I share invites to protests on facebook and never leave my house. I watch Derek Chauvin’s trial from an apartment in a white-flight suburb of Detroit. In swanky Ferndale coffee shops I wear a Black Lives Matter mask, but I don’t when I visit my dad. I buy a “Defund the Police” t-shirt from a white owned mass-producer. I put being likable before being for anything.
I needed olives for a charcuterie board and was examining a plastic container with scrutiny. I don’t even like olives, but a friend had requested them. I wore my BLM mask and an old U.S. Army coat I’d picked up in Toronto. The latter attracted Joe.
Joe’s not his real name. I remember him telling it to me, the paper towel he’d taped to his face with electrical tape as a “mask” flapping as he spoke, but afterwards I couldn’t recall it. My adrenaline erased snippets of our unsettling conversation as we were having it. In my head, he’d already been given other names; racist, bigot, Trump-er, monster. When later recounting these events to friends over cubed cheeses and cured meats, I decided to name him Joe. He slid up to me in the deli section, as I dumbly considered a jar of red-pepper stuffed olives, and said, “nice coat.”
“Thanks,” I replied, turning to greet him. He wore a camouflage Vietnam veteran’s cap over white hair. I thanked him for his service. “I’d shake your hand, but you know,” I gestured broadly, “covid and all.”
He made some unoriginal quip about Gretchen Whitmer, something my dad would buy him a beer for. It led into a rambling pulled straight from a facebook comments section, “it’s all overblown, socialist agenda, unamerican, ‘that woman’ is out of line.” Then he paused, finally noticing the mask. “So what’s that all about?”
When I first was gifted the mask, I’d only worn it out with my boyfriend, needing a man to be my backup. I made a conscious decision not to wear it on my own— because of this exact scenario. But as months passed without incident, I’d grown bolder. I wore it to the corner store, to the gas station—little test runs. So when I’d parked my car in the Kroger’s lot and fished the BLM mask from the pile stuffed in my center console, I thought, why not? Now here it was, the dreaded confrontation.
I attempted to have the conversation I’d had in my head many times before—in all the hot showers the summer of ‘20, all the facebook arguments I’d resisted jumping into while sitting on my sofa, markedly not at any protest. That June, I’d watched crowds swell and fires burn from a hot tub in Traverse City, hitting share on the latest news with a glass of wine in hand. Mentally, though, I’d imagined all the things I’d say if asked why Black Lives Matter. “Well,” I began, “I believe black people face discrimination in this country that I don’t, and I want to show my support.”
He proceeded to tell me the problem, “the real problem,” with black people in America. Tell me—the small, unassuming white girl caught alone and unawares—all his evil.
“They don’t want to help themselves,” he said, all confident and self-assured. “They cry about wanting equal treatment, then live off the welfare state and have kid after kid,”
“That’s a stereotype,” I refuted with a cool calm. My cheeks felt flushed. I dragged sweaty palms over my jeans and continued, “Welfare is for poor people, not black people. It’s not that black people abuse it, it’s that they still haven’t caught up economically to whites. So they end up needing more assistance, feeding the stereotype.” My rebuttal had been rehearsed over numerous beers with my white liberal friends, in social media comments I typed up then deleted before posting.
“That’s because the Democrats reinforce their victim complex,” Joe replied. His tone was bubbly, as if we were speaking about the weather. I was nauseous. “Then the fake news media promotes all this interbreeding.” I had not been prepared for this spin. My heart flipped. So this is what I was dealing with. This wasn’t misinformed or undereducated, this was vehement racial hatred. My eyes flicked to the passing weekend shoppers as he carried on about black men collecting white women like trophies and “abusing them, making them work while they stay home doing drugs, popping out ten kids.” The suburban mom, the elderly black grandma, the 20’s some-odd yuppies with vibrantly dyed hair. I prayed one of them would intervene, jump in and attack, all fire and fury. I prayed no one would pause their step to eavesdrop when he asked, “would you date a black guy?” I prayed no one would associate me with this man.
“Yes, why wouldn’t I?” I was appalled to find myself matching his casual, easy tone. That I responded so diplomatically without a single condemnation of his barbaric views. And I couldn’t help but to recoil at my hypocrisy—sure, I’d date a black guy, but I never have.
It didn’t matter what I said. I refuted his points, calling out inaccuracies in absurdities like “you wouldn’t breed a peacock and an eagle, would you?” I did it with a collected, determined politeness. But Joe always had another take, a ready retort. If he didn’t, he’d pivot entirely, bouncing to the “liberal mainstream media training black men to be thugs” or recounting instances of black people he knew who were assholes.
“Anyone, of any race, can be an asshole,” I said. The overhead fluorescents and chatter of browsing shoppers was exacerbating the migraine brewing behind my eyes. Though I felt at any second I would cry, my voice was level and unwavering.
“You know,” Joe said, after the most uncomfortable five minutes I have ever had in a Kroger, “most other liberals I talk to would have been screaming at me by now.”
“Well, what good would that do?” I replied. “I don’t agree with you, but if I just yell and call you a racist, you’ll never change your mind, we’ll never find any middle ground.” The words felt like bile in my mouth. What middle ground could be found with a man who seemed to think eugenics was still the answer to “the race problem?” Even as I said it, I recognized the taste of lies. I didn’t have it in me to fully confront him, to call him out for the monster he was. Didn’t want to make a scene, didn’t want to be “that millennial,” didn’t want to be anything.
He asked how old I was, what I do for a living, trying to make small talk after intruding on my olive picking with a diatribe of racism and bigotry. And I obliged. I stood there, courteous and respectful, before we finally said our goodbyes.
I finished my shopping in a daze, hands clammy, my pulse in my ears.
Why didn’t I scream at him? He deserved to be screamed at. Joe deserved to be publicly shamed, tarred and feathered right there—his humiliated corpse displayed among the white and yellow slabs of gourmet cheeses. I had so desperately resisted being the “angry liberal.” Joe resisted nothing, unabashedly embracing blatant white supremacy. And I’d smiled and nodded, nodded and smiled. He’d spilled his evil to me because I was alone, unthreatening, and had the same white skin. I’d allowed him to safely share his vile views while black men can’t safely drive with a taillight out.
I loaded my groceries in my trunk and closed it with a slam. I blasted System of a Down on the way home, the bass rumbling through my legs, trying to channel rage. Trying to drown the shame that had bubbled up from my stomach and now sat heavy in my chest. I felt like someone had pissed on my floor and I’d covered it with a rug instead of dousing it in bleach.
I share invites to protests on facebook and never leave my house.
I watch Derek Chauvin’s trial from an apartment in a white-flight suburb of Detroit. I eat my lunch while they play the video of George Floyd dying—I’d seen it so many times now, I’m desensitized. When it gets too heavy I turn off the TV. Because I can turn it off, turn it right out of my head and walk around free and white and unbothered.
I wear a BLM mask to swanky Ferndale coffee shops with rainbow pride flags on the walls, but don’t when I visit my dad. Not when I just want a beer and some barbeque. I notice he’s taken down his Trump 2020 yard sign but has ordered a new red hat. I don’t comment.
I buy a “Defund the Police” t-shirt from a white owned mass-producer and wear it three times before it sinks to the bottom of my dresser drawer never to be seen again.
And Joe might recall our conversation. He might write about me in the comments section of a Qanon forum. That little progressive girl in the U.S. Army coat and Black Lives Matter mask who didn’t yell at him in the Kroger’s deli. The girl who didn’t. The girl who hopes next time, she screams.
Alex Cascio | May 20th 2021, 4:15pm | Kroger’s Deli Section – 2200 E 12 Mile Rd, Royal Oak, MI 48067