On the Bart train on a Tuesday evening, heading towards the East Bay.
Three black girls, dressed in heels, sharing a set of headphones among each other, one of them holding a bottle of wine. They are having fun, messing around, maybe on their way to a party.
Their stop arrives and they get up to leave, as the bottle of wine slips from the fingers and shatters all over the train car floor, pink wine streaming from one side of the car to the other, underneath the seats, around people’s feet. They holler and laugh, as they continue towards the door before it would close in front of them.
But before they make it out, a black man, maybe in his 30’s, with a young, agitated voice calls out to them, “You’re not even gonna pick up none of that are you? You’re just going to leave it right there! That is what is giving us black people a bad name!”
With those quick words he cuts right through the thick fog of unnamed assumptions and subconscious opinions that filled the minds of all in the train car. He suddenly distills the moment from a vague nuisance to a rude awakening of what we were all thinking.
A post-racial society, some speak of? Impossible. I am not the only one who was jolted into recognizing that, yes, I did associate their unruly behavior with the color of their skin. Here, in the supposedly-oh-so-progressive bay area, we think we are beyond judgements, assumptions based on skin color, culture, appearances connoting a different world. But, in fact, we are a bay area heavily segregated, where skin color and socioeconomic status are too tightly bound together.
And all the organic urban farms in our tree-lined streets don’t change the systematized racism rampant on all sides of the bay. But maybe if more angry gentlemen on the Bart would speak the thoughts we were all thinking, we could get closer to a more transparent understanding of the mess we are in.
