Parenting & Family Quote by Tommy Rettig

That opening “Yes” lands like a weary wink: not a concession so much as a setup. Tommy Rettig frames intoxication as both inevitability and alibi, then punctures it with a blunt racial qualifier. The line moves fast, almost conversationally, but it’s doing careful cultural work: it recreates the self-excusing logic of a certain suburban youth narrative (“we had no options”) and then yanks the rug out from under it.

The pivot - “I mean, there was” - is where the real intent shows. Rettig admits the lie embedded in that first claim. Options existed; access existed. What didn’t exist was knowledge distributed equally, or the willingness of white communities to see what was in front of them. “White kids didn’t hear about it” isn’t just about information. It’s about insulation: the way whiteness functions as a kind of selective deafness, where certain drugs, certain risks, certain street-level realities are treated as distant rumors until they wash ashore in the mainstream.

Coming from an actor, the delivery implied by the sentence matters. It reads like testimony from someone who’s watched the story get edited after the fact - the “innocent experimentation” script reserved for some, while others are presumed guilty from the start. Rettig’s punchline is that ignorance isn’t neutral; it’s curated. The joke is mordant, but the target is serious: a culture that treats white obliviousness as fate, not as privilege.