Flashback 2002: Sad day when trip to toy store turns sour

    What did you think of my ballet review yesterday? Honestly, while no one complained, I felt it sort of sagged. I just couldn't get my head around saying something interesting about the experience. I fudged, and dragged in Tchaikovsky's history with Chicago and the Columbian Exposition, trying to smokescreen the fact that I had very little of worth to say about the dance itself.

     I began to wonder if I've EVER written anything worthwhile about the ballet, and in searching came up with this. It isn't about the ballet either, though it mentions the word. But it was so unexpected, and a reminder that not only did people once regularly go downtown to work, but there were toy stores waiting there. That's reason enough to share it. My vacation is officially over today, and I'll have something fresh — in theory — in the paper on Wednesday.

     "A simple 'No' would suffice."

      It was the end of a long day this week. I was rumpled, tired, just another business guy in a creased raincoat, stopping by the Toys R Us on State Street to buy marbles for his kids. My kids like marbles.
     I waited in line, handed the clerk the metal box of marbles. "Phone number area code first," she ordered, in that robotic voice clerks use.
     "Do I have to?" I asked, imagining Toys R Us calling at dinner to hector us about Barbie. "Can't I just buy the marbles?"
     She gazed hard at me. 

     "A simple 'No' would suffice," she snapped.
     I looked at her for the first time. Young. Maybe 19. Black. Eyeglasses. For the next second, I pondered my reaction. The thought bouncing in its seat, waving its arm and going "oh, oh, oh" was a sharp, "A lot of attitude to be coming from the clerk at the Toys R Us."
     But I didn't say that. I took out my money, silently, because I had a feeling of . . . well, it's hard to describe. The Germans call it weltschmerz. A sadness at the world. I obviously wasn't the first customer this young lady had to face. She probably had it up to here with whining white guys in raincoats. She'd probably been itching to zing one of them, and it was my turn. Sure, I could vent at her, and she would either vent back or, realizing that her $5 an hour job might be in the balance, would click into her polite mode, which would be worse.
     I said nothing. That she was black was significant. "She probably hates these raincoated white guys, tramping through here, buying their metal boxes of marbles for their pampered kids at home, refusing to give their phone numbers lest their white suburban idylls be interrupted by other black teenagers in basements, selling magazine subscriptions."
     That's certainly some kind of white guilt. Maybe I should have called the manager over and ratted her out and felt good about it. But the guilt is what I felt. Guilt and a desperate longing for civility. She could have said, "Fork over the phone number, Mr. Potato Head," and, after the initial shock, I would have felt the same urge not to get into an ugly argument with the clerk at the Toys R Us. I paid my money.
     "Would you like a receipt?" she said. This was my chance. I smiled, seizing on a reply. "I suppose I should limit myself to a simple 'Yes,' " I said. She seemed to get my point. She gave a little laugh, and we made eye contact for a second before I grabbed my marbles and rushed away.
     For 100,000 years of human history we clung to our families and our tribes. It's premature, and foolish, to imagine that the past 50 years of enlightenment are enough for us to cast all those things aside.
     In every encounter I have with another person, I coolly note and calculate their race and age and class — in every single one — and as far as I'm concerned anyone who says they don't is a saint or lying.
     Lying or spouting the party line. We tell ourselves we live in a colorblind society — white people do, anyway. That's why we have random checks at airports. What they're really doing is frisking people who might be Islamic terrorists — we seem to be having a problem with the Muslim world; I hope I'm not the one to break this to you.
     But pulling aside every Arab-looking traveler and checking their shoes offends our sense of fairness, so we toss periodic 3-year-olds and grandmothers and congressmen into the mix, as a smoke screen.
     Is it really necessary? My first instinct was that stopping Arab-looking people at airports is not racial profiling. Racial profiling is pulling over a black motorist for driving a Cadillac through Lake Forest and having him spread-eagle on the car until he's found to be the owner.
     I was about to say that's wrong because most blacks driving their Cadillacs through Lake Forest didn't steal them. But then, most Arabs moving through airports aren't terrorists or would-be terrorists or even cousins of terrorists, but assistant managers on their way to Toledo, Ohio, for a button convention.
     This is complex, but of one thing I am certain: better to acknowledge the burden of our prejudices and try to overcome them than to pretend to have a colorblind society that doesn't exist.
     The morning after I bought the marbles, I was hoofing up Wabash on my way to work, still thinking about the Toys R Us clerk, and marvelling at the little ballet of racial antinomy that I, and maybe she, engaged in. A short, swarthy man stepped up to me at Wabash and Wacker and asked, "Can you tell me how to get to Michigan Avenue?"
     I pointed at the Tribune Tower. "You see that building?" I said, resisting the urge to add, "that nightmarish monstrosity of arches and rocks scavenged from the garbage bins of old European cathedrals?"
     Instead I said: "That's Michigan Avenue."
     He thanked me, but before he moved away, I considered adding, "You're looking for the Mexican Consulate, right?" But I stopped myself. Just because the man was 5-foot-1, with a dark complexion and a Pancho Villa mustache didn't mean anything. That was the language of hate. So instead I asked, "What are you looking for on Michigan?"
     "The consulate," he said.
     "In that case," I said, "you want to take a right at Michigan. It's on the west side of the street." I walked off. Two seconds later, I realized he never said which consulate he was looking for.
           — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 15, 2002