Last weekend, mythical gf and I went to South Carolina to see the Carolina Cup, which is a series of horse races. Leading up to what, I have no fucking clue, but it was billed to me as an event of drinking, eating, drinking, socializing, drinking and if you’re lucky, you might even get to see a horse run by. I mean, it sounded like a good idea to me, honestly.
Now I don’t intend for the title of this post to imply that I did not have a good time, quite the contrary, I enjoyed myself a good deal, and I would be happy doing it again in the future. But make absolutely no mistake that the headline is 100% accurate, and of all the things I’ve ever done in my life, there is without any hesitation, question or debate that this was undoubtedly the whitest thing I’ve ever done.
Men frolicking around in linen suits and/or khaki everything, with shirts featuring more pastels than Crayola’s Easter crayon collection. Women wearing gaudy dresses and gigantic doofy hats. And food and alcohol pretty much everywhere, and for an event that’s revolves around four horse races, people bring enough to indulge for at least sun up until sun down.
Make no mistake, it’s not just the whitest thing I’ve done because it’s something that is perceived to be a very white thing done, it’s the whitest thing I’ve done because I don’t think I’ve honestly been anywhere where there’s been such a concentration of white people versus everyone else in my entire life. Even in comparison to my childhood growing up in rural Virginia, where I was part of one of like four known Korean families in town, and I can legitimately remember just one black kid in the three years of elementary school, there were at least Hispanic laborers sprinkled around, and Chinese restaurants even back then.
But at the Carolina Cup, it was legitimately 97% white people, a few black people dressed as affluently and as white as the white folks, and then there was me. I legitimately did not see a single visually obvious Hispanic person, at all, which is hard to believe considering the vast majority of labor work in the country is done by Hispanic laborers. In fact, I was convinced that I was the only Asian person on the grounds, until I wandered over to the college section, where I saw maybe three other Asian people but to no surprise they were under the banners of Duke University, likely there because of a combination of being whiter-washed than I could ever be, and Affirmative Action.
And speaking of the college section, notoriously known as “College Park” which is ironic in only ways that people familiar with the actual towns in Georgia and Maryland, is yet a freak show within a spectacle that’s worth mentioning. To the old people, College Park at the Carolina Cup is oft-described as “a zoo,” due to the sheer amount of underage drinking, hedonism and general over-privileged white behavior going on there. As hyperbolic as it might sound for adults describing college kids, it honestly couldn’t be any more accurate to the truth.
Upon entering College Park, it’s pretty much a wasteland of cheap beer cans all over the place, and shitty music blasting over makeshift music systems, while assloads of college kids in similarly gaudy and flamboyantly white folk clothing are almost all shitfaced, stumbling and dancing all over the place. Girls are all white-girl wasted, and guys are all more than happy to capitalize on their inebriation and satiating their date-rapey fantasies, groping and grinding on drunk bitches left and right. I didn’t actually think I’d see any groping, upskirts or actual tits from what was described to me, but nope, yup, saw all of the above in College Park.
Anyway, as a whole, it’s undoubtedly a spectacle that is very much aware of itself, but then again I can only imagine the Carolina Cup is only one example of how horse race events in general can get, based on the general scuttlebutt agreement that horse races are 98% spectacle and 2% sport. Again, I’ll say that I enjoyed myself there, and would do it again, even if it meant driving four hours each way from Atlanta. But there’s absolutely no competition at all when I can confidently proclaim that going to a horse race is undoubtedly the whitest thing I’ve ever done.
