Chris Z performs spoken word with The World Is A Beautiful Place at the Webster Theatre in Hartford. This piece, entitled "Tyler's Big Day Out" is a response to the very negative and hate-speech laden online reactions to a workshop Chris ran in April, one specifically aimed at the use of the word "nigga" by a bunch of white people.
From his Tumblr:
This is me.in April, i tried to hold a workshop in response to a white dude saying the words “get money nigga” at the end of one of his band’s songs. it didn’t go well. i was being “too pc” for people’s liking. they thought i was on a guilt tripping spree, trying to make them all feel racist. these people were defending the band’s right to say “nigga” so, i gotta say, they were being racist. i got called retarded, a retarded nigger, a faggot, a nigger faggot, etc etc. fuck that.you seem to think that because you don’t/ wear a white hood & burn crosses/ that you aren’t racist./that your “black friends” and vaguely left-leaning political views pre-ordain you to a lifetime supply of good dude credits. in 2012 when a Black youth is 7 times more likely than a white youth to be punished for a comparable offense in school, we are colorblind right?[i]when college educated Black people make less than their high school educated white counterparts, they are just unlucky right[ii]? or maybe not trying hard enough.when white authority places no value on Black life (see police brutality convictions[iii], stop and frisk procedures, etc) it’s all wrong place wrong time right?in 2012 racism exists in a bubble. tiny pockets in the South, in Arizona, but not here. not you.if anything us here in the North East have become too PC right? because one night i decided to try and call racism by its name. because your friends think that word is archaic. it’s funny. no harm done.i did my research. a study in 2011 (archaic) conducted by Penn State found that Black people often exhibit what they called Racial Battle Fatigue, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder/ the Poverty Clinic found that micro-transgressions against People of Color had not only psychological but also physical effects.Robert Carter, relooked at ‘Carson’s Conceptual Model for Trauma’ as it related to Race and the million tiny slights whites commit without thought.and there’s the Perilla Study (2002), Glenn Miller’s The Trauma of Insidious Racism, so on and so forthbut yet, when i tried to research the long-standing psychological damage of middle class white people being told to watch their fucking tongues… i was shocked to find none.but i guess what i forgot is: you are the expert right? cause people always call you…. oh wait. there isn’t a slur for you that denotes the 100’s of years of oppression,that indicates all the actions others commit that attempt to tell you that you aren’t even human, that triggers all the times your mother and grandparents ET ALL fought for the most basic rights and were continuously told they didn’t deserve those rights.that word doesn’t exist, does it?what i am getting at is, shut your fucking mouth you whiny goddamn overgrown babies and open your ears.because maybe you don’t wear a hood but defending the repeated saying of racist words under a guise not even as base as freedom of speech but that they aren’t harmful?well that’s fucking racism.
Someone tell Mindless Self Indulgence and My Chemical Romance.
