This morning, I was walking through m local Meijer waiting for the bank branch in the front of the store to open.
(As an Ex-GI, I'm pretty much always "scanning my sector".)
I was walking past the rows of CDs and DVD, glancing down each row as I passed the end cap. Halfway down one of the rows was a rather well-dressed African-descended female person, talking on a cell phone. We had no sooner made eye contact (which I didn't hold anyway), she said quite clearly, "don't be watchin' me! You don't know me!" I continued past the next end cap and hear (presumably back on the phone) "White man be eyeballin' me in the store," then went on to say something about X-Boxes.
Oh, how I wanted to say, "You don't know me either, but you went from normal (-seeming, at least) to instantly hostile at the sight of a white face. How racist would it be if I had reacted that way to you? And people of all shades wonder why a few of us, innocent of all real harm, shrug at the possibility that your precious feelings have been hurt, n-word or n-deed."
