I grew up in New York City. It was a typical working-class neighborhood. There was an Armenian lady across the street who watched my baby brother when Mom went shopping. There was a Chinese girl my mom sometimes cared for. There were white kids and black kids and brown kids that I played with and walked to school with and argued with and studied with.
When people asked me where I was from, I never minded answering because it was understood that I was American, that I had the right to be there; the question was just curiosity about my heritage.
Then I moved to a small town in South Carolina to work as an engineer. Suddenly the question, “Where are you from?” made me tense up. Because the implication was very different. Suddenly I was foreign.
Oh, people were nice about it. I found out, by accident, that if I dressed in traditional Indian clothes people were actually nicer to me then if I dressed in my normal blue jeans and t-shirt. They would go out of their way to be helpful. But they still saw me as “different”.
When I went to lunch with friends, people stared at us. I had co-workers from all over. My regular lunch group included a blond woman, a black man, a Chinese guy and a couple of white men. The waitresses were unfailingly polite and we never had any issues, except for having people stop and stare when we entered a restaurant. I realized it was because we were usually the only mixed-race group.
For the most part, I chalked it up to cultural differences, with no real malice behind it. After all, when my car broke down, several white men in a truck stopped to help. I felt completely safe with them as they fixed my vehicle and helped me on my way. The woman at the bank and the lady at the store smiled and chatted with me. My white neighbors were friendly. At church, people made me feel welcome. And I never had trouble with the cops.
I had interactions with local police because I had a lead foot. So I got stopped for speeding a few times. They were always polite and I only got a ticket once.
Then a couple of things happened that changed my perspective.
One time I was driving down the main (and only) street of a little town nearby when I saw a KKK rally. I had never seen one before and it took a moment for it to register. I drove right by, and then it hit me — that’s what that was. The white sheets, the signs… I was livid. What made me the angriest is that I’d seen, out of the corner of my eye, a couple of children.
I prepared to turn around and confront them. I wanted to give them a piece of my mind. But the person I was with talked me out of it.
Then a few weeks later, a good friend of mine, who happened to be black, and I got lost while heading to a play. We were on the campus of Clemson University, where he had gotten a Master’s degree, so I felt free to tease him about not knowing his way around.
As we stopped and backtracked yet again, a police officer stopped us and asked for I.D.
I was still shaken up from the KKK incident in addition to being frustrated that we might be late for our event, so I lost my temper.
“Are you stopping us because my friend is black?” I challenged the white officer.
His eyes got wide.
I am an educated person and my speech patterns reflect this. I think that makes a difference with cops. The police officer backed off. He apologized.
“We’re lost,” I explained. “We are on our way to a play presented by the theater arts department. If you could kindly give us directions, we’d appreciate it.”
He was more than happy to do so. A few minutes later, my friend and I were on our way.
My friend was silent. We didn’t talk about the incident until later.
“You know I couldn’t do that,” he said.
“I know,” I told him.
We never talked about it again, but it made me realize that no matter how friendly people were on the surface and how decent most people were, there were still racists living in the South and that they were most prejudiced against black people. As a woman of color I sometimes had to deal with uncomfortable questions and discrimination, but what he and my other black friends had to deal with was much worse.
This was not that long ago. It makes me sad to think that it still happens.
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Previously published on medium
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