So there I was in the 99 cent store and a woman asked where I had gotten this clothes rack in a box (which I’d bought online). Distractedly, I moved the box and said, “Oh, it’s mine.” (I wasn’t listening and thought it was in her way). WELL! She just started squawking about how she wasn’t going to steal it and didn’t I have any manners or know how to talk to people and maybe I should just go back where I came from! I think I laughed and said something like “that would be California.”

But according to this woman, I am from The People’s Republic of the Rude and Socially Inept, otherwise known as Me Chinese Land. Why are bigots always the first to criticize other people for being ignorant? These assholes try so hard to “learn ya how us Americans do it”. I mean, who does that woman think she is? A Nazi Miss Manners?

It isn’t normally said so shrilly, but this type of insult is common, leveled at anyone who isn’t behaving to your satisfaction. They aren’t really saying, “You should go home to your gook nigger wetback third world hut, and you never belonged here in the first place.” The underlying sentiment is actually, “I’m just going to throw the easiest, most obvious ‘insult’ at you, which will involve your ethnicity or, if you’re a woman, your gender.” Once I heard an Indian man call a black token booth worker, “Nigger”, because the train wasn’t stopping at that subway station. A Latino man greets me with, “Me likey Chinese!” A white woman says, “Si, senorita” to a Middle Eastern woman. And an African-American man gets on the bus and says to us, “I love that man! He’s my best friend! I love white people!” Then proceeds to sing “We Are the World.”

It’s precisely because New York City is one of the most diverse places in the world that people feel entitled to stereotypes and ethnic slurs. We supposedly earned the right to use them by co-existing. Who needs to learn about other people when our preconceived ideas serve just as well? The world flocking to New York makes us…worldly? But hey, we know a lot about different cultures…Indian food Monday, Thai Tuesday, Peruvian Wednesday…also, that “fucker” in Spanish is “chingolo (male) or chingala (female).”

These short-hand, fast food insults stand in for our anger and frustration, for feelings of helplessness or vulnerability, for deprivation or persecution. (They also explain why women who don’t respond favorably to strange men accosting them on the street at night are all bitches with PMS and a bad case of lesbianism.) If there are no easily recognizable weaknesses, i.e. not being white or a man, people rely on the old, red- white-and-blue-hotdogs-and-crackerjacks-up-my-ass, American standards, with which I think we are all familiar so I needn’t enumerate them. Which I couldn’t do anyway, since I no speak Engrish.

On another note, I guess that’s what I get for going to a 99 cent store in the first place. Apparently, the name refers to the quality of the people inside.