The Other Profile

This is for Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose misadventure inspired these thoughts, with thanks to Scott M. Sommer of United Auto Workers Region 9, whose Facebook comment lit a firestorm of denial.

Riding the New York City subway—the Number 1 line, that runs from Harlem through Times Square to Greenwich Village and the southern tip of Manhattan—I’m reading the Lonely Planet Guide to Mediterranean Europe. A voice says, “Excuse me,” and I look up and see, sitting across from me, a Black woman more or less my own age, strikingly dressed in clothes that aren’t traditional African garb but evocative of it. “Do you travel much?” she asks.

“A fair amount,” I tell her, and we strike up a conversation about travel. After a bit, she says, “But you know, everything takes longer now, since 9-11. They ask me so many more questions at check-in and security than they used to that it’s actually gotten harder to travel.”

I look at her for a long minute, gauging whether to utter the response that’s on the tip of my tongue, which is, “Not for me.” She and I are, as I have noted, similar in many ways: both New York City urban, both middle-aged, both showing the insignia of a certain level of middle-income comfort. But there’s one salient difference: She’s a middle-aged woman of color, and I’m a middle-aged woman of no color—and as such, invisible to security personnel and police.

That’s not a complaint. For instance, speaking of 9-11, for a few days in mid-September, 2001, southern Manhattan was off-limits to everyone except people who lived or worked there. To travel south of 14th Street, people had to show ID at police checkpoints. People, that is, who weren’t—well, me. I got waved through every time, without producing any identification at all.

Then there was the time I was coming back from Palestine. I had been in the West Bank on a delegation with the California-based Middle East Children’s Alliance. We had been advised to have the Palestinian materials we had collected during the two-week visit mailed to us, rather than attempt to carry them through the Israeli exit check at Ben Gurion airport. We were told that security officers often checked cameras, too, and that if we didn’t want to be questioned and delayed it was wise to move photographs—of, say, the Wall of Separation—off our digital cameras and onto other digital storage media. I spent my last day in the West Bank moving photos and going through everything I had acquired to make sure that on the way out of Israel I couldn’t be identified as pro-Palestinian.

It was wasted work. The Israeli security forces waved me through the way the police officers at 14rh Street had. When I got home, I discovered I had overlooked one item: In a front section of my pocketbook was a beaded bracelet that said, “I [HEART] PALESTINE.”

Once, while on that same delegation, my apparent invisibility extended to half a dozen other people, not all of whom were middle-aged, not all of whom were female (although all of us were in at least one of those categories).

It was the night of the West Bank championship basketball game in Ramallah. We were staying at the Ibdaa Cultural Center of the Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, and the Ibdaa team had just won the championship from the Bethlehem team. We were on the Ibdaa bus, going back with the team and their coaches from the West Bank into Israel. In other words, the bus held perhaps twenty-some young Palestinian men and seven very pale Americans—five women, most but not all middle-aged, and two middle-aged men.

The bus stopped at the check point into Jerusalem. Several Israeli Defense Force soldiers, all armed, boarded the bus and walked up the aisle, asking each Palestinian youth for ID. They took the IDs, left the bus, huddled outside for half an hour, looking over the IDs with flashlights, then re-boarded the bus and handed back the IDs. Twice, they walked past all seven Americans without stopping or saying a word.

• • •

The recent disorderly-conduct arrest of Black Harvard scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., after he spoke with some heat to a white police officer who was demanding that Gates identify himself in his—Gates’—own home, started a national conversation about racial profiling. President Barack Obama even offered his opinion on the subject—twice, the second time moderating if not rescinding his original assertion that the police officer had acted “stupidly.” When my former Metropolitan Council on Housing colleague Scott M. Sommer, now of United Auto Workers Region 9, posted a comment on his Facebook page to the effect that Obama had been right the first time, he ignited an explosion of responses—51 so far, and counting.

None of them, however, noted that racial profiling can and does go in two directions. Indeed, the benefit of the doubt accorded people of no-color happens so often and so routinely that, like me at a checkpoint, it’s usually invisible—at least to most of us who reap that benefit. Sharing stories like these should help make that privilege more visible to everyone.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak, 2009

A Very Political Landscape, Part Deux

Café Rendez-vous, Place Denfert Rochereau, Paris, 14 juillet—Beyond the table in front of me, beyond my poached salmon and glass of Sancerre, are camouflage-painted tanks, guns at the ready, rolling down the Avenue du Général Leclerc. Later, when I get back to my Paris home-for-the-summer, a television special will combine patriotic songs (by no means limited to “The Marseillaise”) with film clips of France’s newest contributions to military technology, including the latest in the pilotless, unstaffed bombers called predator drones.

It’s Quatorze Juillet, the Fête Nationale—July 14, France’s National Holiday, which the rest of the world calls Bastille Day. It commemorates the July 14, 1789, storming of the royal prison called the Bastille that marks the start of the French Revolution. Amazingly, the Fête Nationale vastly outdoes the U.S. Fourth of July in celebrating military might—in this case, of course, France’s.

I’m in this café conducting my own celebration. I’m toasting both a different French revolution and what turned out to be the perfect observance of my first Quatorze Juillet.

I’ve never before been in France in mid-July. I’ve celebrated aspects of Bastille Day in New York, although not the guns and tanks and drones. I got up this morning thinking about how to observe the day without joining the military hoop-la tonight at the Eiffel Tower.

I went for a walk. In the course of it, by sheerest accident, I discovered another monument to the world’s first socialist-anarchist revolution, the Paris Commune (see “A Very Political Landscape,” June 9.

I’ve visited the Mur des Fédérés—the Wall of the Communards—at Père Lachaise Cemetery every time I’ve come to Paris. My mother told me to, on the occasion of my first visit here. Go to the Louvre, she said, and see the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and the Venus de Milo—and go to Père Lachaise and see the Mur des Fédérés. (If she had known that Eugène Pottier, the poet who wrote the words to the communist-anarchist anthem, “The Internationale,” was also buried there, she’d have told me to see his tomb as well. I come from a long line of leftists.)

Living in Paris this summer, I’ve also dropped in occasionally at the Montparnasse Cemetery, the final resting place of two of France’s great political philosophers of the Left, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I stopped to say hello to them today for Quatorze Juillet, then turned to leave the cemetery—

And came face to face with a map I had never seen before that informed me I was yards away from the “Monument de Fédérés.”

It’s smaller than the wall at Père Lachaise, and the inscription on it is a little worn and hard to see. Also, it wasn’t exactly where the map placed it.

Finally I found it. I took a few pictures. Then (I was quite alone there) I lifted my fist in the communist salute and sang one chorus of “The Internationale,” for Quatorze Juillet and in memory of my mother.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak, 2009

The Adventure of the Art Students from Xi'an

I was in Beijing with a hundred or so friends, traveling with the New York Oratorio Society, which was giving two concerts in China.

The trip included a tightly scheduled tour of the country under the aegis of the Chinese government tourism office. Like all tourists in China, we saw the Great Wall and after Beijing would go to the central province of Xi’an to see its famous terra cotta army. Our guides—all young, stylishly dressed representatives of China's emerging middle class—declared in every lecture that the new China, with its "special Chinese" version of communism called "capitalism," was an improvement on the old China.

On the day of the second concert, however, those of us who weren’t singing had a precious hour or so of free time. Two of us had already taken the Beijing subway once and gotten lost in the middle of the city. This time we headed, more prudently, for the nearby shopping area called Silk Alley.

No sooner were we well away from our hotel, than we were approached by two young Asian women who asked whether they might walk with us and practice their English. Hardly more than twenty and respectably dressed; they looked harmless enough. “Sure,” we said, and along they came.

As we walked, they said they were art students recently arrived in Beijing from Xi'an. After we told them we ourselves were going to Xi’an the very next day, we felt as if we knew each other better. They seemed like country girls, a little lost and alone in the big city.

Right after that, one of them said, "Oh, our studio is right here—won't you come up and meet our teacher?" Ah, I thought—they're salespeople, shilling for customers. Or worse, a voice in my head warned, suggesting sinister scenarios of which robbery at gunpoint was the least terrifying. But the two young women really did seem innocent and the dire possibilities in my head not really very likely, so with only a little trepidation, we went along with them.

It looked like a real studio, full of tables holding art paraphernalia and paintings lining the walls. Their teacher was nowhere in sight, but they fixed us jasmine tea and led us around to look at the paintings. They were for sale, the young women said, and asked us which ones we liked.

So it really was only a sales hustle. I liked some of the paintings; one set in particular seemed like just the thing for my son the water-colorist. They named a price and when I hesitated, translating into dollars in my head, they offered me a "discount."

I bought the set, and my friend bought another. The jasmine tea wasn't drugged, and no one robbed us. When we got back to the hotel, the packages the students had wrapped so carefully did indeed contain the paintings we had chosen. There was no crime at all, in other words—only another face of the new Chinese communism.

But there was, after all, a mystery: At a late, post-concert supper that night, it turned out that everyone at our large table had been approached by two young women art students from Xi'an. They, too, had been brought to studios, where they, too, had bought paintings. But we had all been brought to different studios—and, from the descriptions, by different young art students from Xi'an.

The small-time entrepreneurs of Beijing, it seemed, have discovered that Western tourists who might boggle at going to a strange place with a strange man will go almost anywhere with personable young women who say they're students from the provinces. And then they’ll do what Westerners do around the world: Shop.

Mystery solved.

©Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2009
Photo by Ellen Davidson © 2009