Trying to explore my way through writing an essay on the times I've been in situations where I was a racial minority. I have no idea what I'm trying to say, but just remembered seeing Jamiroquai live in Chicago in '93 when my buddy and I were the only 2 white people in attendance
The show was at Cabaret Metro, which was almost exclusively white artists, but the concert was sponsored by WGCI, the soul/R&B station in Chicago. The Jamiroquai frontman was doing a Stevie Wonder imitation on the album. I assumed he was black myself, but he isn't.
Jamiroquai came out, started a jam that featured the didgeridoo played by a dude with dreads (Wallis Buchanan), and I assumed he'd start singing, but then a hyperactive little white dude bounces out of the wings and starts singing like Stevie Wonder. The crowd went wild.
Everyone around us was like "That boy's white!" And then they started asking my buddy and I if we knew he was white, and we were like, "nope" and we all had a good laugh and the show was fantastic. Among the best of like 200 I must've seen there.
I sure as hell don't know what any of that means in the essay I'm trying to write, but it came to mind and it's still cracking me up.
Lord, it's all coming back to me. Most of the Jamiroquai band was white, but the drummer was black, and everyone agreed that was necessary. A woman near us said something like, "no white boy can do the funky drumming like that."
Holy shit was that night fun. Ah, to be 23 again.
The jumping off point for the essay, by the way, is the contention, "I don't have a racist bone in my body." I think that's probably not true for most white folks, no matter how hard one might try to mitigate that reality. I wonder if I'll ever come to point or conclusion.
Honestly, before the show started, my buddy and I were wondering if we were supposed to be in this almost entirely black space. It was a club we'd been to dozens of times, but the audience was different. Once the music started, nothing mattered. That must mean something, right?
