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Michael Omi was on campus tonight, where he gave a smart and engaging talk: “The Contradictions of Colorblindness: Race and Its Discontents.” During the Q&A period, two different audience members — seemingly with noble intentions — commented on the racial/ethnic make-up of the audience and on which members of the audience were (and weren’t) asking questions . . . and it was clear from their comments that they were relying heavily on visual markers to make their respective claims. Their eyes apparently told them everything they needed to know about the identities of the people in the room.

Of course, for pink-skinned mulattoes such as myself, moments like these are always loaded. Whether either of the audience members was actually including me in their reading of the room is impossible to say — the crowd spilled over into the hall, and so there were a lot of faces for them to focus on — but I’d be willing to bet that I wasn’t the only person in the room who typically gets read as white, but who would self-identify as something else. And I found it particularly ironic that a talk as nuanced as Omi’s — where one of the issues specifically on the table was the sloppiness of racial profiling — led more than one audience member to slot a crowd of 150 or more people into discrete racial categories solely on the basis of visual appearance.

Skip ahead to the trip home after the talk. Margaret had taken the car so she could attend a different function just off-campus, and our arrangement was that she would pick me up when she was through with her duties. The side street where she pulled up seems to lead around the side of the building and onto a major thoroughfare . . . but it really doesn’t. And we discover this at the moment when we’re suddenly squeezed in on both sides and stopped on a sidewalk facing an iron gate that’s way too narrow for a car to pass through.

At this stage, Margaret gives up — she’s had a long day and is usually happier as a passenger anyway — and she asks me to drive the rest of the way. So we switch seats, I back out of the predicament we’re in, find my way back to something resembling a real road — and then I proceed to take a wrong turn which has me heading down a “street” that’s technically a pedestrian-only zone, but that I know will actually get us where we need to be. I hadn’t intended to do the illegal thing (honest), but suddenly I was past the “Do Not Enter” sign — and I made the split second decision to cheat the half block or so it would take to get onto a legal road again.

Only problem was that I did so right in front of one of Minneapolis’ finest.

So Officer Friendly pulls me over and asks for my license and proof of insurance. The insurance card I show him was expired (by a few weeks), and he says “close enough.” (The proper one turned out to still be in the glovebox.) He wanders back to his car, checks my priors, comes back, reminds me of the speeding ticket I got in 2004, offers me a firm lecture about paying attention to road markings . . . and then lets me off with a warning. I thank the nice man, and we drive away.

And I suspect that Officer Friendly did just what those two audience members had done: he profiled us. He looked at me and Margaret (and her colleague Sonja, who was also in the car), saw what he thought were white folks with good jobs . . . and that visible whiteness is what spared me the expense of a ticket. While I’d like to be wrong about this, I suspect that if my blackness or my native-American-ness were more clearly visible in my pigmentation and features,* this story would’ve had a different ending. Especially given that I initially handed him an expired insurance card: compounding one offense with another is usually not a recipe for success when people of color get pulled over. I’m not exactly itching to have the ticket he could’ve legitimately written for my moving violation. But I’d feel better about the break I was given if I could believe that I wasn’t being rewarded simply for having pink skin.

*Mind you, in some people’s eyes, I amvisibly non-white. It happens often enough that I’m not completely surprised when it happens again . . . but more typically, I get read by people who don’t know me as just another white guy.

Though this doesn’t explain why people who’ve never met me before routinely tell me that I sound Canadian. Maybe I’m really from some hitherto undiscovered part of the continent called North Québecarolina . . .

So how are you celebrating the holiday weekend?

More mini-comments…

• During my 2 hour layover in Terminal D of the Milwaukee airport, I got to witness the bar manager train a couple of new bartenders. And in an astounding act of indiscretion (at least insofar as he did this right in front of my seat at a full bar, and without any serious attempt to make sure his comments didn’t get heard by the marks paying customers), he told one of them to always make bloody marys as doubles and never to ask first. And, from his tone, it was pretty clear that this was a policy intended to boost receipts, rather than to be generous with the airport’s booze.
• My flight from Milwaukee to San Antonio included a stop (but no plane change) in Kansas City . . . where there was also a crew change. And the new flight attendants made it clear that we were preparing to go to Texas. Not because of their accents (which were barely there), but because of their hair. It had been years since I’d even had to think about “Texas hair” and suddenly there it was, large as life (and I do mean large) to remind me of what I’d been missing.

• My new digital home is slooooowly shaping up. I still need to sort out the protocols that will let me play mp3s, I’d like to find a decent replacement for Dreamweaver, and there are a few quirks in the way things seem to run in Laptop Linux Land that I need to work out (or learn to work with). But, on the whole, it’s a happy-making switch for me.
• The nice folks at Rate Your Students liked something I sent them well enough to post it recently. I’m going to be discreet enough not to point to a particular post in public . . . but I suspect that them what knows me can probably guess which bit of pedagogical peevishness is mine.
• Which of these upcoming events do you think I’m most excited about attending? The National Communication Association’s annual convention (this year, in sunny San Antonio)? The Asylum Street Spankers live at the Cedar Cultural Center next Wednesday?

UPDATE: For folks keeping score at home, you can now cross the mp3 issue off the list above.

Back in August, I noted in this space that my days as a Windows user were numbered. At the time, I figured that it would take a while to cross over to the Land of Linux completely — there being just inconvenience to the switch to keep me from making it mid-semester — but that I’d get there eventually. Of course, I also figured that I’d do so at a moment of my own choosing. And it’s that last bit that turned out to be wrong.

Somewhere in the walk home from my local coffee shop yesterday morning, some tiny(?) corner of the Windows installation on my laptop decided that it was going to corrupt itself . . . and so when I booted up again in my home office, the system that was working perfectly well a mere ten minutes beforehand was suddenly fucked up in a major way. Some programs would start up fine but then freeze if I actually tried to use them. Other programs wouldn’t even get that far. Windows could clearly see my printer, but refused to actually talk with it. Worst of all, I couldn’t do anything online (even though, again, Windows said it could see my home network just fine).

And with a couple of pressing deadlines that couldn’t be ignored, it was far easier for me to momentarily shift my virtual writing space to the Linux side of things than it was for me to get the friendly UMN techies to try and fix the Windows side on short notice . . . and now that I’m here (however hastily, and however partially), it probably makes more sense for me to finish the switch than to try and move a weekend’s worth of writing and e-mail back again.

There’s still enough of my digital life on my Windows partition that I can’t just scrub it clean and forget entirely about fixing it — but I think that whatever fixes happen over there (hopefully next week) will ultimately just set me up to finish the move more cleanly.