Unpleasant Heterogeneous Encounters

Unpleasant Heterogeneous Encounters

Another PajamasMedia reject, because they already have too many articles about this situation:

Unpleasant Heterogeneous Encounters: Racism & Paranoia

There is a very real disconnect between white and black America—-as the recent arrest of Henry Louis Gates in Cambridge demonstrates. I’ve seen an enormous amount of commentary that refers to Gates screaming at a Cambridge police officer as yet another sign that he is a race hustler. But there’s another explanation—-and one that we white people should think about.

Back when I was a freshman at USC (on a full scholarship—-I grew up just under the poverty line), I drove to school every day. One day, my beat up 1964 Chevrolet station wagon overheated on the way to campus. I pulled off the freeway at Fairfax Boulevard, and into a gas station. For those who don’t know Los Angeles in the 1970s, the Fairfax District was heavily Jewish at the time. The two guys running the station were named Sol and Nathan, and were like something out of a movie. Both had very pronounced New York Jewish accents, right down to mannerisms and expressions that might be considered offensive stereotypes today.

Now, where I lived in Santa Monica was also heavily Jewish. Many of my classmates were Jewish. On Jewish holidays, many of my classes were distinctly short of students. But none of my classmates fit any stereotypes. They sounded like me, they dressed like me—there wasn’t anyone with a stereotyped New York Jewish accent (except when being humorous), and I don’t think any of my classmates was Orthodox or Hassidic. In brief, they were Jewish, but it was an extraordinarily subtle difference—one so subtle that if you weren’t told (and there wasn’t much reason to do so), you wouldn’t know it.

Sol and Nathan persuaded me that all I needed was a new radiator cap, and used some gadget to prove that mine was defective. By the time they had done their song and dance, the engine had cooled—-and of course, the car ran fine—-for about 25 minutes, at which point it overheated again.

That evening, it was apparent that the radiator had a pretty substantial leak in it. My father called up the gas station that had sold me a replacement radiator cap. The defensive manner in which Sol responded suggested that this was not an honest mistake—that they took advantage of a college kid who didn’t know any better. I found myself wondering: had they taken advantage of me because I was a Gentile? I really don’t know-—but because they were so obviously different from me, the thought came into my head. Without that obvious difference, I would simply not have even wondered about it.

This is a majority white country. If you are a white person, and someone mistreats you, the odds are very high that it will be another white person. He might be a car mechanic who tells you that your muffler bearings need repacking, or your Johnson rods are bent. He might be a police officer who gets obnoxious when you get argumentative about a traffic ticket. But because you and the other person are engaged in an unpleasant homogeneous encounter, you don’t generally say to yourself, “It’s because I’m white.” You decide, “He’s a crooked mechanic, out to take advantage of me,” or, “This cop is too full of himself and the power that he has been given.”

Now, imagine that you are black-—in a country that is overwhelmingly white. The odds are quite strong that if you have a really unpleasant situation, it will be with a white person: an unpleasant heterogeneous encounter. It is extremely easy to find yourself asking the same question that I asked myself about Sol and Nathan’s radiator cap scam: is it because you hold my group in contempt? (The closest that most white people get to this same situation are those who live in majority black or Hispanic communities.)

It would not take too many of these unpleasant heterogeneous encounters to create the very negative perception of widespread white racism against black people-—when what is really going on is that we tend to notice unpleasant and ugly encounters with people that aren’t like us—-especially when those encounters are scary, or demeaning. Once an individual has developed that perception—-“this is how a black man gets treated in America”—-each new unpleasant heterogeneous encounter is going to reinforce it.

It also doesn’t help that when Professor Gates was growing up, there really was a lot of racial prejudice directed against blacks. Most of it was unthinking but not particularly hate-filled prejudicial assumptions about blacks, but some of it was really ferocious hate-mongering-—of a caliber with the hate-mongering that you have to listen to Rev. Wright to hear today.

I’m not defending Professor Gates’ behavior. But I would suggest that before we assume that his actions were just another sleazy race hustler like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, it might be good to think about easy it is for the disparity in numbers to create false perceptions that everything is about race.