Note: This is one of several throwback journals I wrote last year and did not publish.
9/30/20
It’s coolish. Brooklyn is giving day-after-the-rain dazzle. I am on my e-scooter, linen hooded kaftan skirting atop linen pants such that my fashionista co-workers from Motown the Musical might have sighed with relief. I approach the intersection near the police station. It’s always congested because gentrification has “improved” Classon by subtracting a car lane and adding a bike lane that doesn’t really fit.
But this is not the reason for the congestion. Blocking the bike lane is a cop car from which a perpetrator is being escorted out. Before I can get a good look, I have backed back my scooter to increase the social distance. The light is still red as the resistant, handcuffed 6’1, 215 dude – probably Latin X, maybe Blatino - is pulled from the car. When one of the officers applies care in placing the fallen baseball cap back on his head, he relaxes, complies.
It is only at this point that I take a look at the other officers on their way and realize they are all Latin X as well.
I have several thoughts as I scoot across the green light. I process my initial impulse to protect myself because I imagined all the possibilities of threat the perpetrator could levy depending on his mental health, inebriation, or general rage about being brought in on perhaps a marijuana charge that will help him to become another slave to the prison industrial complex. And I trusted none the scarcely trained, generally underpaid police officers to contain the situation – a skepticism older for me than the black lives matter movement and dating back to Rodney King. In fact, I looked not once at the actual officers until they rocked benevolence with that baseball cap.
Seconds later and because God is good, Mora Amina is yelling my name from catty corner at the intersection. Not only am I happy to see this fellow dancer/thinker/artist/scholar/choreographer/blacklife, she had seen the entire scene and me in it from a different vantage point. Mask compliance, along with an uncharacteristically thoughtful fit-out, made it impossible for Mora Amina to make me out from afar. But she saw it all, my retreat, the scrutiny, the energy around that police car. She saw that it was a Yankees cap and had experienced a similar series of thoughts and post-introspection, only in her case it was augmented by a thought experiment she was in the middle of. It involved noting ways she visually identified/categorized random folks she saw. In sort of a bias training way, she was consciously tracking what would be her subconscious mind:
There’s a white woman with a dog, probably a Karen.
He’s in leggings and it’s cold, a fitness fad junky.
This negro is walking slow, the joint must be good.
This sort of thing.
Sounded like a great tool for engagement of self-awareness. In an effort to better calibrate my subconscious programming and how it is jarred by the renewed 2020 lens of (always high) stakes in situations like this one on the corner, I decided to give this exercise a try.
A Must Read!!
I am next in a Dollar Store standing in line, gracefully acquiescing to every judgment I make about the place. Cheap Family Dollar that feels skeletal in structure, building be damned, feeling trapped in the 70’s or 80’s with employees wearing outfits just dusty enough to reflect the amount of actual dust in the staff-only areas of the store.
“Let me find this $5 coupon and call you back,” says the woman in front of me on the phone with no basket and few items.
“Did you put the onion ring on the burger this time?” shouts one clerk behind a register to the clerk facing her from the other side of the check-out aisle.
Why we gotta be so hood?
A Hasidic Jew walks in, shirt revealing all dirt stains since there was no jacket. Hat, but no jacket.
Wow, he’d come in here? I’d think he’d never want to be at a store this far from kosher.
Then I realize that the only reason I am there is that this modest store is the only place I can find post-its around here, nevermind the price or gentrification level.
This Hasid might have a similar need.
Then I clock myself for judging the place down to evade-worthy even by Third World standards. The man with curls and a dirty shirt may not have the same kinds of issues with it, might even find it more comfortably conservative…
Wait, isn’t the stereotype that Jewish people are financially conservative?
Realizing that it has taken me too many beats to get to the obvious helipad, I then congratulate myself for having not internalized the bigger insult as a thought default.
I mean I am looking for a trophy.
A woman behind me in line holds her few items and a coupon toward me.
“Do you know if these are on sale?”
She assumes I know. I shop with coupons on a regular basis, or work here, or show up regularly for my sundries. Of course. I can’t even get to the door of “irritated” before I see myself, start laughing.
Let’s not get this twisted. Any failures of me or Mora Amina to check our internal bias on this day or any other do not subjugate, disenfranchise or brutalize entire groups of people. We (POC’s) are not at the top of the power structure on this yard and don’t—can’t—practice supremacy as a way of life. But in terms of my general understanding and walk through life, the mechanics, nurturing and transmission of bias that Dr. Eberhardt discusses in her book Biased were laid bare for me on this day. The scene on the corner told me that trauma notwithstanding, I’m alert; the moment in the dollar store told me that I have deprogramming yet to do.
“No,” I say to the woman at the store. “I have no idea, I’m sorry.”
The Jewish man has made it to the line, a few Sharpies and stationery items unavailable at most bodegas in his hands.
Thank you Mora Amina and the Universe. And Dr. Eberhardt.
In fact, let me go pull out that book again…