“[The] slippery slope from the fearsome outsider, to the aliens within, to the bad fellow citizen is likely to end at my brother’s front door.” – Iris Marion Young (2003)
A few weeks ago I was sitting on a bench at the U of A Student Union using my laptop. I might have been doing research for my upcoming presentation for the Western Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting. But I was more likely facebooking. It doesn’t really matter to my story. (Or does it?)
As I happily computed, a voice over my shoulder suddenly broke my reverie. “Hello” was all it said, and joylessly – in fact somewhat aggressively. As I looked up I saw it came from a security guard who passed by, giving me a long, stern, appraising look over his shoulder.
What was that all about? I asked myself. Then it dawned on me. I was there in raggedy, colorful clothing; my shirt was a bright, floral western-style shirt I had cut off at the hem because it was too long at the waist, and my jeans had honest holes in the knees – put there not by underpaid, abused women in Nicaragua working for the Gap, but by actual life and work. I had a bright yellow East-Indian scarf around my neck that didn’t really go with the shirt. I think I was wearing my Crocs. I realized I must have looked much older than the average student, and much too casual to be a professor. I didn’t fit in. Or, more pointedly, I didn’t fit this security guard’s idea of who should be hanging out at the Student Union.
I was profiled.
You see, the people at the U of A fit into certain standard categories. There are students, faculty, and staff of various positions. The staff who work in the Student Union are either administrative professionals or janitorial, concessions, or other types of lower-paid workers. The latter are always uniformed in red or blue polo shirts – the colors of the U of A. Why do they wear uniforms, but the administrators, students, and faculty don’t have to? Well… what if they didn’t? One could argue that people in need of help or information wouldn’t know whom to ask, and the uniforms are helpful in that way. But name badges could fill the same purpose. Perhaps it’s nice to have a visual sense of unity – to see the school colors. But then, why are students and faculty not required, or even encouraged, to wear school colors?
What would we have if the people working the menial jobs at the University didn’t wear uniforms? We would have a bunch of middle-aged, predominantly brown-skinned, casually-dressed people sharing geographical space with the other categorized classes of the U of A. A student might have to interact long enough with one of these people (in terms of seconds or split-seconds) to figure out whether he is a professor, a fellow student, an administrator, a guest, a worker, or a vagrant who should be removed from the premises. How distracting. In fact, a student may begin to look at one of these people as a fellow human being, rather than as a red or blue blur in the corner of one’s eye on the way to the bathroom.
As I sat on the bench, now completely distracted from my work, looking down at my clothes, wondering if my hair was too messy, looking around at the perfect hairdos and predictable designer jeans and boring, unimaginative color schemes of the students walking by, I felt something that I could only describe as… shame. Yes, I am not currently enrolled at the U of A, and I am using their Public wireless. I am just a lowly local. Of course I’ve gotten weird looks and insults before on account of my gender presentation and/or queerness – that is not new. The difference here is that it was someone with a badge making the judgment – the element of illegality was added to the usual social punch in the gut. And it was not even about looking or acting gay. It was a class thing. Of course, this brief flash of shame eventually evolved into the more productive indignation from which I now write. The next time I went down to the U of A I think I put on a black turtleneck – a nice, inconspicuous, professorial look. Yes, boring. Yes, a step back into the closet. Yes, a defeat for imagination. But I wouldn’t be disturbed, and I could get some work done. Or some facebooking.
Jomo, a beloved local bandleader and bohemian who wears au-naturelle dreads and wildly colored Jimi Hendrix-type outfits and plays his ocarina while riding his bicycle, often goes to the U of A to play Frisbee with the students at lunchtime. I haven’t asked him, but I think he does it as a sort of community/cultural outreach, and to promote his visionary band Spirit Familia. He is a beautiful clown, an entertainer – he makes everyone smile. I don’t think he gets chilling looks from security when he’s out on the lawn playing Frisbee. But I wonder what would happen if he came to the Student Union and tried to do research on his laptop?
In India there is a name for this situation. It is called the caste system. One is allowed full freedom of expression within the prescribed behaviors, dress, job opportunities, and marital possibilities of her caste. But she cannot cross the line into those prescribed for another caste. (Nowadays I believe it is not a legal prescription but a social one, yet still hard to throw off overnight after centuries of use, even for the most socially progressive. I do not pretend here to know the history, nor the subtleties, of the caste system within the culturally diverse land of India. But I know it is a living issue.) Here in the United States, we claim at our most idealistic to be a classless society, or at the very least that our socioeconomic classes have porous boundaries. I think these pores are getting clogged.
Since the passage a few days ago of Arizona SB1070, the bill that essentially mandates profiling by law enforcement of those who appear to be undocumented immigrants, I have noticed an unexpected change in my own behavior. When I see a person who looks to me to be of Latino origin, I feel like apologizing, or commiserating. But what am I doing in the initial moment I am looking at them? Racial profiling. This law has me, even in my resistance, serving the Man. This law is not just legally pernicious – it is doing social damage already. To be suspicious, or even unnaturally conscious, of someone who is “different” has always served the agenda of those who wish to keep or augment their power through divide-and-conquer techniques. It served the Dutch colonizers of the Hutus and Tutsis, as well as it did the Nazi party. It continues to serve the economic interests who have pitted poor whites against blacks ever since the end of slavery. The greatest fear of these interests is that we would unify against the real enemy.
If there is any possible positive outcome to the passage of this morally repugnant legislation, perhaps it will be that we will look more deeply at our own persisting unconscious buy-in of the concept of “race,” and our unnatural, engineered fixation on difference, and see that it serves an even more deeply disturbing agenda. It is not simply disempowering and distracting. Our civil liberties are being eroded away. I know… we’ve been hearing that for years. Hence the term: erosion. How long will it be before you are the suspicious “other?” What will protect you, if the laws are no longer there to do it? What will you do if you can’t afford the clothes or the car or the haircut that will identify you as “low-risk,” free to facebook in public at your leisure? Or free to simply walk to the corner store unharassed?
