Strippers, Booze and Race Riots: A day in the life of BP’s Cleanup Workers

From the article:

Upstairs, on the open-air deck, the supervisors and professional contractors drink. One comes over to talk; he calls me a Yankee when I don’t get that when he says “animals” he means black guys. Another tells us about the crime-prone “monkeys.” I have already stopped counting how many times I’ve heard the n-word on Grand Isle today.

[…]

An ex-Army Ranger so drunk he can hardly stand asks me if I have a boyfriend. When I lie and say that I do and he’s right over there somewhere, the Ranger scowls and pushes me. I move to the other side of the ring, where some guy wraps a tight grip around my waist.

“You can have some of BP’s money too if you let me make love to you,” he says.

“I’m not a prostitute,” I inform him, backing up to create some space between our pelvises, but he presses an insistent forearm harder into the small of my back.

“I’m not trying to play you like a prostitute,” he says. “I’m just saying: Whatever it takes.”

[…]

The near-desperate levels of racial and sexual aggression in this horde aren’t what you usually get at a strip show in a bar. It feels more like a strip show in a prison yard.

The article reads like a tale set in one of those dystopian futures where men have turned into primal beings led by the most simplistic kind of instinct based behavior. Of course I understand that’s precisely the tone the writer wanted to set for the article, but it doesn’t make it any less depressing.