Road Rage and Racism

A strange thing happened on my way to work yesterday. I was driving along minding my own business. I had just acquired a coffee from a bourgeois establishment, laboriously turned my three-quarter ton truck around on that narrow suburban street, and set off for my final destination when I peered in my rearview mirror to see a frenetic driver, gesturing wildly, swerving at least a little back and forth, and creeping closer to my bumper with his little car than I felt comfortable with. Just then I noticed that I was approaching a school zone. I slowed down. He crept closer. Now he was tailgating me and if there is one driving behavior I cannot abide it is tailgating. Most people, I think, completely underestimate the danger that it imposes on both vehicles. I don’t mind throwing my thee-quarter ton weight around in cases like this so naturally I slammed on the breaks to give my friend in the rear view mirror a little warning, “hey little guy, I’m bigger than you are and you don’t want to go there.”
I guess he didn’t quite get the message. He proceeded, almost as if he’d planned it—I mean he acted so fast I can only wonder what he was thinking; I conversely had no time to react—to pass me on the right by using the bike lane on this single lane road. As soon as he got in front of me he stopped. As soon as he stopped he got out of his car. As soon as he got out of his car I realized that he was not a little guy at all. OH, SHIT! Worse yet, he came right to my window, waving his arms and said, “Mother fucker, you don’t cut me off and then just slam on your breaks at me! You get out that car and I will kick your motherfuckin’ ASS!” I just stared at him through my window, which suddenly seemed remarkably thin with him on the other side only a few feet away. I grinned actually, kind of a staring match sort of half-grin, that said, “I’m not going to give in to your threat, I’m gonna pretend it doesn’t bother me (or perhaps pretend this isn’t happening, eeek!) and I’ll just grin until you make your next move, I mean, you wouldn’t actually DO anything with that crossing guard up there looking this way, would you?” And he didn’t. He paused for a moment (an impossibly long, frozen time moment), seemed to regain some of his composure and slowly returned to his car, sauntered I suppose. He drove on through, past the crossing guard, and immediately turned the corner, tailgating someone else onto an unsuspecting residential side street.
My heart was pounding hard enough to make my throat hurt, I was almost dizzy with blood rushing into my head and swirling around my eyeballs. I could almost feel the adrenaline charging up my fight or flight response system, exhilarating me, giving me an uncontrollable high, the grin still not wiped from my face. Then it hit me, the crash after the high, like sugar, caffeine, heroine. But the crash wasn’t lethargy. It was a sick feeling, not nausea exactly because I didn’t feel it in my stomach, more in my head and chest as the epinephrine and cortisol raked little troughs across the surfaces of my cells, accumulating into a mesh of microscopic lacerations that ran rivulets into a gash in my very soul. I felt like I was bleeding inside, bleeding pride, bleeding fear, bleeding confidence, safety, privilege.
I was bleeding privilege because my safe little world, supported by my class standing, my gender, my relative size, my big truck and my above-average job had been breached. A total stranger had suddenly and unexpectedly shattered my illusory bubble. Physical threats are not something that average white, middle class men have to put up with very often. I can only think of two other times in my adult life where I faced such mortal danger from another human. That’s probably more than most folks in my position. But for Black men, or women, the same can not be said. Oh, did I mention? My partner in road rage this day was Black? Yeah, a big, angry, able bodied, Black man. Why does it matter?
It matters because I am white. And as any good antiracist will tell you, that produces a series of interlocking dynamics triggered by the complex social landscape in which this altercation took place. If he had been white I still would have been scared, though not quite as much (unless he was one of those really scary white dudes with big muscles, tattoos, facial hair, you know the kind). I still wouldn’t have gotten out of the truck. But I also wouldn’t have been tempted after the fact to wonder what his race, or his perception of my race, might have had to do with his behavior. Moreover, in the alternate reality where I might have reacted differently, or if one of us had pushed it to an actual physical exchange of blows, the stakes would have been decidedly different and if that had happened and he were Black, in the aftermath (assuming I survived) all the cards would have been stacked in my favor.
Before I go on I should detail some more of my fear-based thought process that ran its ugly course through the darker corners of my mind while my adrenal cortex was still pumping like a windmill in a hurricane. Before I go there I should mention that I have lived most of my life as an untested pacifist, no military training, no bar fights, and few opportunities to find out just how situational pacifism really is. So in my hour of (or hours, cause this thought process actually went on all day) of hormonal hemorrhaging, I came up with no shortage of fantasy scenarios with my erstwhile opponent where I knifed, shot, dirked and vehicular-homicided my way out of the situation. The fight part of my evolutionary safety system was a blaze with pictures of my enemy’s ultimate destruction, his bleeding, humbled body, crumpled on the pavement while I muttered something cheeky, cool, collected. Yeah, right. I could have peed my pants is more like it. But the bottom line is, if the situation had ended differently, if I had even had enough calm, collected cool to take down his license plate (perhaps THAT is why he turned the corner?) things would have, statistically speaking, ended decidedly in my favor.
I don’t feel good about that, by the way. On the contrary my white guilt is showing when I review the following underlying construction of my privilege. If I had his license number I could have called the cops. I could have told them in my unmistakably authoritative white voice that a large black man in a tiny car just threatened my life. Actually he only threatened my ass, not my whole life, but a slight exaggeration on my part would have improved my case before the judge. It's likely (statistically speaking, not based on his behavior necessarily) that as a Black man in America where one in five or better has met with some part of the business end of the penal system, he would have at least one prior whereas I, with my lily-white suburban background have none. When he and I stood before the judge, the judge would, in all statistical likelihood, and being aware of his priors, and being subconsciously influenced by a mass media that portrays Blacks as prone to violence, take more pity on innocent ol’ me (especially since I had not broken any laws and he had broken at least three). Even if he had not broken laws, as I plied the linguistic skills that got me through graduate school and slipped my silvery tongue over the judge’s ear, she most likely would cave to my story and throw the book at the big "mean" Black guy over there, who by this time had already given up hope that he would ever get a fair trial, because he’d been through this so many times before, and he’d seen his friends go through this, and he’d known so many when he did time up at state that had the same, sorry, story to tell, so many in fact that not all of them could possibly be lying. And by this time he would have reached the unavoidable conclusion that he along with one fifth of the Black men in America were damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Which, by the way, was the reason he was so pissed in the first place, when this cowboy-hat-wearing white boy in his big-ass truck cut him off and made him late for work.
Even more scary, being aware of these dynamics (though not in possession of the elusive license number) actually made me plot, for a few moments, my fantasy revenge. Whoa! I thought I was an anti-racist! Yeah, and I’m a pacifist too, right up until someone threatens me, then I’m a raging, knife wielding, racist mad man, willing to use my privilege to leap large Black men in a single bound, leaving them bleeding, broke, incarcerated, divided from family, deprived of livelihood, pride or even a reason to live, much less a reason to resist a not so subtly but all the same, subconsciously racist culture. Only now, upon writing this some 36 hours later am I able to see clearly through the adrenaline to the compassion of my ideals and wish—though I never want to see him again—that this big, scary Black man receive no harm, and to think that he is just as good of a person as I, and though I judged him harshly in my moment of fear, to imagine that he had likely judged me from a similar place of fear, fear that life was once again about to become critically un-fair, that white people are always throwing their three-quarter ton weight around, and it is always landing on him, and that he would not stand for this one more time, for if he did, he would break and the gash in his soul would cut too deep and he could not face another day being Black in America.