Re: GR translation: working off whiteman’s penance on his sin

[Monte Davis]

I read that possessive as "penance imposed by whiteman" -- the penance
[subservient, ill-paid labor] Malcolm must do for having brown skin

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 10:44 PM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> V688.6-19, P701.27-40   Well there’s one place where Shit ‘n’ Shinola do
> come together, and that’s in the men’s toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, the
> place Slothrop departed from on his trip down the toilet, as revealed in
> the St. Veronica Papers (preserved, mysteriously, from that hospital’s
> great holocaust). Shit, now, is the color white folks are afraid of. Shit
> is the presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe
> but the stiff and rotting corpse itself inside the whiteman’s warm and
> private own asshole, which is getting pretty intimate. That’s what that
> white toilet’s for. You see many brown toilets? Nope, toilet’s the color of
> gravestones, classical columns of mausoleums, that white porcelain’s the
> very emblem of Odorless and Official Death. Shinola shoeshine polish
> happens to be the color of Shit. Shoeshine boy Malcolm’s in the toilet
> slappin’ on the Shinola, working off whiteman’s penance on his sin of being
> born the color of Shit ‘n’ Shinola.
>
> First, I just want to make sure I got the literal meaning right. So the
> whitemen have done penance for his (Malcolm’s) sin, and now Malcolm is
> paying them back for it.  Is that correct?
>
> Second, it's obviously sarcasm, but what could the whiteman’s penance
> possibly be?
>
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