crash moments

Racism is man's gravest threat to man--the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.
-Abraham Joshua Heschel

The 2004 movie Crash (one of the few that I managed to see this year--I am notoriously television and film averse) introduced into the popular lexicon the phrase "crash moment," a situation in which a person feels discriminated against on the basis of race or ethnicity. The film, written and directed by Paul Haggis, deals with racial and social tensions in Los Angeles, and the term it spawned gained special notoriety during Oprah-gate. I highly recommend the movie, mostly because it features Don Cheadle. Yum.

I have been thinking about racism quite a bit lately, living here in D.C. I wouldn't say that I have had "crash moments" per se, but I have of late been more aware of the color of my skin, for a variety of reasons. One of those is the fact that dogooderlawyer's roommate is black. Last week, entering their building, I was told by one of the security guards about the arrival of a package for the apartment. She gave me the name. "That's me," I joked. "Don't I look like a tall, athletic black man?" They both just stared at me. Then I tried to wheedle. "I know what's inside, because it's for me. It's season two of Chappelle's Show!" More staring. Dogooderlawyer and his roommate are obsessed with this sketch comedy series and were horrified to discover that I had never even heard of it (see above, re: television aversion). The standard greeting around the apartment is, "I'm Rick James, bitch!"

My thought process started when my stolen car was recovered. (The full story on that forthcoming.) The policeman who reported my car as abandoned was a man called Carlos Escobar, and as he was on the scene when I arrived to claim my car, we chatted as I waited for a tow truck. I learned that Carlos is from Mexcio City, he visits his parents there occasionally, and in his career as an Abandoned Auto Investigator, he has developed some very particular habits concerning his car, which he was kind enough to pass along to me. For instance, whenever he puts something in his trunk, he then drives around the neighborhood for a while, as so to make anyone watching him think that he dropped off the items in the car. I told Carlos the story of the theft of my car, and his assessment was swift and decisive: "Your car, I think, was stolen by black people." I left our brief meeting still unclear as to how he arrived at this conclusion, but it colored all his other opinions. When I asked about pawn shops in the area in which to look for the jewelry that had been in the trunk, he averred that such a search would be a waste of time. "Those people," he claimed, "don't use pawn shops. Your things were probably sold on the street."

I volunteer for the Rape Crisis Center here in town, and last Saturday we had an all-day training session at Howard University Hospital, where the district's SANE program is based. Howard University is historically black, as is its hospital (and as is the entire district, for that matter). So when I and two of my fellow volunteers walked through the entrance that morning and hesitated in the lobby, unsure of the classroom's location, a voice beckoned us from down the long corridor. "Come on this way. I know what you're looking for. Room 3800, right?" We hadn't asked directions of anyone; I take from this experience that the hospital doesn't get much white traffic, and as volunteers, we are warned of as much. During role plays that afternoon, I was confronted by a victim, as black woman, who was angry at having to deal with first a white cop, then a white nurse, then me, a white advocate. I can't say I would have blamed her.