Over the last few days, I had a pretty white span of existence. Sure, this doesn’t help detract from the narrative that I’m a Americanized banana of a twinkie kind of Asian person, but as the circumstances have it, my family and I spent a few days on the road, stopping in Savannah and for the first time in my life, visiting Hilton Head Island, which is about one of the whitest places in the country.
Seriously, thinking back to the time spent in HHI, I genuinely can’t recall seeing more than one other person of color, and that person was also Asian which is to say that I don’t remember seeing a single black person while out there.
We stayed at a bougie resort for a few days, and lounged in the pool, went to the beach and even went to the Salty Dog Café, which I’m only aware of its existence because of an old neighbor of mine growing up always seemed to have a lot of Salty Dog Café apparel. For the record, the dining experience was pleasant on the water of a relaxed beach community, but the food and the prices were not quite as satisfactory and I could be content with the rest of my life if I never experienced them again.
But overall, it was a pleasant trip spent with my family and I got to watch my children have a lot of fun in the pool, in our suite, on the beach and chowing down on all sorts of junk food we typically don’t always make available to them at home, and in spite of the shade I spout about HHI being a really white place, it’s also a really nice place, and I’d definitely be open to going there again in the future, and hopefully for longer.
However, to get to the point of this post, as the subject goes, I’m very curious to how the new Ford Bronco seems to have become the official car of white people across the country now. When Ford announced that they were reviving the name and creating a new vehicle to resurrect the car, I couldn’t possibly have been more indifferent. In fact, I was more perplexed and wincing over such news, because to me, the Ford Bronco has forever been tainted and etched with death and scandal since OJ Simpson led the LAPD on the most televised chase in history after he “didn’t” murder his wife.
Apparently such reaction and recollection didn’t resonate with the white people of America, because since they started rolling off the line, Ford Broncos have been snapped up and are being driven like crazy by white people all over the place. Seriously, I haven’t seen a single Bronco driver on the road that isn’t white, and they’re often times being driven with the arrogant mentality of “I have one and you don’t,” because of the sheer demand for these murderer cars.
And I can’t help but be curious to why the Ford Bronco has caught on with white people with such enthusiasm, when I can’t shake the association of the car’s reputation of being what a tried-but-not-found-guilty murderer drove notoriously. And then be further curious to what kind of message it sends that not only is the Ford Bronco more popular than it’s ever been in history, it’s apparently solely within the white community itself.
All shade aside, it really is fascinating that it’s so rabidly popular. Aside from the whole, being OJ Simpson’s car, the Bronco is still a Ford product, and I will probably never not think of all Ford products being cheap, plastic turds with questionable build quality and reliability. Even when I was on the market for a new car a while back, and told myself to wipe the slate clean with all makes and models, Ford was the first maker to get slapped back onto the blacklist after test-driving the option I had earmarked as a potential car, because it felt cheap, performed like shit, and was blown out of the water by every other option.
Yet, the selling power of the Bronco has gone gangbusters, and I even recall articles about how Ford dealerships were bending interested buyers over left and right because the demand for them was so insane that they could mark up and slap on whatever bullshit fees they wanted to them, and they would still go flying off the showroom as soon as they touched down.
Like seriously, it’s a tough truth for me to believe that people would rather get a shitty Ford and pay substantially more for one than they would a higher-end luxury vehicle like an Audi or a BMW. Some of the numbers I’ve seen even compared to Teslas, and yet they decide to go in the opposite direction of getting Fred Flintstone’s car, and will be paying for barrels of fuel on top of their inflated MSRPs.
Whatever though, white people really are funny creatures sometimes, when they’re not being quite so white in other aspects of human behavior. It’s just funny to me that they’re so crazy about the car that used to be OJ Simpson’s, and it’s like an Atlanta United bumper sticker, just seeing one automatically announces to surrounding parties that yes, you are a white person.
I think I will be quite tickled when inevitably I see a Ford Bronco with an Atlanta United sticker, a pro-Second Amendment sticker, maybe both, or any other very Karen-ey paraphernalia, because it’ll be like some meta smorgasbord of whiteness, which I’ll have to photograph to clown on with my friends at such peak white people.
