Trash comes in all colors (Quick notes on a post-racial America).

I intend to spend the night working at the studio. There are couple of paintings that I want to finish but I’m not sure how. I will go first to the local liquor store for a bottle of Merlot so help me find a solution to the aesthetic riddle I’m stuck with. I’m debating myself which way should I go? The Greek, classical way, or the Romantic/Expressionist, German way? We Cubans chose the Russians over the Americans, Tio Stiopa -ДЯДЯ СТЕПА- over Uncle Sam, Ciburaska over Mickey Mouse trying to build ourselves from the ground up after a New Man archetype. To be Cuban is to be perennially involved in a quest for identity. We struggle between white or black. We are the bubbling fume in the mulatto lab tube, thinking we are superior that the rest of Latin Americans, being neither Latinos, nor white Europeans.
The wild call to arms of your individuality rising up to explosion, ascertaining your personality. Your bones and tendons refusing to accommodate, rejecting to conform, to be the same, gray, mutual, mass. The American born to be wild. After all the mass needs the lead of new ideas and unseen horizons were to move forward.
Which way should I go? The way of education, master degree, PhD in philosophical pains of sadistic ideo-frustrated professors. Attain a certain level of knowing about the history of how we came to be illustrated savages of barbarian Parternon. Distinguish myself by wearing a tie, maybe a lose tie to signal that I’m not a greedy materialistic pig despite my middle class gloss but a man of letters. Or should I go the way of aberrant obscurantist who happen to be Cuban and use his Cubanness to extol a sense of superiority that he will never have in order to justify his beastly idiocy and Harpyan arrogance? The big motherfucker with his rice and beans pork tire belly who doesn’t move when you says “excuse me” at the local Newjersian liquor store and you ask him to get his vomit ass out your way in order to grab the bottle of wine that would give some aspirinical relieve from the mediocrity that is to be uneducated and presume to be proud of.
Then comes a Cuban black guy in sleeveless shirt and this white trash who happens to be originally from Havana tells him “ Negro y en camiseta: ladron (black and sleeveless equals to thief”). I wan to spit in his face, break his nose and marked him forever to society as racist scum, a sputum of pretentious difference. Then he goes “ The town is full of bedbugs, they come from Center America, this people, they don’t wash their sheets”. How does he know that Center American immigrants doesn’t wash their sheets? My stomach is revolving and feel like throwing in his face. I’m eager to punch him so bad but I remained silent, swallowing the chauvinism that emanates from his stinking glorious path as a Marielito. There is this theory that I threw some years ago when somebody asked me why Cubans were so vulgar and uneducated. I answered that there are two types of Cubans, the ones that are educated, have good manners, they know how to behave in public, they know how to pronounce words correctly; and there is this other Cuban type, uneducated, ominously vulgar, street wise, lazy, who doesn’t even bother to learn to speak English and that is the kind I happened to come across today at the liquor store.
The first group, the educated, belong either to the first wave of exiles that came during the 60’s. They belonged to well off families, either middle class or high class, sophisticated in manners and uses due to their privileged backgrounds. There is also another educated group made of youth that managed to escape Cuba after getting a degree from a University. Those are artists, filmmakers, engineers, architects, doctors, etc who happen to have an academic education but who some times slip into some kind of vulgarity in expressions and manners due to the general state of decomposition of the society in which they grew up.
And there is the Mariel generation. Most of them, for sure, are good people, well mannered and educated. But among them there is this social scum that Fidel Castro got the opportunity to get rid of in the Mariel boat lift, among them criminals and the mentally ill taken directly out of prisons and mental institutions. The very low–low of the social scale who came 30 years ago to this country and still think and behave like they never got out of Cuba. By looking at him I know this guy is in his 50’s –and still capable of talking so much non-sense. He is one of the trash Marielitos, part of the third of the total of them, the social ejection that Castro missiled to Carter. And because of him I realized that all the people at this store that are paying attention to his mouth crap are going to perceive me and all the Cubans like me as if we think like him, we are like him, racists, bigots, xenophobic and chauvinists. I wish I could send him back to Cuba.
He is the Cuban white trash. But to be fair, there are not only Cuban trashes in American society. There is the archetypical American white trash; the Mexican immigrant trash distinguished from the educated, well off Mexican who usually comes only to the States on vacation or because he has a high paid job here. The Dominican trash, discriminated by the Puerto-Rican trash. The black, un-adapted trash that blames and justify everything with tales of centuries old slavery. Trash comes in all colors.
We are now moving into a post-racial American world. But, really? There is no doubt that after Obama’s presidency black discrimination has receded and perception of Afro-Americans in society has improved. What about the other colors of the racial spectrum? What about the discrimination of Latinos by Latinos? Puerto-Rican against Dominican; Dominican versus Haitian; Argentinian versus the rest. What about discrimination of Asians against Asians, such as Japanese against Chinese, Chinese against Vietnamese, Vietnamese against Cambodian, Korean against Japanese? This is what I see only in the surface of things. We are certainly moving into a post white against black racial world but what about the other colors? After all racism and xenophobia is polychromatic.
Maybe in a truly post-racial world I won’t have to be looking for solutions about which to go regarding aesthetic preferences. In a world with no racism and xenophobia Greek columns would stand only for their mathematical proportions and their intrinsic beauty, and not for their connotation of white culture and Western ethnocentrism and imperialism. German expressionism will only be a scream of the ID and not an indictment of European rationalism. It would be easy to chose forms and styles based on what they denote, what they express and makes you feel and not what they connote in terms of political and ideological implications. And I won’t have to try to figure out all day long what I’m, black, white or mulatto and how to paint accordingly since those questions would have no meaning or relevance anymore.