A Cold Day
One of the highlights, so far, of my career in producing theater was my involvement in the play The Exonerated. In it there is a scene where Dilbert Tibbs talks about imagining you’re locked up and every day a man in a gray suit comes in and beats you. After a while you will have a thing about men in gray suits.
The full import of this didn’t register with me until recently. The store where I buy my groceries in San Francisco is on the top of a hill, always cold, foggy, and sometimes windy.
This day I got to the bus bench, with the cold wind really blowing. I thought about where the warmest place to be was, sitting on the bench or standing behind one of the plexiglass panels. I sat down on the bench. A man sitting at the other end of the bench gave me an angry look.
He said, “I know why you did that.”
I asked, “did what”?
“Hesitate about sitting down. You did it because I’m black”.
I tried to explain that I was just deciding where it would be warmer, but he didn’t believe me. I didn’t think that telling him some of my best friends were black would help so I just shut up.
Overreacting?
All the while I’m thinking, “Talk about overreacting!”
It was only until I was retelling this story that I realized that I was his man in a gray suit.
I began to consider what must have happened to him in his life, so that just by my hesitating about sitting next to him made him decide I was racist.
This is the kind of experience I can’t even imagine. And I’m afraid it is all too common in a society where some people feel comfortable telling people born in America to go back where they came from.
What Color is Your Suit?
I will never again think someone is overreacting.
Neither should you.
Think instead that to them you might just look, act, sound like a man in a gray suit.