Real Subtle Lady...

Tan walking shoes.
Saggy black jeans.
Green turtleneck.
Gray zip-up jacket (hood down).

Sometimes living here in the Bay Area gives you a false sense of confidence. You start to believe that being in America's most liberal city means you don't have to deal with ignorant people. You forget that, no matter how hard we believe in equality and open mindedness, we still live in a racist nation. And even here, where our prejudices tend to be a little more subtle and often times choked back altogether, you will still occasionally catch a middle-aged white woman making a minor, but painfully obvious, detour to avoid crossing paths with a young black man.

"Look around! You couldn't find a whiter, safer or better lit part of this city. But this white woman sees two black guys, who look like UCLA students, strolling down the sidewalk and her reaction is blind fear. I mean, look at us! Are we dressed like gang-bangers? Huh? No. Do we look threatening? No. Fact, if anybody should be scared around here, it's us: We're the only two black faces surrounded by a sea of over-caffeinated white people, patrolled by the triggerhappy LAPD. So you tell me, why aren't we scared?"

It was about 2:30pm, a beautiful day, and I had hardly noticed her walking ahead of me under the BART tracks. That is, until she glanced back. Nervously, half heartedly, at me- over her shoulder. I couldn't help but smirk as I looked down the block behind me. "Yup," I thought, giggling a little bit "just you and me". A few seconds later, when she veered suddenly to her right, over the grass divider between the "bike path" (that we had both been walking on) and the "ped path", I couldn't help but chuckle and shake my head. "You should be ashamed of yourself," I thought. I smiled wide, looked her in her eyes and waved cheerily as she stood still off on the side and I walked merrily past her. Shockingly, she didn't reciprocate. "I really hope she's ashamed of herself," I thought as I giggled my way down the rest of the block. When I got to the corner and looked back to see her standing half a block behind me, I laughed loudly. I wanted to yell "you're a disappointment to everything that Berkeley represents!" but I decided against it. Instead I just waved a friendly goodbye, laughed again and went back to my day dreaming.

That had happened to me once before, in the same part of town actually, but when I was in high school (I was A LOT smaller when I was in high school). I was walking to my girlfriend's house, day dreaming, as usual, when the woman walking in front of me suddenly pulled a 180. "Are you following me?!" The 140 pound (about the same as me) Asian woman screamed.
Startled, I reeled back, sure that I hadn't heard her correctly. "Wha... What?"
"Are you following me?! Where are you going?!"
I rolled my eyes and shook my head as I walked past her. "Get over yourself," I thought.

Racism and prejudice are bad. I know that and I don't want to encourage that type of behavior- but I don't live in a part of the world where I have to worry about being dragged around off the back of someone's truck, so there's a little wiggle room for the part of me that gets a kick out of knowing that a complete stranger is afraid of me. It makes me want to mess around with them. It makes me want to run up behind them and go "oogi-boogey-boo!", just to see how high they jump, and then apologize profusely, patting them on the back, smiling wide (probably giggling) and telling them that I just couldn't help myself. At the same time though, there's a part of me that is deeply saddened to know that after all these years, in a community as diverse as this one, some people can't help but be afraid of a black face. A friend of mine always says "it's the kind of thing that you have to laugh at to stop yourself from crying," and I don't feel that way about many things, but racism, and the irrational fear of a 24-year-old black man day dreaming about his D&D character is one of them.