TL;DR: Pragmatism, Racism, and White Guilt. So, while I was out walking the dog this morning, I heard a loud HEY! from across the street. I looked over and a black kid, maybe 17 years old, was walking out of a deli at a steady pace. The HEY came from the skinny, middle-aged Chinese owner of the deli, and soon he and his wife had come outside after the kid. Again, he yelled HEY!, pointed at the kid, and–since I was pretty much the only other person at this intersection–looked at me as if to say WTF MAN?! DO SOMETHING. Now this is where time slowed down and some people popped into my head: Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown. A non-black person assuming that a black person is up to no good can lead to totally unjust reactions and punishments. The deli owner didnt say He stole a muffin! he just said HEY! STOP! and pointed his finger like fire might come out of it. Now in my younger and stupider days, I was detained by the cops for a variety of totally legitimate reasons: Criminal trespass on school district property, illegal use of paintball guns in a closed public park AT NIGHT, driving with a broken tail light, failure to stop at a stop sign, possession of borrowed prescription meds, driving the wrong way on a one-way, failure to stay in lane on a highway (weaving) AT NIGHT...in the end they let me go every time. Every single time. Ive often thought Would they have let me go if I was black? Or would I be a statistic? Thats why when some people in the media imply that black people disproportionately engage in criminal behavior, I think to myself Well, could it be that white kids are just getting away with more stuff? Because with the help of a bunch of white cops in Texas and Oklahoma, I certainly did. At least SEVEN times. How many times does a black kid get? ... so anyway, slamming me back into the moment, the deli owner yells one more time STOP! and the kid, who has big pink earbuds in, just keeps walking away from the deli and toward me. The kid is aloof, and doesnt seem to notice anything, but the deli owner is so intense and seems so sure of some wrongdoing. So I wave to the kid and say Excuse me... hey theyre talking to you, man... hello? and he just keeps walking. No way he could have missed me. Passes by me. Never alters speed, never reacts to anything. I look back at the deli owner and his wife who are now in arms crossed, shaking head mode. And I kinda just stood there wondering why the deli owner wouldnt follow the kid any farther than the sidewalk outside his store, and thinking about stereotypes and societal roles. Imagine if I had taken the deli owners implied word and physically stopped the kid in some kind of citizens arrest. Now imagine I did that BUT the deli owner was mistaken. Suddenly you have an uninvolved white guy assuming in a split second that a black kid is a criminal and harassing an innocent person. Now imagine the kid had stolen something really valuable, like a watch or a wad of cash from the register, and all I did was try to slow him down verbally. In that version, Im the coward who let him get away. In the end, Im left a little confused about assumptions and how to be a good person. Im confused about where pragmatism ends and white guilt begins. But if Ive learned anything today, its this: If you steal something, please sprint away from the scene with a guilty look on your face. Walking away with aloof confidence just confuses the hell out of people.
Posted on: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 13:52:42 +0000