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Riding along in that bus, all of us waiters who just happened to be
black started joking about the outcome of this mysterious gig in
plantation vernacular. You know, like
 With the horrible Island looming around us, we brought out the modern voice of the deconstructed black male, rather than the reconstructed voice of the destroyed black male. We dug deep into the stock racist stereotype icons that have been used against us for years, from Uncle Rastus to Stepin Fetchit to the reactionaries like Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy--the images that have been described as a self-fulfilling prophesy of who we are and will always be. It was like we had grabbed up every denigrating image of blacks over the last 400 years, put them in a blender and refined them as a piece of spiritual humor to protect us from this job. We knew it was going to be an experience that would call for us all to reach down somewhere deep inside, and we were powerless to stop it. You had to poke fun in order to survive. |
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