Verbal Tightrope

I'm housesitting and there's a crew here doing some renovations on the house. The main guy is probably somewhere in his 40s and today he has two young men helping him (all are white). I'm currently sitting in a part of the house where I can hear most of their conversations, but I'm working on transcriptions, so I'm not getting everything. Somehow, the execution of Tookie Williams came up. One of the young men, sounding sure that he's among friends, says that "killing him was fucked up." The older man strongly disagrees, "Bro, he killed 4 kids, bro!" (I appreciated the bookending on that statement, a technique he would continue to use to emphasize his points). One of the young men has stopped talking, so now it's down to two. They argue the case, the young man citing Tookie's self-professed innocence and various news reports, the foreman making plain statements of fact that Tookie took contracts out on people and various other things I couldn't catch. At some point, I gathered, the older man pulled a form of knowledge rank mentioning a fact based on his own experiences in jail. This left the assistant with no reply. The conversation lull was short, though, and in the next part I heard the older man was saying something (in truth, several somethings) negative about black women. All black women. At this, the young man seemed to be caught between feeling the urge to challenge the racism and needing to come off as a cool construction guy -- and he was challenging his boss. He decided to take the sex option and asked, "Are you serious that you've never thought any black woman was just smokin' hot?" This failed. I'm not sure what happened next, but at some point the foreman asked, "Bro, how can you sit there and tell me I'm a white supremacist? Bro!" I was sad to have missed the lead in to that. The next defense was odd. I pictured the older man shaking his head as he said, "Bro. You've known me for years and for 20 years I've lived in LA the whole time." I'm not sure how that proves that you're not a racist, but I guess that was the final word because afterwards he declared he was going out to smoke a cigarette.

The two young men were then left alone. I heard the gritty sounds of grout applied between spanish tiles. The argumentative young man said, "I don't know. I just don't see how you can say that shit." The second young man offers a sidestep: "You know P. He just is what he is. That's just it." Then my favorite line of the night, the one that catalyzed this post, a plaintive cry from someone who feels strongly that racism is bad, that it should be challenged, but is also unwilling to appear unmanly or to ostracize himself from the group, the verbal tightrope walking of the liberal on a (newly discovered to be) conservative blue-collar job... the young man says, "Thing is, as soon as I figured out I like pussy, I didn't care what color skin it was wrapped in."

And that really was the final word.