Fugitivus

The bear and I were watching a show that was discussing racial stereotypes briefly. The “Asians can’t drive” stereotype came up, and I had to profess ignorance. That was one I had never heard. The bear told me he’d heard that one plenty of times before, and since it was a stereotype that made it onto national television, I had to assume plenty of other people were aware of that one.

After thinking about it some, I went to google up some statistics, and got a better picture of what I think was going on. I grew up in an area with a surprisingly large immigrant population (albeit unsurprisingly segregated). There is a distinctly large Asian population here, but it’s comprised overwhelmingly of a very few ethnicities, generally not Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. I only bring that up because I know that in my mind, when I think “Asian” and don’t investigate the thought further, I generally think of some undifferentiated compendium of “ChineseJapaneseKorean.” I don’t think of Southeast Asian. If you were to ask me, “Are Thais Asian?” I’d say yes, but if you were to ask me, “What is Asian?” I’d probably say Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and might not remember the rest of the Asian world unless prompted. Admittedly, maybe that is just my brain. But it made me wonder if the “Asian people can’t drive” stereotype didn’t really take root here because the most identifiably Asian population in my hometown isn’t necessarily considered “Asian” at first glance.

There is also a sizable [redacted] African population here. In my hometown, it’s the Africans who can’t drive. It’s also the Africans who are “taking all the jobs” and “can’t take care of their kids” and “run down the neighborhoods” and “talk way too loud.” The first, second, and third of those assumptions never really took root in me for some reason, possibly because I grew up in a neighborhood with a very diverse mix of immigrants, and got to actually see immigrants working extremely hard (usually in jobs white people would never take), caring lovingly for their children, and tending their homes and lawns way better than my father ever did. In fact, the city was called on my house several times, and the police a few times, due to our general slovenliness and perceived threat of violence to the neighbors, so I’m pretty sure we were the ones bringing the neighborhood down, and not the Laotion guys who lived down the street.

The talk too loud stereotype and the bad driving stereotype did take root, though. I know they did, because whenever somebody is talking very loudly near me, or is speeding recklessly, in the split-second before I turn my head to look at them, this chime goes off in my head that says, “I bet they’re going to be black.” Anybody in my town with dark skin shares the same stereotypical space in my brain — if they’re speeding and talking loud, they’ve got to be African or African-American.

I didn’t used to notice this when I was a kid. In fact, I didn’t notice it until I went to a different town for college. That town had a very different demographic make-up, with a very small immigrant population, and an absolutely dismal proportion of African-Americans, who were nonetheless even more segregated. This escaped my notice entirely for about a year of college, until one day I was on the bus and I saw a Nigerian man. And I stared. I stared before I caught myself staring, and, horrified, forced myself to stare at my shoes the rest of the ride, asking myself what the fuck was wrong with me. It finally occurred to me — you haven’t seen somebody who isn’t white for almost an entire year. I stopped wondering what was wrong with me, and started wondering what was wrong with this town, and this college. And then I went back to wondering what was wrong with me, that I had never noticed this in all the college materials.

In that town, African-Americans couldn’t drive, and African-Americans spoke too loud. There wasn’t really any other ethnicity available to share that stereotypical space.

Now that I’m back in my hometown, I take note of it every time my brain clicks and whirs and spits out, “That shitty driver is going to be black.” I take note of the fact that, if they are black, my brain wants to file that away in a box called “Told you so, blacks are shitty drivers,” whereas if they turn out to be white or any other ethnicity, my brain wants to file that away in a box called, “What a shitty driver, moving along.” I really force myself to notice that I’m doing this, and sometimes I force myself to say it out loud — “I assumed that woman was going to be Somali because she was loud, and then when she was Somali, I felt smug.” (I do not say this out loud in front of the person I am pigeon-holing — I say it out loud just for myself, or sometimes in front of my bear.)

It feels really icky to say that shit out loud, to hear what I’m saying. I do it that way because my ex-friend Polar once went off on a racist rant, and hearing that shit said out loud made me realize how few places you have to hide racism anymore, once you’ve taken it outside your head and put it in public. Once I say, out loud, “I felt smug because a black person was loud, the way I expect them to be,” there is no way for me to chock that up to anything else. With Polar, she went on a rant with me about a solicitor who came to her house on an obvious pyramid scheme about flipping properties. Solicitors suck, and pyramid schemes suck, so I understood her fuming about how shitty it was and how angry it made her, thinking about how that solicitor was probably just going to go next door and scam some old person. I got that. But she just wouldn’t stop talking about it, and seemed to get angrier and angrier the more she talked. I don’t know what clicked it for me, something in the tone of her voice, but I finally asked, “What race was the guy?” And thus opened up a new wing of the conversation, called “Fucking Africans.” I wasn’t yet at the point in my life where I was willing to shut somebody down cold, and end a friendship with them over a major breach in goddamn ethics. So I tried having a “rational” conversation with her about how maybe, just throwing this out there, maybe that situation wasn’t any worse just because he was Africans. Maybe it sucks to have a solicitor try to scam you, no matter what race they are. And maybe we should stop talking about how he’s a fucking African who you can’t even understand the way he talks hurfle burfle racist puke, and just move on to talking about something else, okay?

I finally accidentally shut down the conversation when Polar, getting increasingly backed into a corner, tried this one: “It’s not even what he was doing that bothered me! It’s just that he came to this country and took somebody else’s job!” Without thinking about it, I burst into laughter. “Oh, the coveted ‘scam old people all day’ job? That’s a tight fucking market, how dare he take that job away from some sad white dude who has to work in an office with benefits now that the pyramid scheme is all sewn up.” I was being really generous at the time, all “oh, she’s just venting, I should help educate her” instead of “racism makes white people believe completely insane things and I am not going to entertain this conversation as if it is sane or reasonable.”

I’m getting really off track here. What I meant to say about all of this: there are a collection of racist stereotypes that I know intimately, but where I have grown up, they’ve been applied to completely different groups of people. If I hadn’t heard that “Asians can’t drive” thing on TV, I never would have even considered the fact that perhaps in other parts of the country, Africans aren’t the bad drivers. Perhaps in other parts of the country, all the same stereotypes just get applied to the local demographic whipping boy. And I got curious about that. I started to wonder what other hometowns look like, how this process works everywhere — take a stereotype and stick it to whoever your town values the least. If anybody is comfortable sharing, I’d like to know who is the loud bad driver in your town. What ethnicity fills the slot of (any given stereotype)? I’m less interested in the ethnicities than I am in the stereotypes, since I suspect we’ll end up with a static list of stereotypes, and a rotating cast of characters to fill them. I’m interested in this because it’s like a Mad Libs of goddamn horrible oppression: pick some characteristic that white people, as a society, have decided is an accurate indicator of a person’s unfitness for citizenship (which is its own insane judgment to start with), and then just fill in the blank with whoever your most visible local non-white ethnicity is. Like, if I put out there: The worst drivers in my town are (ethnicity), and ask a local white person to fill in the blank, I probably now have a fairly accurate judgment of the demographics of their town.