As a college student, I am broke. I feel no shame in it since I understand that it's apart of life, but I also don't plan to wallow in it either. This summer, after a month of gallivanting like the 20-year-old that I am, I decided that I would snag a few jobs and buy myself a nice little keyboard. I applied to over 20 different businesses (three a day) until I ended up with three different gigs (two of which were blessings from family friends). However, in the process of applying for jobs I came out with an interestingly, uncomfortable experience at one of our local chains of a boutique-that-must-not-be-named. My mother (yes, she is one of those moms) brought the incident to the attention of the store owner who then allowed me to share my experience with her via email. My accounts of the incident are as followed...

I walked into the store and headed for the front counter. No one was behind the counter so I waited for a few seconds and then looked around to see if I could pinpoint someone who obviously worked at the store. There were other women there who were looking at me, but I couldn't tell if they were just shoppers so I turned around and waited awhile longer. Finally, someone came to the desk. I asked about hiring and she said that they were not, but that I could send my resume in anyway. I didn't think anything of it and took the email address. What made me most uncomfortable was that when I was exiting the store I stopped and browsed a little after seeing some cute shirts and I noticed that all of the women were staring at me again. I attempted to shrug it off and looked a little longer, despite feeling a strange tension, before heading to my car. After I hit the pavement in front of the store, I turned back around to see three of the women huddled together in the front of the store watching me and talking. At that point, I felt very self-conscious and I made a comment about it to my mother, who also noticed the blatant staring and talking, when I got into the car.

Now the owner was very polite and seemed extremely concerned about earning my business again; however, I am more concerned about the implications of the incident. The energy was definitely negative judging from the looks on their faces (pinched noses, furrowed eyebrows, deep frowns, and smug smirks were all accounted for).There could've been a number of reasons why those women were looking at me including my clothes, my hair, the confused expression on my face, etc. But all of those things have to do with appearance. You can only formulate a thought about a specific individual if you have seen or come into contact with them (or the idea of them), whether the thought is good, bad, or indifferent. I had noticed one woman looking me up and down, but my attire was neat (I am middle class and able to afford a plain little brown sundress with a tan cardigan) so they couldn't have been appalled by my appearance (unless they happened to despise my brown sundress).
But, of course, being an African American woman I didn't have the luxury of assuming that I'd been stared down in the store and all the way back to my car because of my outfit. It was race. No one in that store looked like me. They were all middle-aged white women. That is how I looked any different from them. I told myself that race must've been the reason why they were so disapproving of my presence in that store.

I've gone over it a couple of times since then and tried to analyze the sequence of events until I realized what I was doing and stopped to figure out why this was so important. This is not the first time that I've experienced this strange ordeal and it will not be the last. (No, seriously. It wasn't the last time.) However, I was transfixed on the subtlety of it all and just how far some people in this world would go to prove me wrong. In legal terms, I cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they responded to me that way because I am black. In a court of law, I would need way more evidence. I would need confessions, fingerprints, scientific data, and a video of the entire episode before half of the United States of America even came closer to conceding that it was about race. (40 percent of America supports the Black Lives Matter movement, by the way). I could argue until I'm blue in the face, but the judge would need more proof. Just like I would not concede on the basis of my experiences, the judge would not concede on the basis of the law and, perhaps more importantly, my opposing council would not concede on the basis of his experience (or lack thereof). This is where we are, America. Half of us are fighting what can't see, half of us can't see what we need to fight, and all of us are transfixed on the juxtaposition of both sides.