Thursday, 7 April 2011

Racial profiling

I grew up in a very multicultural area of western Sydney. As a result of sharing my entire childhood with Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, African, Lebanese, Indian, Bangladeshi, Aboriginal and the occasional white kid, I've never developed a conciousness for cultural sensitivity. Things just are how they are, and I don't tend to infer anything from that.
Well not really.

Ok, white people bother me. I see a large group of white people, and I assume they're up to no good. This is because I am one, and we're fucking jerks. That's a rant for another day.

The first time I became aware that it's actually possible to cause offence by referring to someone by race didn't really come until I was already (technically) an adult. I was working as a security guard at the tender age of 20, bouncing at a nighclub.

Ok, that's not true either. I wasn't a bouncer. They big guys were bouncers. The coterie of regulars, the 7 foot tall Samoan guys were allowed to stand out the front of the club and call themselves bouncers. At a demure 6'3" white guy with glasses, I only had the option of patrolling the back part of the club, the regular non-dancing part of the bar, which included the poker machine room. My primary job was making sure people didn't try to sneak in through the fire exits. Fights seldom broke out.

At some point during my first night on the job, a Lebanese guy came up to me and asked where he could find the owner. Now if I was a competent security guard, I might have balked at telling a perfect stranger who and where the owner was. There's a good chance that he was up to no good and was not seeking out the owner to tell him how fond he is of the establishment.

But none of this occurred to me, so I glanced around and said "oh, he's a short white guy...". My inquisitor held up his hands defensively, as if I had just offered to feed him broken glass.

"Whoa!" he said smoothly "Watch it with the racism, kid!".
I hesitated. Was he fucking serious?
"But," I protested "He is a short wh-".

"Never mind, I'll find him myself.". Lebanese guy wanted nothing more to do with me. I felt dirty. It bothered me all night. I went home, slept on it.

Overnight, my cultural apathy was flipped upside down. Without being consciously aware of it, I pledged never to refer to someone by race ever again.
99% of the time, this wasn't an inconvenience. 99% of the time, there's no need to describe someone visually. If I drew a venn diagram to demonstrate this, it would be a single purple circle.

I carried on for seven more years like this, trying not to look too ashamed when someone uttered a racial descriptor in my presence. I felt like I was trapped in that episode of Seinfeld where Jerry is dating an American-Indian woman and shies away from works like 'reservation' in fear of reducing his chance of scoring with his femme du jour.

After a brief stint at Kinko's and EB Games, I took a job in a corporate environment, and all my interpersonal dealings were with coworkers I came to know by name. It didn't matter that Tien was Vietnamese and Paul was Romanian (and looks exactly like Agent 47 from the Hitman series of video games), because if I needed to speak to Tien I knew where her desk was. I was finally away from strangers and no longer reliant on my descriptive vocabulary.

I took a new job recently, working in an office of maybe 120 people. I am ashamed to admit that in the last six months I have learned less than 20 names. I know the people on my team. I know my boss, and his boss, and his boss, and even his boss, who is the regional managing director. These are useful to know.

Sometimes I run into strangers in the kitchen who know my name and I don't know theirs. This is ok, because  I never need to refer to them, so they can continue being strangers. It's cool.

Then this happened:

I have this (mis)fortune of sitting next to the IT guy at work, and this apparently makes me his fucking secretary. Several times a day if someone has managed to lock themselves out of their PC or wreck their company-issue Blackberry, they come to his desk. If it's empty, this is where I come in.

Stranger: "Where's Mark?"
Me: *blank stare*
Stranger: Can you tell him I was here?
Me: ...sure?

Then they leave. I hope they'll find Mark on their own, or come back in a few minutes when he returns to his desk, and my involvement is moot. Sometimes however I'm actually paying attention and Mark gets back. Social obligation neurons in my brain flare to life.
Me: "Hey Mark, there was someone looking for you."
Mark: "Who?"
Me: "Uh..." *pause*
Mark: "Ok, what'd they want?"
Me: *blank stare*
Mark: "What did they look like?"
I can feel shame creeping into my face as my eyes dart around the office, hoping that person turns up at that moment. They almost never do.
Me: "Tall... guy? With a blue shirt? And kind of wild hair. Glasses! He had glasses!"
Mark: "Asian?"
Me: "...yes. He was Asian."
Mark: "That's David. His laptop is..."
I tune out the technobabble. Actually, nothing Mark is saying is complicated or overly technical, but I don't care what Mark's job entails right now I have assimilated more pertinent data.
Me: "His name is David."
Mark: *blank stare*

So, I've decided if a dude is Asian, I'm gonna say so. It's just easier, and it's not like I mean anything by it, right? Time to call a spade a spade.

Ok, maybe that's a bad example.

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