Grandma, Get New Material

This piece about He called me the N word seems to be an outtake from a longer thing. It's possible I'm missing something. 

I'm not sure he REALLY conveys whatever he's trying to say because he's from South Africa and the racism in the US is mild compared to his experience, so I think he falls a bit short of really slapping racist Americans in the face with "That's a fond childhood memory for me, not the most HATEFUL, hurtful word I've ever heard."

Because it reminds me of this story from my life:

I went home to live with my parents during my divorce. I brought my two aspie kids with me and the oldest was eighteen. A couple of months or whatever after we show up, my sons go get all their hair shaved off -- including their eyebrows -- and we come home and my mom says to them "What prison did you escape from?" 

Mom grew up in Nazi Germany and she could be the sweetest, most heart of gold person you ever met and could also be just POISONOUS about her social and emotional manipulation where you were supposed to never do that again because she made frowny faces at you.

So that was intended to shame my kids and rebuke them into never shaving their heads again. This was completely lost on my socially challenged kids, in part because I don't operate that way.

This kind of garbage worked really well on my brother who tried like hell to get Mom's approval and not so much on me. In my teens, I had ugly screaming fights with her which stopped when I moved out and it got easier to say to myself "Whatever, mom. Sorry you have baggage. Thanks for the good stuff you do."

A month later, oblivious to the staunch disapproval from their grandmother whose house we are living in to keep us off the streets, my sons get their heads shaved again. We come home and my mom says the exact same thing and my oldest rolls his eyes and says "Grandma, get new material. That joke wasn't that funny the first time."

Some months later, he told me "She looked at me like I killed, then desecrated her favorite dog while she watched." I overheard the exchange but didn't see her face. All I knew for some time was that after that, she almost never spoke to him. 

She would tell me to "tell him..." 

And then I would go to him and say "Grandma told me to tell you...." And he would look at me funny and say "Um. Okay."

I understood that my mother really meant more like "MAKE your kids do what I want (because I don't know how to do that)." And that's not how my relationship to them works. 

I also knew she would check if I actually did as I was told, especially if it wasn't magically getting the results she implicitly expected.

After we moved out, my son and I talked and I learned that within the first hour of me leaving the house after being told to tell him, she would burst into his room, demand to know if I had told him X and he would say "Yes." She would look at him expectantly and then confused and then leave.

She never said one word to me about "Why are my instructions not being followed?" or whatever. I didn't learn until after we moved out that for something like eight months she immediately checked if I had done what I said I would do and then felt helpless and baffled while my aspie son went "That was weird. Moving on."

And I think Trevor Noah is kind of going for "They should look at me like I killed and desecrated their favorite dog and never speak to me again." and not quite hitting that note.