For the second time of my life, I had that classic American racial slur hurled at me by a stranger on a roadway.
I know some people have heard it so many times it becomes an ambient sound. Some people never survived the occasion when it was hurled at them. I’m thankful for surviving, but deeply bitter that it happened to me at all.
The words we call curses do cast a malicious spell. They cause the object pain and trouble, but they also infect. The hate enters you. It causes self doubt and brings rancor into your life. Once inside, it can seep out and be directed at other innocents.
Once again in our country, we live in a time of a pandemic of hate. How will we inoculate ourselves? How do we stop the spread of this deadly disease?
I was minding my own business — walking my dog on Saturday night after a lovely evening with friends.
A dark SUV slowed down, which is already alarming on a residential street at night. The voice of a woman shouts the slur then speeds away.
My shoulders tensed. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. As I emerged from the shock, I sensed the danger, but I wasn’t able to get a photo quick enough to capture the license plate. I’m not sure what that would have accomplished anyway.
I did call Sheriff Lou Falco two days later, to make sure he knew that these kinds of attacks are happening in our county. He expressed sadness that this happened to me.
I suggested that this person must’ve been extremely hostile towards people of color because my racial identity is imperceptible to some even in daylight. I then worried out loud that this person may have known me, and now, where I live.
I also told him why I froze that night. This moment had transported me to a similar incident when I was in third grade on my way home from Longfellow elementary school in Teaneck New Jersey, 55 years earlier. An ice cream cone followed the same curse, the creamy sugary sweet saturating my face and neck and shirt and book bag. Later, streaked with tears, it was wiped off me when I made it to my mother‘s art gallery.
After I was cleaned up, that same day, my father took me to the dojo of a fellow veteran friend of his. I failed to see how martial arts would protect me from flying ice cream cones, but he knew all too well the world that I had now been initiated into. It was a world I imagine he thought he had escaped by raising me in an affluent middle class integrated suburban community. He knew that the word that was hurled my way always precedes violence. It is violent. He also now knew that in America, that word cannot be escaped, nor the hate that launches it.
I fear there’s more violence around the corner, some of it directed at me, some of it directed at members of the Jewish, Muslim, immigrant, trans or BIPOC communities. The animus comes from people who have made hate their business, their religion.
As this pandemic of hate rages, we must find a way not to allow the hatred to penetrate or it will spread into a bonfire that will consume us all.
The next day, when I was walking my dog, a vehicle passed us and through the open passenger window a dog barked at mine. My sympathetic lymphatic system contracted as adrenaline entered my system again. I’m not sure if it’s the PTSD from what happened 55 years before or three days before — or everything in between.
I thought about keeping this incident to myself, or maybe sharing it, for therapeutic reasons, with a few friends and family. I have no evidence. I have no solution. Yet I imagine that if words can be shaped into weapons to harm, then conversely, they can be forged into tools to heal.
So I seek to use these words to bring healing to myself, to other innocent victims of hate and yes, to also to promote healing for people so swollen with anger that they seek innocent victims at night.
I’m sharing what happened to me for the same reason I called the Sheriff. We should report every incidence of resurgent intolerance against the visibly different. We need to know what’s going on in our county in real time.
Each report rings an alarm to stay alert because there is more hate coming down the road.
Stay Safe.
