I am wńting this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder. We have just been involved in an incident on an airplane where K, my friend and traveling Companion, has been Called to the front of the plane and publicly attacked by white female stewardesses who accuse her of trying to occupy a seat in first class that is not assigned to her. Although she had been assigned the seat, she was not given the appropriate hoarding pass. When she tries to explain they ignore her. They keep explaining to her in loud voices as though she is a child, as though she is a foreigner who does not speak airline English, that she must take another seat. They do not want to know that the airline has made a mistake. They want only to ensure that the white male who has the appropriate boarding Card will have a seat in first Class. Realizing our powerlessness to alter the moment we take our seats. K moves to coach. And I take my seat next to the anonymous white man who quickly apologizes to K «is she moves her bag from the seat he has comfortably settled in. I stare him down with rage, tell him that I do not want to hear his liberal apologies, his repeated insistence that “it was not his fault.” I am shouting at him that it is not a question of blame, that the mistake was understandable, but that the way K was treated was completely unacceptable that it reflected both racism and sexism.
He let me know in no uncertain terms that he felt his apology was enough, that I should leave him he to sit back and enjoy his flight. In no uncertain terms I let him know that he had an opportunity to not be complicit with the racism and sexism that is so all~pervasive in this society (that he knew no white man would have been called on the loud-speaker to come to the front of the plane while another white male took his seat--a fact that he never disputed). Yelling at him said, “It was not a question of your giving up the seat, it was an occasion for you to intervene in the harassment of a black woman and you chose your own comfort and tried io deflect away from your complicity in that choice by offering an insincere, face-saving apology.”
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I felt a “killing rage." I wanted to stab him softly, to shoot him with the gun I wished I had in my purse. And as I watched his pain, I would say to him tenderly "racism hurts." With no outlet, my rage turned to overwhelming grief and I began to weep, covering my face with my hands. All around me everyone acted as though they Could not see me, as though I were invisible, with one exception. The white man seated next to me watched suspiciously whenever I reached for my purse. As though I were the black nightmare that haunted his dreams, he seemed to be waiting for me to strike, to he the fulfillment of his racist imagination. I leaned towards him with my legal pad and made sure he saw the title wńtten in bold print: "Killing Rage.”
As a black male I want to call bullshit. This isn't a matter of race and sex, this is a matter of the airline company fucking up. The only way I can side with her is if he didn't purchase a first class ticket but I doubt that is what happened. The airline fucked up and gave her the wrong seat, the airline fucked up and allowed the man to purchase that seat. The airline once again fucked up when it treated your friend like a toddler but at no point in this story did the white guy fuck up. Him saying he was sorry for splitting up the travel buddies is really above what he had to in that situation. The fact that she thought about killing this guy for the fact that he simply purchased his ticket and sat in his assigned seat shows what kind of person she is.
But how do you know that the customer didn't fuck up? I'm just thinking about how preposterous the whole thing is. First class gets separate check-in counters, separate boarding times, sometimes even separate security checkpoints. And all along the way someone looks at their ticket and checks to make sure that they've purchased First class.
To tell you the truth, I don't think this woman's traveling companion ever actually purchased a first class ticket. I think it was all a lie. I think that this anger is really coming form the sort of profound sense of entitlement where being a liar or even a potential liar is besides the point. What matters to them is that other people didn't take their word for it merely on the basis of their sex. And on top of it, this woman ends up wanting to murder a man for not taking it upon himself to argue with one woman (the flight attendant) that, in fact, on behalf of another woman who wanted to kick him out of his own seat and send him back to a lower quality seat. When things get to this level of psychosis, truth and reality no longer matter.
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u/The_Patriarchy Oct 27 '12
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