In trying to keep on track with my writing goals, I’ve decided to resume the medium writing prompts. For today, I’m to write about “something I could not do”. For me it was working as a cook. In my past post I have made it very clear I have no love of cooking. Food serivce is the most racialized of all employment. An employment, that drove me to alcoholism and suicidal ideation. With those statements alone, I could leave it at that, but I need to go further why cooking itself made me hateful.
It was and still is a racialized industry
I am a Black man, that caste alone limits what I can and cannot do in white supremacist society. The unwritten, yet explicit rule of any job, is to keep the Blacks on the bottom, period. Kitchens are one of the last bastions where white male mediocrity is enforced. Nearly every chef I worked under was a white man who is only there because they showed up. Myself, having post secondary education and coming from an immigrant background always felt the indignity of caste reinforced in this industry. These are men, who through no effort what so ever, were given the opportunity to thrive in a degrading postion due to the colour of their skin.
With defferement left in the hands of these mediocre white men, the abuses would range from subtle to explicit. My size, intellect and “race” gave me some reprieve from these interactions. At times I would challenge their beliefs whenever the opportunity arose.I could not abide by the juvenille innocence they wished to convery from their position. For at the heart of white supremacy is fear of retribution from groups that had been wronged. So while they would hold thier tongues around me when I would call them out, they would switch their targets to servers.
There were no conversations aside from sports, which server was most attractive etc. All small topics from small minds and being trapped with that day in and day out was maddening. So to cope, I started drinking before and after my shift. If it was going to be a hectic night, I would ensure to leave and get loaded before I started. I wanted to be numb to serving a population that hates my exsistence yet relies on me to server their needs. So all I felt was anger and self-hatred.
It’s all wage slavery.
Chattel slavery never went away, industries simply made everyone a debt slave. When you’ve had nothing but minimum wage jobs, you start to see the hopelessness and unfairness of the systems we intereact with.Our societies reinfoce a racialized hierarchy and as such, opportunities are limited for arbitrary reasons. We are all socialized to see darker skinned and “African-descended” peoples’ as a perpetual underclass. It is no accident that the jobs with the highest stress, lowest pay and unfair power dymanics are often off-loaded on the descendents of slaves. Economically speaking, too many people have been conditioned to believe in a zero-sum mentality. This mentality is reinforced by the cruelty we express towards those we force into these postions. All becasue we believe there must be somebody to be shit upon.
This is the rationalizations of abusers, which is what systemic white supremacy is, a legal rationalization of abuses. The abuser lives in fear of justified retribution it is why they push boundaries of abuse without fear of retaliaton. They hate their postion in life and actively know that what they believe is a fabrication. They have suken so much into an identity that was not of their own making, but only as far as their idiocy would be useful. Like all loose ends, they were discarded once they served their purpose. And when they realize they’ve been had, they punch down becuase they can’t get back at the people who conned them.
Every. Fucking. Time.
These people don’t understand they are going as far as they are ever going to go and no amount of violence or anger will change that. Letting them fester in that existential dread was somewhat comforting.
I’m not going to believe the lie about myself
The only way a lie has power is if one chooses to believe it and seeing that in kitchens was too much. I refused to believe that this was what I was meant to be, a servant to the dominant caste. I still continue to find this unacceptable and no longer need to believe this lie. Meritocracy, work ethic, gregariousness, team player are all words used to enforce my inferior position to whiteness. I can’t get ahead in a system designed to destroy what I can offer the world. Now that I’m out of such situations, I am using my abilities to ensure less people have to endure this industry. If anything I hope one day to fully automate any and all drudgery of human experience.
Everyday I spend in tech is another day I can free our species from the tryanny of caste. That is something that wouldn’t have been possible if I had stayed a kitchen slave.