Monday, June 11, 2007

Scary Racism


You know, I kid my husband all the time. He is Jewish, and he's always talking about racism particular to the Jewish. I kid him because, of course, other people have suffered racism too.

An incident happened today, which was ironic because recently I was reminding him of a time I was scared for him. It was a long time ago when we lived in Worcester MA. I was transporting a rocking chair and air conditioner from my deceased grandfather's home (on my mother's side both) to her apartment in the low income district that catered to the elderly. So this was not a "good" neighborhood.

A cop spotted us in the old crap duster. He pulled us over, but instead of getting my (I was the driver) info, they ordered my husband (the passenger) out. See they thought he was hispanic. When I angrily asked (at the age of 19) what they thought they were doing they yelled at me "well we don't know who he is". I was like, well I do. Anyway, nothing happened of it, but it was pretty scary. And probably the only reason nothing happened was that they realized these weren't a couple of hispanic kids, who likely have no resources, but just someone in a crappy car in a crappy part of the neighborhood.

So today my husband comes home with a recent chapter. He was in Sanford Maine before a business appointment. He was a few minutes early, and saw an interesting old family plot (we got a lot of miscellaneous cemetaries scattered around the areas) to check out. He got out and checked it out, when a police car slowly pulled down the driveway of a house. Then, of course, the police came back. (Note: the police do this a lot in this area, even though it's the middle of nowhere, it can kind of be disconcerting anyway, especially if you are just about seeing the sites).

So Robert goes to approach the police officer, who then screams for him to get back into his car. So fine, he returns back to his car. Info is provided, and Robert shows him his customer list and business card as proof that he should be in the area (do we still live in the US?).

So the officer goes in, and calls it in or whatever. Comes back, and now he's chatty with Robert. So Rob goes "oh, are you going to keep the business card", because that didn't get returned back. Then he explains that he doesn't do mortgages for business, he wholesales to businesses that sell mortgages to individuals.

So this Sargent of Sanford ME goes "Goldenburn (fake name there), is that a Jew name?" At which point, Rob just freezes up and is taken aback. And thankfully, he just keeps his cool wanting to get out of there safely. And then the guy goes "figures" and walks away.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

People can really suck.