Return to Treasure Island.

Hmmm. So when I wrote my last post about the flea market, I really wasn't expecting to get as many comments as I did. Not that I am complaining, I just thought the post that I wrote the week before was more interesting.

Anyways, I figured I would respond to your responses. My old friend anonymous had this to say:

Does everything about race offend you? If she saw you coming and hid the book ( but not before you saw the title), would that offend you?

Maybe there aren't many black folks where you live and she was trying to sell the book to the author's intended audience.


Let's start at the beginning...

Does everything about race offend you?


Yes.



lololololololol, just kidding. No, anonymous--everything about race does not offend me.


If she saw you coming and hid the book ( but not before you saw the title), would that offend you?

No, it would not offend me. I would think it was weird though. I actually wasn't offended when she showed me the book. It was more like, "Gee you must have very limited interaction with black people if your first instinct after talking to a black person for 30 seconds is to show them something about black people." I actually thought it was funny. People can just be clueless sometimes, and this incident was a good example of that.

If I had been offended, I wouldn't have helped her to make a living by purchasing the book that I was originally looking at.

Maybe there aren't many black folks where you live and she was trying to sell the book to the author's intended audience.

Who is the author's intended audience? What are you basing your answer to the last question on?

So many times when I write this blog, I think to myself: Do I need to make such and such explicit, or can I just leave what I've written as is? I usually decide to just leave it, because that means less writing for me. But more often than not, I get comments that make it clear to me that perhaps there is no such thing as overexplaining/oversharing.

I do not think the lady at the flea market is a mean, bad or evil lady. I am not in her head, but my impression of the situation is that she had no malicious intent when she showed me the book. I do think that her showing me the book came primarily from the fact that I was black. As I said in the original post, I don't have a problem with a white vendor showing me something that is related to being black, if it makes logical sense.

And in my understanding of logic, black person = automatically interested in purchasing black item ≠ logical sense. It's not like the book was just sitting on top of the stack, she actually dug through a pile to show me this book. I am a fan of suggestive selling as much as the next person, but I know enough about selling to know that you are more likely to build the sale if the items you suggest are somehow related to the original item.

Moving on.

yourwhitefriend (who actually is my white friend) made two comments on this post.

First:

For reals. I witnessed this event and still can't believe it happened.

And then a little later:

I have to say, though, that what if she really did just think that the pictures were cool, and had absolutely no idea what the title was (since she obviously had no idea what it was about either, I wouldn't put it past her to be that clueless)? Or maybe she did realize what the title was, but thought you might enjoy the pictures anyway, as someone who was expressing an interest in old books. Wouldn't it have been worse/racish if she were going to show you the book to point out the pictures, but then chose not to for fear of offending you?

Yes, this is giving her more credit than she probably deserves, but it's perhaps something else to think about.

Welcome to my brain, mywhitefriend. There are many times (though not in this particular instance,) where I have strange encounters with white people where I wonder if they were racist/racish/neither. I spend precious minutes after the fact trying to figure out what was going on. This is time I could be using to decide what I'm going to make for dinner, what I think the U.S.'s next step should be in Afghanistan, or who I think is going to get voted off this week on Dancing With The Stars.

Remember when you were talking to me about how rude other shoppers were being at the market? When that happens to you, you know instantly that it's happening because those people are just rude or having a bad day or something similar. You don't spend any time at all wondering if they are rude because they don't like people that look like you. Think of the brain space that frees up!

I realize that don't have to think about such things. But I don't really believe that ignorance is bliss. I prefer to have as accurate of an understanding as possible about the world around me, and often that means analyzing things that happen to me. I don't let racist/racish things that happen in my life limit me in significant ways. However, I also believe in holding other people accountable for their actions instead of deciding to bear the burden all myself. Just like it is helpful for me to learn how to react to things in productive ways, isn't it also helpful for others to learn to act in productive ways? I think so.

Comments? You know what to do.