“Party’s remark about worrying about your kids also struck me as odd. Show me parents of ANY race who don’t worry when their kids go out at night.”
Here’s the difference.
Scene: two white coworkers, parents of teenage boys.
K is married to a white man, white teenage son, affluent suburb.
L is married to a black man, teens are black, racially diverse suburb.
K recounts a funny story about a game her son is participating in, whereby kids are hiding near one another’s garages and then playing “gotcha”, shooting one another with water guns and so forth. Kids are getting creative with hiding in bushes, knowing when the family will be driving, etc. Most of the class is participating, there are points on a board at school, ha ha isn’t this fun hijinks. There’s no vandalism except maybe someone’s flowers get trampled, it’s all light hearted fun blah blah blah.
L quietly speaks up and says she could not let her son participate in this game. She simply cannot take the chance of her black son hiding in bushes to “accost” a fellow student. It just takes one nutty neighbor to call the police or tote a gun and then her son is in danger. He simply cannot afford “high spirited hijinks” that is cute among white suburban boys but menacing when done by black boys. And like it or not, there is a different reaction to “my kid’s classmate is hiding in our bushes waiting to shoot us with a water gun when we pull out of the garage” when it’s a white kid vs black kid.
That’s the kind of thing people are talking about, moooop.
Though I do agree with you that sometimes there is an assumption that if you’re white, you move through life seamlessly with only pleasant encounters, and truly, sometimes the rude cashier or the jerk who pushed ahead of you in line is just a jerk to everyone.
Yesterday I was in a line in a coffee shop. The man in front of me was a Mexican blue collar worker. It was unclear by where he was standing whether he was in line or not, so I asked him. Now, maybe internally he thought “wealthy white lady thinks I dont belong at a fancy coffee shop with overpriced lattes, microaggression alert” but I really was just clarifying whether he was in line or not. Later on, he sort of angled the line in a way that blocked other people and because I’m a stickler for this kind of thing, I put my hand up and said to him that he really needed to move, he was making the line block other people and we needed to angle ourselves more flat and not block the other patrons. Again, it’s quite possible he perceived it as a microaggression of a wealthy white lady telling him what to do because he’s Mexican, but really, I’m just correcting someone who wasn’t showing common sense irrespective of race. I’d have done the same thing with a fellow wealthy white suburbanite.