Something Sinister This Way Remains

The issue with this is that there are great opportunities to better one’s circumstances and educate and edify so that one can assume the sense of protection from racial discrimination for a variety of factors. The factors create for a quick illusion that can be harshly and painfully evaporated. On college campuses and work places where people tend to have higher degrees you tend to find more “liberated minds” in accepted-whites. These liberated minds don’t have many overt racist tendencies, and are not malicious…though they are ignorant about their ignorance. Nobody is fully culturally competent and totally without prejudice—that’s humanity—but striving to overcome flaws is what represents the best efforts in all affairs. The non-white gets to live in a bubble of decimated racial tension in these scenarios and lives (at least in the context of that setting) with decreased pressure…sometimes without even having to consider it. The illusion is quickly dispersed as the inherently (though possibly not consciously) racist system takes hold.

This was probably most apparent in the wrongful 2009 arrest of Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. who, ironically, is one of the most foremost scholarly authorities on the matter. Gates was arrested while outside of his home for suspicion of breaking and entering into his own home. One cannot wear their intellectual achievements draped over their features as one does their own skin, no matter how they self-define. The book was judged by its cover and the black man outside the Massachusetts home was immediately suspicious. This had also happened recently to Bob Dylan, who was walking around as Bob Dylan does with a scraggly beard and sweatshirt, but whereas I might see a disheveled Bob Dylan being mistaken for (at the very least) a man looking for a meal, Dr. Gates is very clean cut and—not for nothing—much easier to understand than the slurry-to-speak Dylan.

Even more recently than that a former Professor and a man who has taken a mentorship role in my life, Professor Luis Quiros, experienced a situation just as this. Professor Quiros is a brown, Latino man and as such was accused of listening to music far too loudly near a school by his local police. “Near a school” of course, can be defined as “a few blocks away” and “too loudly” can be described as “playing music at all”. The Professor sat in his car, with the engine off, in front of his own home while he was targeted as a suspicious person. He decided then to roll with the punches as he was questioned: he didn’t turn off the music as was requested and held an audible conversation over the modestly playing songs, he refused to identify as the owner of the house he was parked in front of, and eventually resisted arrest as he was not charged with anything. The entire affair could certainly have been avoided if only he’d have presented identification to begin with, but as his neighbors arrived vouching for his 20 year tenure as a resident of the neighborhood, the damage had been done and a message had been sent:  “Your suspicions are unfounded.” Once incarcerated Mr. Quiros found himself cuffed to a wall for five hours and berated with demeaning questions about his level of education. As it humiliatingly care to bear upon the interrogating officer that the man they had accused of suspicion was a college Professor with two Masters Degrees and Doctoral courses, as well as a published author and highly visible local activist and advocate they proceeded to show him to a judge. Reluctantly posting bail, Professor Quiros will be taking the police to task in court. Of course, this was in Westchester County just north of New York City—so perhaps our metropolitan and outer lying suburbs aren’t as progressed as we like to think they are.