Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [34]
The day after the L.A. riots began in 1992, when the mayhem had spread into the white neighborhoods near Beverly Hills and Hollywood, white people went into urgent survival mode. Thousands who live in the hills above Los Angeles fled. Thousands more stayed and brought out their guns. It appeared as if the racial Armageddon many had feared was upon us.
I was working out of a Warner Bros. office in Rockefeller Center in New York City. Word was passed throughout the building that everyone was to evacuate and head for home by 1:00 P.M. It was feared that blacks in New York might catch “riot fever” and go berserk. At 1:00 PM. I went out on the street, and what I saw I believe (and hope) I may never see again—tens of thousands of white people running down the sidewalks to get the next commuter train or bus out of town. It was like a scene from The Day of the Locust, wall-to-wall humans in a collective panic, moving as one, in fear for their lives.
Within half an hour, the streets were deserted. Empty. It was eerie, creepy. New York City, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week—and it looked like five A.M. on a Sunday morning.
I walked home to my neighborhood. Not really concerned about anything other than the fact that my pen had run out of ink, I stopped by the stationery store across the street from my apartment. It was one of the few businesses still open (most had closed and shuttered their windows). I picked up a couple of pens and some paper and went up to the counter to pay. There, at the cash register, stood the elderly owner—with a baseball bat on the counter in front of him. I asked him what the bat was for.
“Just in case,” he replied, eyes darting around to see what was happening outside on the street.
“Just in case of what?” I asked.
“You know, in case they decide to riot here.”
He wasn’t referring to L.A. rioters hopping on a plane and bringing their Molotovs here to toss around the Big Apple. What he had in mind—like everyone who was running to catch the last train home to the white suburbs—was the fact that our race problem has never really been solved, and that black America was harboring a lot of pent-up anger over the incredible disparity between the lives of blacks and whites in this country. That bat on the counter spoke volumes about the one basic unspoken fear all whites have: that, sooner or later, the blacks are going to rise up and get their revenge. We are all sitting on a racial tinderbox, and we know we better be ready when the victims of our greed come calling.
Well, hey, why wait for that to happen? Do you really want to let it get to that point? Wouldn’t you rather fix the problem than have to flee for your life as your house burns behind you? I know I would!
So I’ve put together some easy-to-follow survival tips that might help save your honky ass. Sooner or later—you know it and I know it—there are going to be millions of Rodney Kings knocking on your door, and this time they aren’t going to be the ones taking the beating.
If we are unwilling to take serious action to correct our race problem, chances are we’ll all end up having to live in a gated neighborhood, armed with semiautomatic weapons and a private security force. Now what fan is that?
SURVIVAL TIPS FOR WHITE AMERICA
1. Hire only black people.
I’m done hiring white people. Nothing against them personally, of course. They’re a dependable, hardworking lot. Those I’ve hired for my films and TV shows have been a great bunch.
But they are white.
How can I write what I’ve already written in this chapter when I’ve done little or nothing to correct the problem in my own backyard? Oh, sure, I could give you a hundred excuses for why it’s so hard to find African-Americans in this business—and they’d all be true. So what? So it’s hard? Does that absolve me of responsibility? I oughta be leading a picket of myself.