The Marketing of Race

The coffee tastes like regret. I’m sitting here, staring at my phone, that little black mirror of all our modern sins, and I’m thinking about last night.

And I’m not thinking about the woman. Not really. I’m thinking about the sickness.

The date was just a symptom, a single, ugly pustule on the skin of a much deeper disease. You go out there, into the meat market, you put on your clean shirt and your best lies, and you hope for a little bit of warmth, a little bit of honest-to-God human connection. And what do you get? You get a front-row seat to the end of the goddamn world.

She was a beautiful black woman. A real knockout, on the surface. The kind of woman who makes you forget, for a little while, that the whole damn thing is a rigged game. We were on our second date, at one of those fancy ranch places where they sell you a view of the sunset for twenty bucks a glass. I was playing the part, the gentleman. I held her hand, I kissed her. The whole goddamn song and dance.

But there was nothing there. A beautiful, empty box. I kept trying to find a way in, asking her questions, trying to get a read on who the hell she was behind the pretty mask. “What do you do? What do you like?” And all I got was a collection of vague, empty answers. It’s a strange and terrible thing, to be sitting across from a beautiful woman and feel absolutely nothing, like you’re talking to a well-dressed mannequin. It’s a loneliness that’s worse than being alone.

We were sitting outside, under the stars, eating their overpriced food, playing the part of two civilized human beings who might actually like each other. The air was cool, the wine was decent, and the whole goddamn thing was a beautiful, quiet lie.

And then, somehow, we stepped on the landmine. The topic of race.

And the shit just came out of her mouth. Not like a conversation. No. It was a sudden, ugly eruption, like a geyser of stored-up poison, a passionate, pre-programmed tirade that had nothing to do with me, or her, or the quiet desert night. The whole goddamn evening didn’t just go up in flames; it was revealed as a fraud from the start.

She had this idea, this pre-packaged, ready-to-eat narrative that the whole slavery conversation was new, something Trump cooked up. And I’m sitting there, the wine tasting like acid in my mouth, thinking, Christ, I’ve been hearing this shit since I was a kid. She was talking about history, but it wasn’t history. It was a legacy, a brand, a goddamn marketing campaign. They take the words, they squeeze them, they twist them, but they never get to the goddamn truth.

And in that moment, with all that programmed bullshit spewing out of her mouth, she wasn’t a person anymore. She was a goddamn press release, a product of some brilliant, evil marketing. A walking, talking, beautifully-dressed collection of talking points she’d downloaded from the great, sad, and completely bankrupt church of modern victimhood.

And I’d had enough. I had to take a bite, just for my own goddamn entertainment.

“The truth is,” I interjected, my voice a little too loud, “if you want to talk about the slave trade, you have to talk about the Africans. They were the primary beneficiaries. They got rich selling their own competition, their own rivals, down the river. Slavery was already a booming business in Africa before the first white man ever set foot on the continent. The Arabs, the other African kingdoms, they were all in on it. You can still find statues in their capital cities today, honoring the rich black bastards who made their fortunes selling other black bastards.”

And right on cue, she gave me the line. “Oh, that’s just Fox News,” she hissed, her voice dripping with a contempt she hadn’t earned. “That’s all lies.”

And that’s when I knew for sure. This wasn’t a conversation; it was an interrogation by a true woke believer. It was a religion. Her victimhood, her “systemic racism,” that’s her god. It’s the warm, comfortable, and completely un-falsifiable explanation for every failure, every bad decision, every empty space in her own goddamn soul. You can’t argue with that. You can’t present facts. You can’t show her the goddamn numbers. It’s like trying to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and it annoys the pig.

“And the real kicker?” I chimed in, really enjoying the burn of it all now. “The Africans, they’ve moved on. They’re not sitting around, picking at the same old scabs. It’s an American phenomenon, this obsession with a past that’s not even yours.”

You got to be kidding me. She had a white ex-husband, a half-white kid, and she was still sitting here, playing the part. She was a coward. A woman who had been given every opportunity—beauty, education, a life in a country where she could sit across from a man like me and spit in his face without fear—and she had chosen the easiest, laziest, and most pathetic identity available to her: the victim.

This woman, from San Diego, no accent, educated, everything seemed normal. But she was wearing her skin like a goddamn uniform. And she wanted me to wear one, too. “You need to read the Woke book,” she told me. “You need to go watch Roots.”

Why the fuck do I need to watch any of that shit? What the fuck does it have to do with you? You live in Tucson. You speak just like me. You’re just another triple-crutchy little fucker who’s found a good excuse to be a miserable cunt. And I’m not buying it.

This isn’t just about one woman. It’s about the whole goddamn country. We’re turning into a nation of press releases, of people who have traded their own messy, beautiful, and completely unique souls for a pre-packaged, ready-to-wear identity. You’re not a man anymore; you’re a collection of privileges. You’re not a woman; you’re an intersection of oppressions. And none of you have anything real to say. You’re all just reading from the same tired, old script.

And that, right there, that’s why I have to leave. That’s why a place like Argentina, with all its real, honest-to-God problems—the corruption, the poverty, the chaos—looks like a goddamn paradise to me. Because at least their problems are real. At least they’re fighting over something tangible, like food, or money, or power. We’re fighting over phantoms. Over pronouns. Over grievances that are a hundred and fifty years old.

I hate people with crutches. I hate the victimhood. I get it. The world isn’t fair. Short people don’t get to be CEOs. Bald men don’t get as much ass. Not everyone makes a hundred and fifty grand a year. The hot water isn’t always hot enough. That’s not a racial problem; that’s just the ugly, beautiful, and completely indifferent business of being alive.

But to blame every goddamn failure, every bad decision, every empty space in your own soul on the color of your skin? That’s not a crutch; that’s a goddamn prison. And you’re the one holding the key.

I drove her back to her apartment. The conversation was dead. I was exhausted. She leaned in, gave me a kiss, and said, “I had a really great time.”

I just looked at her. A man, a nice guy, still handsome, I’d gone out of my way for this. Thirty minutes there, thirty minutes back. Two hundred bucks down the drain. For what? To go home alone and jerk off into a nylon sock.

On the drive home, I texted her. “This is not how I intended this night to go,” I wrote. “I’m very disappointed.”

She texted back, “It’s great that we can have a disagreement and still be on the same footing. I had a great night. I really enjoyed the conversation.”

And I just thought, “I bet you did, you reverse-racist bigot.”

It’s such a turn-off. It makes you not want to date them anymore. I think I’m done. My eating on the side of the turkey is over. No more legs and backs. I’m just going to stick with the thighs and the breast.

Sprinkled with a little blonde hair and blue eyes.