i'm not a racist, i'm a mother.

today at the grocery store i was standing at the checkout, crushed between people in line in front and behind me (i stupidly went at 6pm, just when all the 9-5ers are heading to the store to pick up dinner), when the rather girthful (that's a word, right?) black woman in front of me whipped her entire body violently around and glared at me, hissing: “you've bumped into me several times (with a snake-like sss on the s in several).”

now, any of you who have toddlers know precisely what i'm about to say. i barely knew this woman existed prior to her berating me -- she was but a vague, spectral smear of navy blue fabric ahead of me, registered only unconsciously as something positioned between me and getting the hell out of there. yes, i was quite consumed with trying to keep M_ 1) in the shopping basket, from which she was actively attempting to escape, 2) from opening a full bottle of mr. bubble and dumping it all over herself and our foodstuffs, 3) from hurtling herself onto the checkout counter in a vain attempt to grab the faux pen attached to the credit/debit card reader -- all of this while, of course, attempting to unload our cart and find my wallet. i had no idea i'd bumped her, nor did i realize that this would be symbolic of the historical oppression of all black people by whitey (me), which was clearly the subtext of her hissing and the attendant headshaking/voluminous sighing and the visible pissed-offness that followed. suddenly i felt as though i had become the man, who -- in my inherent privilege and blissful lack of awareness of said privilege -- was again, quite literally, pushing a minority around.

c'mon, i said “i'm sorry.” heh.

so she stomped off all in a huff, with looks of vague confusion/bemusement from those nearby trailing her. and while i feel for her on one level -- knowing full well that she's surely encountered white men and women throughout her life who, indeed, saw her as somehow a lesser being and treated her as such in both mild and extreme ways -- i am, to put it simply, not one of them. so let me say this once and only once for everyone out there, whatever color pigmentation your skin might hold: that harried-seeming lady in the grocery store struggling with a toddler (or toddlers) and her purchases? cut her some fucking slack, man. she doesn't mean to harsh your grocery store buzz, or to be annoying, or to bump you with her grocery cart. she's in survival-mode, just trying to get shit done before the ticking timebombs in her cart molded into the shapes of small children implode. she's not being rude, at least not intentionally, and anything she does relative to you isn't about you specifically, or your people's history of being oppressed generally, or whatever. its, at bottom, simply about the myopia necessary for a mother with a child in a public place to have in order that she might survive the trip unscathed, and with minimal embarrassment. really. promise.

Comments

[mike wolf]

racial + socio economic subtexts are always weired... the weirder thing is that you felt the subtext, with nothing being said....

the other day I was working the tech table at the charter school open house, a youngster about 4 years old walks up and wants to play w/ the computer, im kind of siked and ask him if he uses the computer in the library, his grandmother replies "hmmmpf we have a computer at home" ... now i didnt mean by my statement that they couldnt afford one at home... but my statement to her had that subtext, and her statement back to me had the subtext "what a black family cant have a computer at home" ... I felt bad for the rest of the night... knowing thats not what I meant, but that it got taken that way...

as for the super market w/ the child... im oblivious to everything but keeping the boy from melt down.

[helen]

Um, well, gosh. I think I would have to say that even black people, with their fully-developed and much-earned sense of paranoia about "whitey", would probably be confused here. I doubt very much that the woman thought you were absentmindedly bumping into her because she was black and therefore not important to notice, but because she was FAT. And she is probably very sensitive about being fat, and taking up so much room in a check-out line, check?

It's all good, Sweetney.