A Joke

by Tony Robles/PNN

Working for C & H Security is a trip. Been doing it little less than a year. You meet all kinds; people that have worked in other professions, traveled extensively by plane, train, bus or by not even leaving the ground. In security you are told your primary function is to observe and report; you’re told to be on the lookout for suspicious looking persons and/or activity. Some guys who do the job take it much too seriously, as if auditioning to appear on the TV show “cops” (as the pursuer, not the pursued, of course).

I have met interesting people; Latinos who have forgotten they are Latino, Samoans who share their last bit of food with you and others who walk, breathe, talk and love in their own way.

Some guards have forgotten that others like them (that is, those with arms, legs, noses, armpits, etc.) are human and not criminals. They make comments and tell jokes that show their petty biases and prejudices. One such cat is a Filipino guy who I worked with for several months. He would talk about black people at the supermarket he was hired to guard by the supermarket owners. He said that the black people had this black attitude. When people say this, what it means, as far as I am concerned is that black people somehow don’t love their elders, their mothers and fathers, their children. They don’t see the beauty in plants, the ocean, the moon, nature; that God doesn’t love them like he loves other people, and that, of course, they deserve to be locked up in a variety of jails or prisons, because that is, of course, where God thinks they should be. Then he told a joke that kind of went like this:

Where do you end up when you cross the Bay Bridge?

Answer: Africa (because of the large black population)

I got up and walked out of the room. Sometimes this happens. You can’t find the words to counter the stupidity and you feel like a coward afterward. I should have told him a little about the history of African-Americans in the Philippines, namely the Philippine-American War; a war in which the US took over the Philippines after the Spanish-American war. This war killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who were fighting the colonial Spanish and, after they had been defeated, were once again colonized by another colonial power, the US. Black soldiers from the US known as “Buffalo Soldiers” were sent to fight in the islands (as well as in Cuba). When many of the soldiers saw how the Filipinos were being shot and dehumanized, those soldiers jumped to the Filipino side and fought against the United States. I didn’t tell him this. Maybe he should have known. Maybe he did know and forgot, or maybe he knew and just didn’t give a damn.

But after a couple weeks I came up with a joke of my own

What do you call a Filipino guy working as a guard for C & H Security?

Answer: Nigga

© 2009 Tony Robles