So my assignment tonight is to write about an encounter I’ve witnessed that had to do with race. First, I need to say that I really really really liked this article, despite the fact that it was kinda long. So, an encounter...?
I have an idea, but it’s actually two different events, totally unrelated. First one follows. The names have been changed, BTW.
So I’m in Underwater Basket Weaving 101, and I’m sitting between Gary, a tall, gangly WASP-ish guy, and Lawrence, a stocky African-American. Gary is wearing stone-washed Calvin Klein jeans and a golf shirt with the collar “popped”. Lawrence is wearing torn-up jeans with some sort of design on the left butt-pocket, and a brown tee shirt with something written on the front-- I don’t remember what, though. Gary is sitting on my left, and Lawrence is on my right.
Lawrence is listening to rap on his iPod, through headphones, although everyone at the table can hear it.
“Lawrence, dude, turn that down. No one wants to listen to your trash,” Gary says, reaching across me and yanking one of Lawrence’s earbuds out.
“Whatchya doin’, bro? My ‘buds are broken, they sound like that no matter how loud I have it set to. And it’s not trash, y’know what I’m sayin’, Aladdin?” Lawrence asks me.
“Umm... I don’t really care for..." I say, getting cut off.
“Lawrence, you’re only living up to your stereotype. Stop acting black, and turn that $%#@ down.” Gary gets up and walks to a different table to learn how to weave patterns.
OK, second story.
So I’m in down-town LA with my mom. We’re walking from our hotel to dinner, about a five mile walk. We come to an intersection that we have to cross, and there’s a man standing by the crosswalk, swaying back and forth. It’s not obvious what color he is, because he’s covered with all grime and filth imaginable. He has about a dozen shopping bags sitting at his feet, and he is wearing three or four different coats and jackets.
My mom sees him, and immediately turns around, so she’s not facing him.
“Aladdin! We’ve got to find a different way to get there. Don’t look, but there’s a homeless man at the light, and he looks dangerous.”
“Mom, he’s just an old man. Why would he hurt us? It’s not like we have anything valuable on us, we’re just tourists.”
The man begins to pick up his bags, one by one, look through them briefly, then move them about ten feet down the sidewalk.
“Common, mom, he’s not going to do anything.”
We end up crossing at a different intersection just to avoid the man, but as we pass him on the other side of the street, it becomes apparent that he was moving his bags so we could pass by him and his stuff without getting too close to him. I felt really bad, since he had spent maybe ten or fifteen minutes moving his bags, and now he had to move them all back, but when your mom is paying for dinner, you do what she says.
Sorry, y’all, this is turning out to be a long post. I guess what I’ve realized, after reading this article, is that discrimination is blind. It doesn’t matter who the person is, so long as they fit into some sort of pre-concieved notion of what they are. Racism is a glutton of a word, but it’s also a very specific word. Racism implies discrimination against someone or a group of people because they’re black. What about Asians? What about people who are Muslim, or look like they haven’t had a bath in two weeks? What about people who are the exact same race as me, but have somehow ended up at the sewer of the social system? We discriminate blindly, and this isn’t something that people like to face. But no matter what we call it, racism, stereotyping, etc., it’s all the same, and needs to be addressed.
The end. Hammer Time!
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