When I was a teenager, my mom told me on many occasions that my white friends would eventually pretend not to know me in public. She would often talk about how it would happen to her. For the longest time, the town I grew up in only had 2 grocery stores, so anybody in town who went grocery shopping had a 50/50 chance of going to the store you were shopping in. My mom would say her white coworkers who were so warm and friendly in the workplace would completely ignore her if they saw her at the grocery store or any other business around town. She was nonexistent as far as they were concerned. It also only happened with white coworkers. Her black coworkers would stop for a chat, or at least make eye contact and smile.
Flash forward a few decades and I can definitely confirm the wisdom imparted by my mother from my own observations. I'll be the first to admit that I'm terrible at remembering names, but I have a mind like a steel trap when it comes to remembering faces. If I've seen you before, I know I've seen you before. On many occasions, I have encountered white coworkers and former coworkers in public spaces and they have utterly ignored me. One incident I will always remember happened at the movie theater. For a little backstory, I had worked with one particular coworker on a special project for about 6 weeks. We worked together, in the same room, just a couple of feet from each other, every day for 8-10 hours for 6 weeks. We talked, as people who are in such close proximity will do. So, to make a long story short, she had no reason to not recognize me when she saw me in line at the movie theater about 18 months later. Yet, there we stood, mere feet from each other, and she pretended not to know me. I tried to make eye contact with her so I could at least offer a smile. Nope. I was the invisible black guy. Another instance happened with a high school classmate. I ran into her in the aisle at the grocery store in my hometown. Her mom was friends with my mom and her dad was friends with my dad. I recognized her immediately since we had just seen each other at our class reunion a year earlier. At the grocery store, however, I was just some black stranger to be ignored.
After seeing this situation play out in my life in many instances, it's my hypothesis that, at least in public, we become invisible black people. It's not that we're being consciously ignored, because that would require recognition that we are actually there. Instead, it's that we don't even register as being there. In being not white, we become a part of the background. I think part of the white person's brain says black people are an unknown, making eye contact might trigger them, acting friendly might trigger them, so the best thing is to not see them and certainly not interact with them. That same black person they see every day at work becomes background noise at the store.
I know some will say race has nothing to do with it. I might buy that, but I've seen white people recognize each other in public spaces all the time, even in cases where it's been decades since they've seen each other. One person might make eye contact with the other and then step over to say, "Hey, I don't mean to disturb you, but are you so-and-so from such-a-place?" I saw one recently where someone in her 20s recognized someone who used to babysit her. So you can't convince me these things don't happen.
Trust me, the black people who are being ignored know they're being ignored.
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