I had lunch on Friday in San Leandro at a little Mexican place I like. A pollo taco with chips and dipping sauce. It was a warm day and I decided to eat at one of the little tables outside.
Then this Black woman I recognized sauntered up to an adjoining table and sat down. She wasn’t eating there; she hadn’t ordered anything from the café. She worked at a nearby big box store (to judge from the ID badge dangling from her neck), was on her break apparently, and decided to light up a cigarette at a place where she could sit.
I’d run into her before. The first time, when her smoke hit me like a bomb, I’d asked her to please not smoke. She wasn’t eating there.
We had words, that first time. Now here she was again.
I wasn’t having it. I went inside and asked the manager to ask her to leave. The manager did. The smoker relinquished her seat at the table but rather than leave she took a place on the sidewalk about four feet away, turned her back to me, and proceeded to continue smoking. It was an in-your-face middle finger rebuke, a declaration of defiance and What are you gonna do about it?
I asked for the manager again. This really upset the smoker. “I can smoke anywhere I want,” she announced.
“Actually, you can’t,” I replied.
Then she hurled her ultimate weapon. “You a White bitch racist.”
What did my race have to do with the situation? And why the “bitch” reference? I know that “bitch” is popular in rap music but I’m not sure what it means when someone like the smoker uses it, except as an all-purpose insult. I probably should have kept my mouth shut, but I was angry, so I said, “Racist. That’s all you have. Did it ever occur to you that I’m complaining about you, not because you’re Black, but because of your behavior?”
This is what we encounter all the time from some angry Black people and their representatives in government, like Carroll Fife. If you complain at all about the behavior of a Black person, you’re automatically a racist. But this is a lie. Exposure to second-hand cigarette smoke is as dangerous as smoking. As an older person with cancer, and with chronic upper-respiratory symptoms, I can’t tolerate cigarette smoke. I not only have common sense on my side, I have the law: it is illegal to smoke in “public places, including dining areas,” according to the San Leandro municipal code.
The problem with this particular smoker, as is so often the case with people like her, is that she felt entitled to smoke wherever she wants, and if anyone tries to stop her, they must be a racist. People like her have been trained all their lives to view any objection to their behavior as racism. They can’t comprehend that, sometimes, their behavior is objectively wrong; they’ve been raised to believe that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want. “You are somebody!” Jesse Jackson told them long ago.
Now, let me segue a little and explain how and why this encounter so troubled me. I know that relations between some Black people and some White people can be precarious. There can be deeply-buried negative feelings on both sides. Both can feel justified in their thoughts and behaviors. Both can believe that any criticism is tantamount to a personal attack. Both can be long-suffering. I don’t want to be part of that equation. I want to feel above and beyond it. I want to live in a color-blind world. Yet there I was, almost the stereotypical older White man pissed off at a stereotypical younger Black woman. She was pushing my buttons and I resented it. Was I part of the problem?
I think about this stuff a lot, putting myself through every permutation you can think of. And yet I get nowhere. I don’t like it; I feel thrust into it by circumstances beyond my control. I second-guess myself: Should I have just left when the smoker came? But where else could I have gone? I had bought my meal expecting to sit in a chair at a little table. There was no place else within blocks where I could have sat in comfort. But should I have stayed and breathed in her cigarette smoke? That was unacceptable. I was in a tough spot, between the devil and the deep blue sea. I really felt my only option was to complain to the manager. And by that act I antagonized the smoker. My action only served to convince her that White people are devilish racists.
And thus the cycle continues.
After due reflection, I arrived at my conclusion. I’m a loving guy, anxious to do right by everyone, eager to forgive others their transgressions against me. But I have to admit there is something morally and intellectually deficient about that smoker. It’s not the biggest crime in the world, her smoking in public or her total disdain for her neighbor, but those are indicative of something that’s happening in this city and in this country. It’s a large part of the reason why Donald Trump won, and why the Democratic Party is so unpopular. The Party seems unable to criticize asocial, dysfunctional behavior like the smoker’s (who probably votes Democratic if she votes at all). Instead, Democrats turn reality upside down and insist that anti-Black racism is a problem, perhaps the problem in America.
It’s demonstrably not. But people are tired of being accused of racism by people who in actuality themselves harbor anti-White thoughts. (Yes, Black people can be racists.) For this, I blame, not the anti-White racists themselves, who are naïve and perhaps not well educated, but the elite classes—teachers, politicians, activists, journalists—who convince Black people that racism is widespread and instill this false belief in their susceptible minds. Just as Trump promoted the Big Lie—that Obama was born in Kenya—these elite progressives spread the Big Lie that America is a racist country. Damn them for that; it’s tearing our country apart.
Steve Heimoff