Travelogue #1
I saw some guys in camo at the ShortStop towing a boat which was disguised to look like grass. What were you guys hunting, I asked.
Mexicans, they said.
Really, I said, with an air of credulity.
No, not really, they said. We were hunting ducks, they said. This is Iowa, they said. Aren’t your expectations of backwoods racism troubling, they said. You do as much to reify the legacy of racism as any of the people you look down on, they said, and your assumptions about us are the real soft bigotry of low expectations, they said.
I don’t know what reify means, I said.
