Karaoke While Black
Last Sunday, I had to deal with a microaggressive white woman at my favorite karaoke bar. It’s not the first time she’s been microaggressive. She has a fetishizing relationship with the men of color that she dates and a generally fetishizing relationship with people of color. She frequently corners me and forces me to endure her endless very cringeworthy racial monologues.
It’s damned near impossible to explain racist microaggressions to a staff that has zero black people. I haven’t seen a black person work there in a good 15 years.
I had to have my white partner explain racial microaggressions to the only non-white person working there at the time because the staff was too busy tone-policing me to understand that I was allowed to set any sort of boundaries with this person. The next time I returned to the club, said staff person asked what she did (again) because she is “generally sweet” to the staff.
I said I was not surprised to hear she is generally sweet to the staff. There are no black people on the staff, she has said several times that she would like to get a job working there, and although said staff person acknowledged that she keeps making cringeworthy racial comments to him, it doesn’t bother him.
This woman asked me to sing a duet with her. She asked for “Baby It’s Cold Outside” and I suggested White Christmas. I let her sit at the table with me and my friends, and sing a song with us, but it was definitely a give her an inch and then she takes a mile kind of situation because she immediately asked me to sing “Dream” with her.
I did not want to and said no.
She refused to take no for an answer, about six times in a row, and said “Just tell me what I did wrong?” over and over again. When I agreed to sing one Christmas song with her, at no time did I agree to sing multiple songs with her. but she became extremely emotionally manipulative, refused to respect my boundaries, and used white tears to coerce my compliance in front of my partner Princess Chris Hughes and two other witnesses at our table.
When I refused to comply, she left both her drinks at our table for approximately 20 minutes and after some time I said “I guess she left” and brought them back to the bar. When I did so, she returned, took the two beers, and sat next to my partner. She waved at me to come sit between her and my partner, and I refused and sat across the table. At that point, a staff member (the only non-white one working at the time) came and asked me what was wrong. It was very clear (in a very short time) that I was going to have to have my white partner talk to him because I was dealing with people in such a colonized space.
San Francisco is a generally hostile place for African Americans. 5.3% of the population there is Black, yet close to 40% of homeless San Franciscans are Black. As many of you know, my mental health improved greatly when I moved from San Francisco to Oakland – where I was able to pursue my writing career in an environment that doesn’t disregard the concerns of African Americans while forwarding their own narrative. Not that Oakland is free of overt or covert racism, but it is 33% Black.
It is very frustrating and difficult to try to communicate with people whose political views are very different from yours, and I have lost all hope that anything will ever get corrected in this place except me. Their policies are so generally lax in other areas that there has been no response whatsoever to my report that I was nonconsensual groped (twice) by a drunken patron with a documented history of groping multiple women (yes, a couple of women approached me, and told me he’s done it to them as well). Only one woman is working inside the club.
Sumiko Saulson 