I visited the Scottish Isle of Arran with friends I'd met while on the English FSP at the University of Glasgow. A peculiar incident happened while we were catching the last ship to the mainland after having taken a bus from one of the far corners of the island.
On the short path to the ship, I walked a leisurely eight feet behind a man who kept glancing behind himself at me as if he were trying to prevent some sort of blind-sided attack. I also remember a young girl who violently turned a corner when she saw that I pursued her path to the ship. What happened next still astounds and stymies me, and I hope that in writing about it, I can come to some sort of a conclusion. The man in front of me suddenly turned to the side and approached the seaside railing as if to regard the water, all the while looking to his side, and, when I passed him, looking at my back smirkingly as if he had thwarted a violent attempt of some sort. I caught up with my friends and kept my peripheral vision on this man who left the railing the moment I'd passed him. My friends and I then boarded the ship, but my mind remained possessed with the fact that the experience probably occurred because I am black.
Yep, I'm black. The only black young man in my FSP group, in fact. The only black young man in my residence hall at the university, in fact. The only black person on the plane ride over to Glasgow, in fact. So I'm not going to say that up until that time, I hadn't received alarmed stares and contemplative glances and uncomfortable look-overs. But until that moment when that man stepped aside so I could walk on by, I hadn't experienced a judgment or a condemnation so blatant as this silent one which echoes still in the troubled, emotional, contemplative recesses of my mind.
I talked to a friend of mine at the University about the incident, and he said the man probably thought I was going to rob him. "Rob him? Me?" I thought. I would never think of doing such a thing as purposefully violating a fellow human being's person for the sole reason of increasing my personal wealth or indulging gross pleasures. Me? Alfred Charles Valrie Jr., thought of as a robber? That sort of thing only happens to those thuggish, under-educated, inner-city blacks who, most likely, are robbers. You know, the ones who wear Fubu jackets or Pelle-Pelle shirts and who sport over sized boots and over sized pants and who can be seen wearing a Walkman while rapping to the lyrics of the latest foul-mouthed hip-hop artist. But not me. Alfred Valrie, who attends one of the more prestigious schools in the world and is respectful and up standing and who walks tall and proud and who wears khaki pants or corduroys and turtlenecks or nicely-pressed shirts. (I know I'm humiliating myself, but I think there's a point here.) Besides, I'm not as broad-nosed or wooly-haired or dark-complexioned as some other blacks, so why should I be persecuted?
Why anyone should be persecuted based on natural appearance is what I will never know or fully understand. But I have considered what I should have done in the exact moment when that man stepped to the side. Maybe I should have thanked him for giving me more room. As if I were royalty or something and he were my subject. "Thank you," I should have called to him with my hand upraised like Queen Elizabeth or the Pope. Or maybe I should have indulged his fears and done violence to him and tossed his lifeless body over the railing and into the sea. Then I could have said, "You should have been more careful. You can never trust those like me." Or maybe I was right to continue walking on by, but perhaps I should not have glanced at him peripherally, betraying my hurt and bewilderment. Why was I paying such close attention to the movements of a person eight feet in front of me, you may ask? The answer is that I become incredibly more sensitive to the actions of people when I am in homogeneously-peopled environments. I should have continued walking as if his action didn't hurt me, right? But it did hurt me, and it still does.
I didn't write this with the intention of evoking empathy or sharing the inner turmoil of a furious, frustrated black man. I wrote this simply to share the experience of a dispirited young person who began to harbor -- at the point the man stepped aside -- a contemptuous soul, both envious of the white students in the FSP group who could blend in seamlessly and silently hateful of a set of misconceptions and egregious prejudices under which the invisible chafe and the loathed become what they are wrongly thought to be. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to shed this skin. These days, there's an increasing amount of static on the lower frequencies.
