To the Woman at Trader Joe’s
Dear Middle Aged Mother at Trader Joe’s on 82nd,
I want to apologize for making you uncomfortable while we were shopping this afternoon. I may have grabbed some sausages and turned around a little too quickly, and that may have been what startled you and caused you to clutch your maybe 8 year old son close to your side and tell him to stay close.
You aren’t the first person I’ve had this experience with. In fact, you’re probably close to the fifth just today, and probably some where in the thousands since I’ve moved to Portland. I am curious, though: what is it exactly that made you react to me shopping so fearfully?
I’ve come up with many hypotheses over the years: my white skin, my blue eyes, and light brown hair - all features I share with perpetrators of most of the worst crimes against humanity in human history. Perhaps it’s my hulking 5’7” frame, or perhaps the way I grabbed the sausages off the shelf and put them in my basket. Or perhaps it’s something else.
Perhaps it’s that I am the equivalent of a slave in a plantation town, and you - and thus your child as well - are a member of the ruling class. “That’s crazy!” you’ll say, “Look at you, you’re a free White man in the United States of America!” And yet we both know exactly why you held your child close when I was near, and it is the exact same reason that Slavers in America feared their slaves, both before and after emancipation.
It’s not uncommon for people to refer to me in code when I am in public as Jesus, God, or some other egocentric self projection of a force they understand much less than the universe and certainly much less than the self that projects it. But if I were speaking to you as Jesus or God, I would tell you that you are putting your children in danger via your complicity in a corrupt, morally bankrupt system. And just as the Devil never appears and announces themselves directly, neither does God.
So you have nothing to fear for your children while we are shopping at Trader Joes - it won’t be me who they have to reckon with for your actions. It will be God, and themselves, and their understanding of you as a mother, grandmother, etc when the time comes for them to learn where you stood at this moment in history, and how you later tried to justify it, explain it away, and run from it.
This story has already been told in America, and countless times in history before that. You are repeating the mistakes of history, and like us suffering the mistakes of our forebearers, you children will suffer yours.
So yeah, I’m not gonna smack your kid in the face with a package of wieners, lady. Chill the fuck out. God’s gonna handle that.
P.S. Unrelatedly, can we both agree that the TJ's manager tonight weaponizes music as a form of harassment and plays it way too loud to be appropriate at a community grocery store? No one wants to listen to Heart's "Crazy On You" at 70 decibels while crawling their way through a crowded grocery store during rush hour. What a dick.