Mordant Belle

Up until last month, I worked at *local video rental store*, in what’s known locally as a “ghetto”, though it wasn’t really one - just a run-down, poor area, where lots of our customers were black, Latino/a, and rural white folks. I always closed, which meant that I was there til midnight or 1am

Sam worried for my safety all the time, for which I appreciated his concern, but I got increasingly annoyed that every day I worked, he would fret about my car being broken into or stolen, or my being assaulted/kidnapped/raped in the parking lot. Every day he would say something about it, and say, half serious, half in jest, that he would come escort me home.

This despite the fact that I repeatedly told him I felt quite safe at work - I knew the security guard assigned to the area, a short, middle-aged, fast talking black woman who was possibly the sweetest person I ever met, and who checked in with all the staff (most of us were in our early 20s) frequently.

I also trusted all my coworkers - we were all friends and we all watched out for each other. I frequently drove some of the guys home who only had skateboards or whose family had only one car, so they had to wait for their mom. My car is a piece of shit 2000 Saturn anyway, damaged by an accident that I didn’t fix. I hated that he would go on and on that I was in danger and my car was in danger, when I knew I was safe.

And yet he never worried when I lived in the dorms at State. I would call him, usually, on the way from my dorm to my car in the parking structure that was, literally, less than 300 yards away, and I was always afraid of being assaulted there.

He always told me I was perfectly safe, despite the fact that I reminded him of the bulletins posted around the dorms all semester - at least one every month, often more - about rapes, assaults, and robberies that occurred on campus. Add in the college night-time atmosphere of a well-known party school, plus the loud, offensive frat boys who would yell “hey baby” or other propositions, and I was justifiably fearful that something could and would happen. Not to mention in the latter situation I was almost always alone.

Not to say Sam didn’t worry about me on campus, but he didn’t seem to take my assessment of either situation as seriously as his - despite the fact that I was more familiar with these areas and situations than he was. It’s something to note that my instincts on whether or not I’m “safe” were not relevant to his evaluation.

In his assumptions, too, was a note about race and class, though I didn’t realize it at the time (. I felt (and probably was) more safe amongst the minority populations and working poor - the everyday public, who were much less likely to assault/rape/rob me out of nowhere and for no reason, and many of whom were truly my friends and looking out for me. I felt (and, again, probably was) less safe amongst the drunken frat-boy atmosphere, with the kids whose parents were paying for their college and felt a sense of entitlement to everything, including but not limited to my appearance. A surprising number of robberies on campus were bored rich kids who just didn’t care about other people. I don’t really know which situation was more dangerous to me, but that’s my perception.

Something else that I’ve been reading about on occasion in my so-far-tenuous relays into the blogs of women of color, though: “safety” is a loaded word, tainted with the stink of white privilege. It’s virtually always white people, especially middle-class white people, who assume “safety” is one of their civil rights, along with the right to privacy, guns, and religious freedom.

Only entitled people - usually upper- to middle-class, white, male, or some combo - feel that sense that the worlds “owes” them something, including safety. Or a “purpose”, or “recognition”, or a “good job”. These things are privileges, and enjoyed, usually, by the privileged.

Some of the less privileged can gain these things with hard work, time, and effort, but that’s no guarantee they’ll get them. There is no certainty that (what’s the right word? unprivileged?) people can get the above entitlement even WITH hard work, no guarantee, especially for people of color, doubly so for women of color. Only privileged people (in my case, white, in Sam’s case, white male) take such things for granted, as a given, rather than a blessing.

I don’t think such things should be privileges, I think they SHOULD be rights. It’s crucial that people are able to make choices, and no one should be compelled to make a choice out of fear. Everyone should feel safe. But at the moment, feeling safe isn’t a right for a vast majority of American citizens, and other people throughout the world. From what I can tell from the few WOC blogs I’ve read, the first question they’d ask is, “What are you doing to change this?” And when I’m honest, I answer “Nothing, really.” I’m not sure where to go, or what to do, for that. But I’m working on it.

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