I usually don’t think much about race. I like to think that “black” is one of the least important predicates that can properly be applied to me. But this article, which discusses an event where black moms explained the “race talk” every young black man gets really affected me. Even growing up in a pristine Silicon Vally suburb, my parents still told me that I couldn’t put the hood up on my hoodie because police would think I was a “thug”. I would always whine, “But everyone else wears hoodies!”, and they would respond “Well you’re not everyone else”. But I didn’t want to be different, I wanted to fit in with the rest of my neighborhood’s hoodie donning skateboard riding wannabe hooligans.I thought my parents were being ridiculous. What would happen to me in the tech capital of the world for wearing a hoodie? I knew racism existed “somewhere” but real, legitimate, me being mistreated for the way I dress racism in Almaden Valley? No way.
One day, when I was 14 or 15 I was taking a short-cut behind a shopping complex to get to a CVS. Wearing a hoodie, like I usually did when I was out of my parent’s clutches. I saw a cop approaching me. He asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was going to CVS. He asked why I went behind the complex, and I told him because it was quicker. He asked me if I had any drugs on me, and I said no. Then he asked me what I was doing in this neighborhood and where I lived. I bemusedly told him that I lived down the street. Then he said, “No you don’t”.
I laughed, in bewilderment. “But seriously, I live right down the street”. And he repeated himself “No you don’t. Stop screwing around with me. Where do you actually live. You’re going to be in a lot of trouble if you don’t start telling the truth.”
And I paused, even more bewildered. I didn’t get it. Why didn’t he believe me? And then it clicked; because in the whole of Almaden Valley, a suburb of 50,000, there was probably 50 black people, tops. As my friend Kelly wryly noted last Summer, there’s more Teslas in Almaden than black people. And then I was simultaneously struck by fear and anger, but mostly fear.
“Officer…I live here. I live three blocks away. On Bitterroot Place.”
He looked at me with impatient disbelief.
“Officer, I live three blocks away.”
I thought that he might believe me if I told him what my parents did.
“Officer, my Mom is a journalist at the San Jose Mercury News, and my Dad is the VP of Human Resources at a Fortune 500 company. Seriously, I live three blocks away.”
He continued to look at me strangely. His walkie-talkie squawked. Somewhere, an actual crime was being committed. He looked back at me with a strange look, like he was confronted with a vexing puzzle but didn’t have time to solve it.
Then he told me that I was trespassing, and that if he caught me back here again that he would inform Long’s Pharmacy and that I would be banned from shopping at the complex. Which was bull. Complete, face-saving bull. And then he left.
As I was walking home, I felt more hurt, angry, and humiliated than I had ever felt up to that point. That a man who didn’t even live in my community had the nerve to tell me that I didn’t belong somewhere two stone throws from my house. Because my darker complexion and nappy hair and hoodie threw me into the “doesn’t belong in a ‘nice’ neighborhood” pile.
What’s sad is that this is a “benign” case of racial profiling. And nothing of a similar magnitude ever happened to me again. But I still remember that feeling whenever someone makes an insensitive comment, or I read about another case of racial profiling or discrimination or police brutality. And it’s a terrible, dehumanizing feeling. People wonder why black youth are supposedly so “angry” and so “defiant”. Well, if I was in fear of being dehumanized or having my belonging in my own community questioned whenever I left my house, I would be pretty angry too.
Maybe I should have told him that I’m a quarter-white. But that wouldn’t have mattered, and that’s the point; it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. I just wanted to be viewed as “that kid”, not “that black kid”, and I am glad for events and initiatives like this, which try to explain how it feels to worry about your child’s dignity (or safety) from robbed from them for such an arbitrary reason to people who are privileged (not that I am not) enough to not have experienced it.
So the next time you hear about or see racism or discrimination and are tempted to brush it off, perhaps because its’ a “benign” act of discrimination like the one I enjoyed, remember Arundhati Roy’s poignant diagnosis of a society where the dismissal of “small wrongs” because they paled in significance to “bigger wrongs” rendered the very causes of bigger wrongs insignificant.
Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace Worse Things kept happening”
Jordan Olmstead 