I'm extremely white and extremely liberal. From a very young age, I was told by my dad that skin colour and religion are both accidents of birth so we shouldn't judge people by those criteria but by the people they grew into.
In 1985 when I went on a Florida vacation, I was also as naive as a middle class girl, raised in a mostly white community can be. We stayed at my hubby's nana's home in Daytona Beach and, being extremely white, I chose to head to Volusia Mall to see a movie rather than spending the day at the beach with my mom-in-law and sis-in-law. I took the bus. It was an easy ride as it was one bus to the mall and one home but when I was heading home, I couldn't remember the number. There were a lot of people at the bus stop at the mall so I chose three lovely older women to approach with my questions. They asked me where I was from and I laughed and asked if I had a Canadian accent. They also laughed and said "No, if you were from here, you'd have asked those white girls"
The women were going on the bus I needed and they offered to show me my stop. We rode together and had a great time talking.
When I returned to nana's house, the neighbour across the street had whipped them into a frenzy about what had likely happened to me on the bus. He told them it was mostly blacks and Hispanics on the bus and I could be in real trouble. He "gallantly" offered to drive us for the rest of the vacation.
On one of our drives, he had to swing by his dad's grocery store. Apparently, his dad owned several grocery stores in the poorest areas of Daytona. Being Canadian, I had never seen cashiers in bulletproof cages or a gun toting security guard.
Shoppers were being searched as they left the store. The whole vibe was one of distrust and the expectation of being robbed and yet, the robbery was coming from the store, not the shoppers. The prices were stunning. Milk was the highest price I'd seen. Hamburger was about double what it was out of that neighbourhood.
As we were leaving, the owners son pointed out a line of people at a specific cashier...he derisively told us "those people" were scamming the gov't by cashing in their food stamps for 1/2 the value in cash. It was completely lost on him that it was his father who was actually cheating the gov't, gaining double on all of those food stamps. When I asked about the higher than normal prices, he beamed and let us know that was why his dad was so smart. The people who live near the store have no choice. They live in an area where major chains won't go and they don't have cars or money to go shopping anywhere else so his dad could charge what he wanted.
When I was watching CNN today, with people breaking into check cashing stores and destroying them, I was reminded of that grocery store. Check cashing stores, rental furniture stores and other stores that take advantage of disadvantage and abject poverty targeted those in the area long before they became targets.
... A few days ago, I went to lunch with my son and I was telling him about Desmond Cole's article in Toronto Life, The Skin I'm In. I told him how insane it was that Desmond had been stopped by police more than 50 times. My son surprised me by telling me he's been carded several times in Toronto and Waterloo. He also said the only times it's happened was when he was with friends who aren't white. He said it's a common occurrence for those friends to be carded or stopped for no reason while driving. One of his friends told him he considered getting dreds but he didn't want to put up with the hassle...from police.
As a white liberal, it's sometimes easy to believe that things have changed/are changing but for us, nothing had to change, my husband and I have never been stopped by the police, we never worry when crossing the border, people never clutch their purses or cross the street when they see us approaching. My sons friends are amazing, university educated, funny young adults anyone would want their kid hanging out with but to the police, they are too often (and once is too often) reduced to the colour of their skin. I wish I had answers instead of anger.
