This afternoon, Ryu and I walked the usual circuit around downtown. We approached the corner of Eighth Street and River Avenue where two people stood slightly bent forward, looking at a crop of tulips. The tulips are out en force before the first week in May. The woman in the pair had a camera in her hands, the man mimicking her movements but without a camera. They wore matching blue jeans and Pittsburgh Steelers windbreakers. Tourists. The two, seemingly satisfied with the documentation of the floral samples inside this one planter, straightened up in time to see us arrive at the corner. Now, before the story progresses, I want to share a useful set of metaphors prefaced by a bit of information.
First, Ryu is a beautiful dog. People across the age range and genders make cooing sounds when he prances past. If he and I are stopped at an intersection (or anywhere, to my chagrin, because he’s relieving himself), people exploit the interlude as an opportunity to pose a set of boilerplate questions: is it a boy or girl, what kind of dog is he, how old is he, is he friendly, where did you get him, my gosh he is so cute, can I pet him? Those questions belong exclusively to the realm of Yes and No, save for the ‘he is so cute’ bit which, of course, is not a question. To that, I grin and feel aggravatingly single.
Oh, the metaphor. Ryu is a total magnet. Were he a human and minus the leash, I’d be his wingman. (Full disclosure: I’ve never been a wingman. I had to read Urban Dictionary to confirm the word choice.) The situations wherein people tell me that he’s cute, what options exist other than to say “thanks,” comment in agreement, or provide a perfunctory grin? I can’t deny or lie that he’s a fucking awesome looking dog. Still, hello? How about some attention on the end of the leash wearing pants? Society -- and by that I mean the popular media -- teaches that animals ought attract attention to their carer. A dog projects a manner of unselfishness onto their human and, in Ryu’s case, a sense of style. So far, in a year, I’ve had not one bite. Which is unfair (and I don’t mean the pun). Always the wingman and never the... not wingman? How does that old saw work in the structure of the bridesmaids cliché...? Let me know, ladies.
I should note that walking downtown has practical and tactical value. Schlepping into town extends our range of both exercise and recognition. He and I walk a lot farther when in town than during our usual neighbourhood trek (at least, it seems farther, for his need to lift a leg every 30 seconds). He also gets to ‘chase’ the abundant foraging squirrels in Centennial Park absent my anxiety of car traffic. The downtown excursion is also tactical in that should Ryu ever slip away -- which his breed notoriously accomplishes like tragic Houdini-dogs -- it’ll give some comfort that a slew of people in both our walking areas would recognise a happily running Shiba Inu and know which weeping man to find.
Returning to the Steelers fans. The light to cross Eighth turned prohibitive as I came to a stop next to them. The woman’s face registered the familiar ‘I’m going to ask questions about your wonderful dog’ expression yet the man’s voice hit me first. “Is that a husky?” he asked. I looked at him, registered him as perhaps in the late 60s and, looking back to the now crouched woman, responded in the negative. “He looks like a baby husky,” she says from the balls of her feet looking at Ryu who is next to me and two feet from the couple. “No, he’s fully grown. Six years this summer,” I say. The man insists that Ryu looks like a husky. It’s then that a recognise his tone: matter-of-fact, as though the situation were switched and Ryu were in their care and I posed the questions. How odd. He asked whether Ryu is friendly, to which I deviated for the first time from the standard “yes,” to “he is friendly if you are.” When the man kept still and said “I’d better not risk it then,” I noticed a politically themed button on his baseball cap: white numbers 9 1 2 superimposed over an American flag. The white numbers sparked a backwards process of adding up the events of the past 1o seconds. These people are Tea Party activists. Holy shit. This hit me with force. The woman, still crouched and all smiles focused on Ryu, asks what ‘kind’ of dog he is, and I share that “he’s a Shiba Inu, a Japanese hunting dog; kind of like a fox.” She stands up yet remains looking down, enraptured. The man says, “well he can’t be Japanese or else his eyes would be all slanted.” I look not at the man’s face but at his political button. The Eighth Street crossing light turns. “Nos cruzamos, Ryu,” and we walk toward the park. The couple go east.
His eyes would be all slanted. The strange old man said that about my dog. My Japanese dog. Several issues here.
One, I’ve never encountered a self-identifying Tea Party activist. Last week I saw a white SUV parked outside the Curragh Irish Pub festooned with Michigan Tea Party magnets. I made mental note that the crazies are arrived. ‘Take back the government’? What does that even mean? It’s right there: where we the people elected it. My sole exposure to Tea Party supporters otherwise is through newspapers and the internet. If one discounts their leaders Palin, Limbaugh and Beck, the rank-and-file seem like average rednecks: poor, under-educated and racialist. Yet, the New York Times recently released a survey disproving that stereotype... at least, the poor portion. The survey also suggests that Tea Party supporters possess an average level of education (in 2010 America, what in hell does that even mean? I know college students who cannot conjugate a verb). Perhaps I’m on the wispy end of the 1970’s culture wars but possessing an education infers that one is aware of social acceptabilities. If Tea Party activists are indeed of average income and education (but totally racialist), then it boggles the mind to consider what for this man is socially taboo if describing Japanese things as ‘slanted’ is comfortably safe. Perhaps his mental calendar flips perpetually between 1944 and 1985?
Second, the man applied a human physiology to a dog without a discernible sense of irony. Slanted eyes - Japanese humans - Japanese dogs. I honestly don’t get the connection. Japanese people do not have slanted eyes. Their eyelids, like many East Asian people, have a double crease. So, yeah, not correct. The physiology of dog eyelids to their original nation makes no goddamn sense and negative a thousand sense in connection to the humans of that geography. Maybe this point links back to number one up there because, call me old-fashioned, an educated discerning person would not have made the inter-species analogy. It’s fucking clumsy, embarrassing.
Third, the man said the horrible bigoted comment in a didactic tone one uses when correcting a simple mistake. Try this exercise at home. Have a person say aloud, “we now have a lot of children so should by a Toyota coupe.” Then, you respond aloud with “no, we shouldn’t buy a coupe because it only has two doors.” Sounds reasonable, right? A sedan is defined by its having four doors and a coupe, two. No big deal here. Now, in that same tone say “well he can’t be Japanese or else his eyes would be all slanted.” Please, please tell me that you feel the wrongness of the words. English speakers should hear a similar wrongness of language not so much in tone as in time with the mistaken conjugation of ‘saw‘ and ‘seen‘ (I seen a Prius accelerate suddenly and then smash into an Audi vs I saw a Prius accelerate suddenly and then smash into a no you fucking didn’t you litigious liar, shut up).
The stinky cherry atop this anti-social cake is point four: he presumed that I wouldn’t taken offence to his comment. This upsets me most.
The bigot presumes that others of their group share their prejudices; therefore, all white guys are equally bigoted. NO. NO! That logic isn’t logic: it is racist. How does that obvious truth escape racialist people? This is an older, white married man ostensibly not from this city who yet possesses the peace of mind to conclude that an unknown white man also accepts bigotry. The adjective ‘unknown’ ought to activate his brain’s crucial ‘keep the questionable comments inside’ mechanism, but in this case the unknown might as well be ‘nephew.’ And that ‘quality’ about bigotry terrifies: the implied familial-like cohesiveness of racial identity. Remember, he and I are total strangers to the other. What we had in common are skin colour, language and shared space of an intersection. Yet, out of the stranger-ness this man found in me a familiar identity based on skin colour. That shared identity enabled the forging of a sufficient bond for him to comfortably share that horrible comment. His assuming my tolerance in hearing bigotry presumes that all white people are bigots -- that all white people think the same. Exactly zero white people agree with that presumption! Even crazies agree, if asked in a a sensible manner, that not all crazies think the same kind of batshit crazy. I’d bet other people’s money that this bigot would emphatically conclude that all whites do not think the same. He is a shameless racist and I am a heathen sodomite, yet we’re both white. ¡Viva la diferencia! No racial/ethnic/cultural/gender/sexual group appreciates that totality of prejudice by another group. Remember the calendar reference up there? It’s 2010 for fuck’s sake. But, go ahead and test my argument: replace any group in the gap in the following sample sentence as a test. ________ love to go shopping. Blacks? Racist. Asians? Bigoted. Persians? Ditto. Women? Sexist. Homos? (oh... shit...) Homophobic.
What is the take away from this experience? I walked into Centennial Park with Ryu, the scene familiar: sunshine and trees, squirrels and tulips in the city I chose to call home. Yet, I felt different. A strange man infected me with his racial presumption. For the first time I felt bad for being white. The comment about my Japanese dog looped me into a colour-bound prejudice that I did not fight. It happened suddenly. I was unprepared. It took place in public. Whatever. The truth is that my goddamn liberal insistence on the goodness of people cloaked the man’s vile nature until too late. I acted in response to a traffic light instead of in defence of principles and so suffered in the aftermath. This is an education.
Ryu seems unaffected, I am pleased to report.
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