Real Kinda Hatred

White boys definitely not being gaslighting, segregationist, confederate trash. They’re just exercising free speech. Get over it, libs!

Hey y’all, this is Lance. I’m still working on the Jayhawks/Bettie Serveert podcast and that should be good to go by the end of next week. But first, I wanted to give family members this bonus episode. I know I said something about Bill Hicks, but I actually wanna revisit Thelonious Monster. My discussion about “Colorblind” was initially headed in a different direction, but it derailed the rhythm of the episode. However, I think that initial direction is worth exploring, so what I’ve done is excerpted the part of the episode y’all already heard and I built on it. We’re gonna join Thelonious Monster lead singer Bob Forrest on stage where he’s introducing the song “Colorblind.” Hope you enjoy.

Before I lived here (Huntington Beach), I lived in Inglewood with my mom and dad and we lived in these houses that all looked the same. Every house on the block looked exactly the same. It was an all-white area, there was no black people or Mexican people anywhere near this environment.  And in one house these black people moved in and it was such a tragic thing in our family. We couldn’t live on the same block as black people. So, my dad put the house up for sale, we moved, and this is a song about that experience.”
–Bob Forrest intro to “Colorblind” at The Golden Bear, Huntington Beach, CA, February 7, 1991

Probably my favorite song about racism not involving Ras Kass or Ice Cube. “Colorblind” is not a sweeping broadside like “The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll,” yet it’s no less effective in exposing white supremacy to the harsh light of truth. It’s one thing to tackle the subject as an adult, but Bob’s masterstroke is writing the song from the perspective of his 6-8 year old self. His world is Marco Polo, Slip ‘n’ Slide, and playing hoops with Michael Johnson. He doesn’t yet understand that redlining in Los Angeles WAS Jim Crow and that SoCal police departments, exemplified by William Parker’s LAPD — and later Daryl Gates’ LAPD — loved being vicious dogpack racists just as much as Bull Connor’s redneck armada. There’s no way young Bob could possibly comprehend that whites drive blacks out of neighborhoods for the exact same reason cops murder unarmed black people. Both groups see whiteness as a thing to serve and protect at all costs and blacks as less than human, essentially deserving what they get.

“They said it wasn’t a question of race
It was just property values”

This lyric is dead-on brilliant because it ties directly to the history of redlining and nails with surgical precision how the first rule of white supremacy is: DO NOT TALK ABOUT WHITE SUPREMACY. If you don’t talk about it, don’t address it, then it doesn’t exist. I mean, Bob heard all the men in the neighborhood getting trashed and hate vomiting n-bombs at the bar in the back of his house. He may have been a little kid, but he knew they were talking about his friend Michael. And yet, these fragile-ass white dudes couldn’t even admit it was race. They hid behind property values, as if property values were a scientific concept like gravity and not a subjective assessment of value based on waspy notions of good and bad neighborhoods. That’s why the second rule of white supremacy is: Gaslight yourself first and you’ll find gaslighting everyone else is as easy as flipping a switch.

Charlottesville, Virginia, August 11, 2017

In the intro to “Colorblind” Bob says, “Before I moved here, I lived in Inglewood with my mom and dad and we lived in these houses that all looked the same.” This is underappreciated history. I think because Los Angeles is such a transient city, its local history is often overlooked as being representative of the American experience. Fact is, majority-minority neighborhoods like Inglewood, Gardena, and Compton were bastions of whiteness in the 1950s and ‘60s, and I do mean bastions in the siege warfare sense. Suburbs were specifically created and rigidly defined after World War Two as a place for whites to segregate themselves from scary ethnics. When I called this Jim Crow, it’s because that’s what it was.

In a video entitled, “Before the 1950s, the Whiteness of Compton was Defended Vehemently,” Josh Sides, a historian at CSU Northridge, says:

“The move of African-Americans to Los Angeles is really quite slow until World War Two. Nonetheless, the population increases just enough by the 19-teens that white homeowners become very concerned that their property values are gonna decline as a result of the black influx. There's a curious thing about this and that is this: whites believe then, and I think now, that the arrival of black people in their neighborhood will lower property values. And the really troubling reality is, that that is true. The arrival of black people does usually lower property values, but not, of course, because of any material difference, but simply because real estate is all about perception. If you looked at the Federal Housing Administration studies during World War Two, they actually found that blacks defaulted at a lower rate on their mortgages than whites did. But it doesn't really matter.

Real estate is never really about true value. It's about perceptual value. And in this case, the perception that blacks would lower value meant that in reality, the values did decline. And so (there was) white paranoia about that decline, even when whites did not think of themselves as racists. In fact, in LA they really distanced themselves from that sort of malicious Southern racism, but of course, whether they were racists or not was sort of immaterial because they entered into agreements that kept blacks out of their neighborhoods and they defended those agreements very vehemently."

“Whether they were racists or not was sort of immaterial.” That is a banner phrase and says a lot about how white supremacy works, not just in Los Angeles, and not just in the deep south, but everywhere. Check this out. In 1957, the formerly all-white Levittown, Pennsylvania, suburb entered crisis mode when, like “Colorblind,” a black family had the unmitigated gall to move into the suburb. I’m gonna play you three reactions to this news.

Let’s get Klan Mom outta the way first. This unpleasant woman looks like a fucking cigarette burning on hot asphalt.

Klan Mom – Excerpt 1

OG Karen gives us transparent racism, terrible child rearing (a double tie-in to “Colorblind”), disgust at the thought of race mixing and mixed families (hey, I think she’s talking about me!), she promotes the idea that a single family moving in is “pushing their way in,” as if it were a literal act of violence we get the hilariously ironic nod to education and bettering themselves, two things confederate whites abjectly despise [laughs], and she finishes with an alley oop slam dunk of a phrase, “I’ll do what I can to help” … wait for it … “get them out legally and peacefully.”

We don’t need to belabor Klan Mom and her ilk. They’re Norman Rockwell terrorist cells. However, I was wrong about the first rule of white supremacy. Clearly, the concept is front and center in these people’s lives. They talk and panic and obsess about their perceived superiority that in reality the first rule of white supremacy is: Do not challenge white supremacy. We can talk about it, around it, or best of all, act like it’s not there. But it cannot be challenged.

Terribly Shocked – Excerpt 2

You might be thinking, “LD, she seems cool AND has a sexy voice. What’s the problem?” Coolness and sexiness aside, how can any white person in 1957 say with a straight face, “I was terribly shocked to find that there were people in this community who would be so violently opposed to (a black family moving in). I rather thought that everyone would just accept it as I would.” WHAAAATTT??? We’re barely two years removed from Emmett Till’s murder and the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and you know what was happening simultaneous with William and Daisy Myers getting terrorized by Levittown racists? The Little Rock Nine were trying to enter Central High School in Arkansas and literally staring down the National Guard and packs of snarling, barking caucasians. So Kathleen Turner, who admitted she reads the paper and listens to the radio to get news, is terribly shocked that racism exists?!?! Bitch please.

White supremacy isn’t just cops and firehoses. It’s largely about social control and arguably for whites even more than non-whites. This is how you get nice complacent middle class caucasians who do nothing as vicious dogpack racists set the actual moral tone for the community, reifying the bigotry through a kind of willful social agnosticism. To be fair, the Myers family was eventually supported by whites willing to fight the fascists, who predictably backed down once they were met with a show of force. The police also went through the motions of enforcing the law just enough that white mobs finally stopped burning crosses on the Myers’ lawn and yes that actually happened.

Which brings us to the third reaction to the news of a black family moving in.

A White Problem – Excerpt 3

There it is. Thank you white lady from 1957. When George Wallace said, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" about five years after this Levittown integration panic, he wasn’t talking about the law. He knew which way the judicial winds were blowing. Wallace was speaking for all segregationists, who were never EVER going to intellectually, psychologically, or emotionally integrate, even if they formally comply with the law. And they were always gonna see themselves as superior, despite all evidence to the contrary.

How white supremacists appear on the inside. Keep your flamethrowers handy!

My theory is that white supremacy is a disorder like alcoholism or drug addiction and it exists in a similar world of rigid binaries: drunk, not drunk, high, not high, white, not white. Wallace didn’t say, “OK, gimme a tight five-minute presentation on integration and maybe we’ll give it a try.” He said, “Segregation forever” because there’s never any middle ground or compromise with fascists. Like drunks and like junkies, white supremacists will contort themselves into any position, however nonsensical or contradictory, to get their way. They will lie, cheat, steal, and murder, if necessary. Did you ever see John Carpenter’s version of The Thing? I read it as an allegory for how white supremacy violently assimilates each individual from the inside out until one thing is indistinguishable from another thing.

“The houses all look the same sometimes
I’d even run into the Freemans next door
Thinking it was ours”

I don’t know whether the Forrests actually lived next door to the Freemans, but that is a wonderful lyrical touch. It’d be easy to read that as free man = white man. That’s probably even what Bob intended. But, I read it ironically. In an environment where identical houses are filled with so many identical people thinking identical thoughts, there is no one less free than some cookie cutter white bigot. In fact, the only person free in that entire song was the kid in the first or the second or the third grade.

Which brings us back to the intro to “Colorblind.” What does Bob say? “Before I moved here, I lived in Inglewood with my mom and dad.” In other words, “here” was where the family moved at the end of the song. Well, that audio clip comes from a February 7, 1991, performance at The Golden Bear in Huntington Beach. And I know this because I drove 11 hours down from Chico to attend because there was no way I was missing the Monster in my hometown. Big Drill Car, one of the two Orange County bands opening, got me and a few others on the list. (And for the record, it was not the classic Golden Bear on PCH, but a brief resurrection of the name in a nearby location.)

21-year-old me after the Monster show in HB, wearing the shirt they sold at the merch table, and pointing to my signed Stormy Weather liner notes. February 7, 1991.

Same liner notes today. November 30, 2021.

Between the “Colorblind” intro and a brief mention of Golden West College, the JC right down the street from my house, in “Michael Jordan,” Bob made a few HB-specific references during the set. So, I asked him about it after the show and he admitted that his family moved from Inglewood to Huntington Beach, he briefly attended Golden West, as I had a few years earlier, AND he also went to Marina High School, the high school from which my brother Craig and I both graduated. As I noted in my previous bonus episode:

In June 1976 I moved to Huntington Beach, a coastal fantasyland dominated by insulated white people whose insatiable pursuit of status symbols definitely wasn't masking deep-seated insecurity.

I wrote that long before I knew I’d be talking about the Monster, so it’s nice to have one of my favorite songwriters and a former resident of HB back me up in song form. “Colorblind” certainly confirms my “insulated white people with deep-seated insecurity” thesis. As for “insatiable pursuit of status symbols masking deep-seated insecurity,” I think Bob’s got that one covered as well.

“Mercedes Benz and necklaces
Have long been divided
He needs a personal license plate
And she needs a new man to hold

And everybody's wondering what's gone wrong
With all their daughters and with all their sons
But if they look at themselves just once in while
If they look at themselves they wouldn't wonder why
Anymore”

Despite our shared experience of ending up in HB and people wondering what’s gone wrong with their goofball son, there was no Mercedes, no personalized license plate, and sure as hell no jewelry worth mentioning in the Davis household. Our family wasn’t materialistic in the slightest, especially relative to our neighbors. More significantly, though, we weren’t white. Well, my dad was white, but my mom was Japanese, which made Craig and I hapa, half-white and half-Japanese, which can also be read as not quite white, not quite Asian. And while I experienced some direct racism during my time in HB, that didn’t really bother me. Far uglier was the constant barrage of racial slurs uttered casually by white friends and acquaintances. Which begs the question, if you’re surrounded by racist trash and status hawks are you sure you’re in a good neighborhood???

Lemme pop in real quick to say that my brother lived for years on 20th St, which means those flyers were a block over from his old apartment. That is all.

FYI, the live version of “Real Kinda Hatred” heard at the end of the episode is from McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, August 10, 1991. It was one of Martyn Lenoble’s earliest gigs as Thelonious bassist, maybe even his first. As much as I love Bob’s vocal and the wah-wah guitar, Martyn’s bass might be the best part of the performance.