Friday, November 9, 2012

How I Made My Father Uncomfortable: Part 1

I know, you may be all like, "Whaa...? A 'Part 1' post? is there a second part? eighteen more parts? Is this the beginning of the middle three parts and then some indeterminate time  in the future you'll release three really high tech shitty first three parts and then sell the rights to some giant corporation so they can make the final three parts?" No no, my dears! I've just decided that this should be a series. There's another post I published some time ago that I'm thinking of also turning into a series, just because it kicked so much ass.

Truth be told, I've made my father uncomfortable enough times to write a really awkward book, which I may someday. I also contemplated calling this post: Questions My Father Wished He Couldn't Answer.

First off: My Dad is awesome. I just need to preface with this. He is a self-defined "recovering Catholic" which gives you an idea of his upbringing: A little up-tight (his upbringing, not him), importance of education, and there's some things you just don't talk about. He raised me with the company of my Mother, who is also awesome, but we'll save that for another post. My mother made it very clear to us childrens growing up that you should never be ashamed or scared to ask a question any question. Everything was on the table. You want to know what a penis is? Oh, she'll tell you what a penis is! Why boys have it and girls don't, what it's used for, all sorts of different things people do regarding the penis, why people are weird about saying the word penis and how silly that is, any medical conditions that she's aware of that can plague the penis, everything ever. My mother is the only person I know that could make a foul-mouthed trucker blush.

Okay, yeah, and probably me too.

In any case, I realized at a very young age that if I wanted to know everything about something: ask my mom, if I had a feeling something was socially sensitive and didn't want to know everything especially (and most often) because the answer I usually wanted was a definition, not a sociology paper, I should ask Dad. Poor Dad.

You should also know that I got about 50% of my U.S. history from the plethora of Doonesbury compilations we had around the house (and most of my humor for The Far Side, and most of my adorability from Calvin and Hobbes). Not only is my dad a pretty big fan, but we're actually related to B.D. Yeah. Related to B.D. Whatever, it's by marriage and some distant second-cousin something, but it's still pretty cool.



I can't find the exact strip to save my life, but I'll put it up as soon as I do. There was a particular series in the seventies in which a young suburban kid had moved to the big city and was all of a sudden surrounded by bustling diversity. On the bus ride to school there was a young and tough black kid who would always make fun of him, be mean to him, knock is books out of his hand, etc. The little boy (around 6-8, probably) was always really polite because he didn't want anyone to think he was racist.

Then one day, the little boy had enough, and the little black boy does something mean and the little white boy loses his shit and says, "You... you... YOU HONKY!" To which the other boy replies, "What did you say?" And that was the end of the strip. And the beginning of my fascination with the word honky.

I was probably about ten or eleven at the time and I brought the book to my dad and said, as I'm sure many parents become accustomed to, seemingly out of nowhere, "Daddy, what's a honky?" In retrospect, it's a good thing I brought the book with me because as soon as he saw it he understood that this was a contextual question, not one that had just sprung into my head, and not something I'd been called at school (hah, like I didn't go to school with nearly all honkies anyway).

The first ever Doonesbury strip. Published in the Yale school paper.


Thus it was explained to me that "honky" is a slang term, merely meaning "white person". "Is it mean?" I asked. "Not particularly." My dad answered. While at that point, I understood the joke, I had a whole new set of questions that I was free to ponder on my own, seeing as I had asked my father. If there's no other connotation to "honky" then why did the word come into existence? Why didn't people continue just to say, "white person" or "Caucasian"? Maybe there was another connotation to the word.

Bottom line: My personal theory is that honky doesn't have a specific connotation because we're boring fucking honkies.

Or maybe it really does, and every other race in the world is laughing their ass of at me right now. I kind of hope it's that.

Also: I really only wanted to write this post so I could use the word honky an obscene amount of times. I think that word is hilarious and I'd like to bring it back.

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