there?”  

He didn’t wait for a response, but as he walked away, he muttered,

“Damn n-ggers are out here with jobs and sh-t, and I can’t even feed my f-ckin white family.”

…Sir.

First of all, you better be extremely grateful that I am now saved and sanctified, because if you had DARED to utter those words to me during my heathen days, it is very possible that those comments could’ve landed you in the hospital. Homeless or not, I wouldn’t have thought twice about giving your poverty-stricken self a swift round-house kick in the side of your head.

And my kicks are powerful. I took Tae Kwon Do.

Second of all, let’s be real. The fact that I’M in this country has ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY no correlation with the fact that YOU’RE homeless. Now, I don’t know anything about your background, but chances are your homelessness can be at least partially attributed to some piss-poor decision making on your part. Is it my fault that you decided to spend most of your earnings on alcohol (which you reeked of) or other illicit substances, which probably led to the downward spiral of you losing your job and your home?

Nah, that’s all you boo.  

Now, let’s look at the issue from a more statistical perspective, shall we? We shall.

Black people only make up roughly 12% of the country’s population, and while the national unemployment rate continues to hover around 9%, the unemployment rate for blacks is closer to 20%. 20%!! So although you clearly have it pretty bad, there are many more black people in your same position, if not worse off. To be really real, the simple fact that we’re black automatically means that we have it worse than you.

But let’s just suppose that every negro and negrette in America actually decided to go back to Africa. Yes, there would be fewer people in the country, thus naturally reducing the job to laborer ratio, but that would happen regardless of which segment of the population suddenly left, even if it were Asians, Latinos, or Italians. Let’s go even further and suppose that blacks made up a large enough segment of the population such that a mass exodus would decrease the job to laborer ratio to 1:1. Basic macroeconomic principle tells us that no matter the state of a nation’s economy, zero unemployment doesn’t actually exist, even if a market is in perfect equilibrium.  The theory of the frictional rate of unemployment proves that there will ALWAYS be a prevailing level of unemployment, simply because there are always people moving in and out of the labor force (i.e. recent graduates, people changing jobs, etc).

So, dear homeless man, if you haven’t gotten my point by now, let me sum it up for you.

Shut the hell up and have a seat. In fact, have two seats.

Because if you’re homeless now, your racist behind would probably be homeless in better times anyway.

I swear, all these enemies of progress just won’t let me be great!

-The Extraordinaire