“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you worked here.” A woman remarked when she realized that I in fact didn’t work there, was a customer just like her, and that she was interrupting my conversation with the sales associate. Now, I was not dressed in the store’s distinctive uniform … what could possibly have made her assume that I was there to serve?
At another time and place, I would have retorted, “Is it because I’m brown?” I couldn’t help myself. After three decades in the U.S., I have been mistaken countless times for the help, from the delivery guy to the building supervisor to the bodega stock boy to the receptionist of the company I ran. Not that there is anything wrong with such labor – my first jobs in America included selling shoes and restocking school supplies – but there is a whole lot wrong with acting reflexively based on ingrained stereotypes such as black and brown folks holding subordinate or servile positions.
I suspect that it was unconscious or implicit bias on the part of the woman who interrupted me earlier. Same goes with the many others who treated me as they did without much thought or consideration.
During my first year in New York, when I was studying arts administration, I rang the doorbell of a gallery in the Upper East Side, to do research on an early twentieth century artist. A woman looked up from her desk and shouted through the locked glass door, “I didn’t order anything.” In the late 2000s, while my husband and I rented at a “luxury” apartment building in Washington, D.C., a fellow tenant entered the elevator I was in and told me askance, “You’re coming to my apartment later to fix the lights, right?” Our building supervisor was Salvadoran, and I swear, we did not look alike (he was lighter skinned and taller). And so forth and so on and here we are, in 2023.
I try to be conscious of my thoughts and reactions and this time, I caught the spark before I could combust. I thanked the salesperson who helped me, smiled at the woman and said, “She’s all yours.”