FRIDAY, JULY 26, 2013: Four decades ago, when I was a college student, it was not uncommon for guys my age to let their freak flags fly. Of course, once we graduated, we did have to conform to shorter hairstyles; i.e., if we ever hoped to find meaningful employment.
Four years ago, feeling nostalgic for those heady hippie times, as well as hoping to attain my cost cutting goal, I had decided to cut out haircuts. It didn’t take long for me to regain my long hair hippie appearance. It also didn’t take long for me to discover that society’s reactions to my unconventional appearance hadn’t changed a bit in those forty years. Cutting through the euphemistic crap of that previous sentence, I was being profiled.
Now mind you, way back then, as I do now, I shower daily; so it’s not like I’ve ever looked or smelled dirty. And while my blue jeans may’ve looked worn, they, too, were clean.
Nonetheless, I found that doing something as ordinary as walking down a city street netted me wary stares from approaching pedestrians; with some of these needlessly frightened folks even cutting me a wide berth (or even crossing the street). Shopping in stores (notorious for not waiting on their patrons) earned me immediate “customer service”, too. True, as a legitimate, customer, I was delighted for the attention, BUT, upon deeper reflection, I could not help but view the motivation of these retailers to be suspect.
No doubt, had I needed to fly from point A to B, c2011, the apprehensive TSA would’ve either given me one of their more, comprehensive, patently offensive pat-downs or added me to some terrorist watch list (perhaps both?).
While I’m not about to suggest that others profiling me (to be some sort of derelict) ever came even close to the severity and seriousness of the racial and ethnic profiling of minorities, there are still unsettling similarities.
Of course, the major difference, here, is obvious. In my case, virtually all of my profiling problems vanished upon the resumption of regular visits to my barber. For those with a greater amount of melanin in their skin, there can be no such easy recourse. Even more disturbing, the latter physical trait can and does trigger a lifetime of problems. As incidents (such as George Zimmerman needlessly getting in Trayvon Martin’s face) have amply demonstrated, the consequences can be deadly.
My personal experience in being profiled, even as mild as that was, is just one more reason why I am so sensitive to what happened in Sanford, Florida; why I am so adamantly opposed to the written-by-racists-for-racists stand-your-ground laws.
Once gun nuts get that evil shit in writing; once they get it in their F’d up heads that they can kill minorities with impunity; that no jury will be allowed to find them guilty; it then becomes open season on their racially profiled victims. Indeed, the ink of these flawed laws won’t be fully dry before these seething with violence, vigilantes go out of their way to scratch their itchy, bigoted trigger fingers.
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