I reposted a story about a white model getting in black face for a photo shoot in French Vogue on Facebook and the response ranged from shock to indifference (mostly mine). Thing is, the whole premise of a racial slur is that the offender has to have or represent some kind of oppression. Like if a leaf blowing Mexican called me a “nigger” I’m almost 100% not going to care. I’ll be the nigger in his world, because his world ain’t big enough for me to give a shit about. No diss to all the hard-working leaf blowing Mexicans. Actually I use that as an example because a Mexican should be offended by me calling them a “leaf-blower,” because last I checked niggers weren’t doing the shit-work anymore. Black folks moved on in the 60s to government jobs and/or permanent victim-worshipping poverty (and increasingly less of the latter since the Obama Effect set in). Progress shouldn’t be rubbed in other people’s noses.

But more to the point, it’s the sign of an insecure people when a slur has to be met with outrage. Only victims fear the taunts of their oppressors. Black people, Staties, Carribeans and Continentals, have all endured enough of Western denigration and come out still swinging, still hustling. We don’t have to prove shit to anyone anymore about how Afro-fabulous we are. We built the pyramids, ET is Black and Jesus is the spitting image of my Uncle Pete. Does any Black person under the age of 50 doubt this?

So we should be throwing off our neurotic insecurity about words like Nigger and antique notions like blackface. These have never had anything to do with us. Like race itself, they are a European idea foisted on us. Giving in or pretending they have some meaning or ability to hold us back is de facto allowing them to do just that.

I’ve never read the book but I’ve heard good things. I think I understand the concept and what I do understand seems to relate to my own experiences.

Foremost, we are all originally at the mercy of our parents’ expectations. As a new parent, I see this quite clearly. My son is complete devoid of expectations. He does not know what happens if you fall down, pull Daddy’s hair, or eat rocks. He is innocent in every sense of the word, totally naive.

He is going around the world trying things, anything that occurs to him. Certain things occur to him because they’re built into his survival mechanisms and other things originate from the neurological randomizer we call free will. He wants to drop things, break things, pick things up and ultimately discover where he and they fit in the cosmos.

He doesn’t know he’s interested in the cosmos, obviously, but he is. In fact, he’s already hooked and cooking up ways to experience more shit.

This process is natural and inevitable, but it is not unconditional. There are other factors honing in on my son’s development that have to be taken into account. There is, after all, the world.

I, as Langston’s (my son) father, am a part of his world, a very special part of his world because I am in a position to limit and encourage certain types of otherwise completely innocent behavior. After I tell Langston to stop fucking with the remote control, he knows from then on Daddy doesn’t like it. It may take a while to sink in, but eventually after enough “No thank you’s” and a few hand slaps, he gets it. From then on, he has a real choice. Do I obey Daddy – the big guy who picks me up, changes me and makes me laugh sometimes – or do I transgress in my own interests?

It’s the Garden of Eden all over again, only I’m not God. I have a pretty good moral compass about what to do and not to – Don’t kill people, do help old ladies cross the street, etc… but I don’t know that a few crusty dumb-ass ideas aren’t getting thrown into the mix as well. Only now my kid takes my bullshit for gospel and now he’s on the side of stupid.

Or even more insidious. My kid turns out to be an accountant or something incredibly square and I can’t support him with it. I want him to be a famous poet or something. I may say the words, “I support you” all day but if I don’t mean them, I might as well just say, “I’m disappointed. I wanted something else from you.” Not FOR you, but FROM you.

This is what fucks kids up. Implanting something in them that they are supposed to want instead of what they do want. It completely destroys the internal joy compass. The kid starts doing what they think is supposed to make them happy and when it doesn’t, they blame themselves all the more. It never occurs to them that their parents might have led them astray or didn’t nurture them enough. The tragedy of the gifted child is that everything is always their fault, something that needs to be changed about them.

The even more astounding fact is that it’s my take that the majority of people are actually like this. It may be neurotic, but it’s commonplace. Most people are deformed in some way by the expectations of those they look up to. Whether it be a religious leader, a parent or the media, there is always someone telling them what they need to live up to and how they are so majorly failing.

I am wracked with this even to this day. I am 32-going-on-33 and I still feel this way. I still feel like whenever somebody doesn’t like me, it’s my fault. In my ordinary life dealing with real life people I can largely defuse this tick. I can control my thoughts, evaluate the other person and decide if their opinion really matters to me at all. But I find strangely enough, the symptoms are far worse when it comes to strangers and near-strangers. I feel personally shunned if someone doesn’t accept a friend request. I experience tangible rejection when someone drops me.

It takes me right back to being the new kid in the hood, the weird guy who played D&D and actually liked girls for more than jumping off. I’m right back to Me Vs. Them and all I want is someone to tell me, “You’re fine, they’re assholes, who needs em?” And not just anyone, but someone I trust, someone I respect, someone… unlike myself.

Because the real shame of doing this to our youngins and ourselves is that the gift each of us was sent here to deliver never gets realized. The path that needed to be taken never gets took. The perspective the world needs never gets seen.

Instead, you get a passive aggressive asshole honking at old ladies in the slow lane. You get middle class folks protesting to protect the rights of their owners. You have little girls dieting to death to look like creatures who exist only in Photoshop and little boys kicking the head’s in of other little boys because they don’t have the courage to kiss them.

You get, in a nutshell, our world.

I want something better for my son. I want his path to be his own, not the one I guilt him into taking. Parents like me should take a cue from the sufis who said, “Be joyful at sudden disappointment!” Because what we expect is usually the same old bullshit.

It’s occurred to me today while syncing up my Facebook to tweet and my Twitter to Facebook that it’s easier to post more links, music and trivia using those methods than going through my blog. I’m a guy that doesn’t like to fight the future and I can smell the winds of change in the air. So it occurred to me that maybe my blog is supposed to be something different from just a scrapbook. If a tool don’t cut, maybe it’s not a knife. Try scooping.

To wit, the effort of syncing my digital presence is causing me to evolve my ways. I’m seeing this blog isn’t so much a vehicle for posting a bunch of non sequiturs, it’s my public record – the New York Times of my existence on the web.

So I’m going to start using this to write out what I generally post in often disconnected rants on Twitter, interspersed with bits of digital flotsam that happen to catch my attention. You’ll still get all the stuff that vaguely interests me through my feed posts – Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg (I’m everywhere) plus get my personal perspective through my blog.

Now about my perspective…