White Like Me

Maybe it was because I am a white man.

Why else would you have even come close to thinking that your comments were acceptable?

Yes, that was me, leaving the store on Grand Caillou Road with my payday groceries. I smiled as you marked my receipt with the yellow felt-tipped pen.

Then you stopped smiling, as a family of black people wheeled their buggy around me, to the left, and casually through the big glass doors into the parking lot, laughing and chatting.

“I guess color really does matter,” said you.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“I guess color really does matter,” you repeated.

“I don’t understand,” I replied. “What do you mean?”

Gesturing toward the door through which the family of black folks had just exited.

“They think they can do whatever they want, because they’re black,” you said.

I could only presume, at that point, the offense was the family walking through the broad exit without stopping to have their buggy contents examined. Seated as you were on the bench, with my not-so-small frame in front of you, they might not have seen you.

No matter.

The relevant question is, what did their race have to do with it? And why did you choose me to be the recipient of your racially-tinged, insensitive generalization? Do white people not ignore your authority?

Since you are older than I, perhaps I should be impressed that you used the word “black” instead of what you probably grew up saying. And surely, when you have expressed sentiments related to the deep-seated disregard for people who don’t look like you and I, nobody has called you on it. At this moment of expressed ignorance, you were no different from ugliness I have encountered throughout my life in these United States, and the peculiar point of view that comes from being a journalist who has worked in a number of them. You were at that moment the person making rude comments about gay people, not realizing that the person subjected to them might just be gay, because he didn’t fit the stereotype. You were, at that moment, the police officer in a New York station house many years ago, who winked at me – as the only other white person in the vicinity – while a black man lay bleeding on a holding cell floor.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said with a smirk. “He just fell down.”

I was traveling at the time with an all-black volunteer ambulance corps in an inner city neighborhood and at that moment had the only white non-cop face.

You were the teenager in Mississippi who held a banana clip from an assault rifle between his two fingers, as I interviewed him about an upcoming march organized because of unanswered questions about the alleged lynching of a 16-year-old black kid, who told me “I’ve got this for Jesse Jackson,” who was due in town the next day to lead the march.

I could go on and on about the white people who assumed, because I am white, that my ears were a safe repository for their venom. And that’s what it is, venom.

The company you work for has taken great efforts over the years to make clear it doesn’t tolerate racism. I found it ironic that the manager I complained to was black. I told her that I hoped you might be properly counseled, or receive some sensitivity training. She said the matter would be dealt with.

And I hope it is because I don’t like having my shopping experience marred by people who think it’s OK to share what you did, just because you are white like me. •

White Like Me