As exotic as housepaint

This morning, walking down Lake Street towards the bus stop, I was reminded by how subjective the experience of "exotic" is. There I am, meandering down a street that is two blocks from my house, peeking in the store windows, trying not slide on the ice, when I noticed a family standing on a nearby corner. A white middle-class-seeming family - mom, dad, two adolescent children in warm nonstandoutish clothes. They are holding hands and looking around them with very big eyes. As I approach them, I hear this: "Yeah, I know, it's amazing isn't it," said the dad. "And it's not even 9:00 yet but look at all the people." The daughter was peering into the window of the Latin American grocery store on the corner and she turned to her mom, "I'd be afraid to go in there. I wouldn't know what anything is." "Aw honey," said her mom, "It' s just exotic. You don't have to be afraid of exotic things."

At that instant, I felt a part of their "exotic" urban tableau and wondered if I was an addition to their movie or a disappointment. Was I too white to fit into their exotic white frame or was my fake fur coat and Tibetan scarf "urban" enough in that earthy crunchy PC way?

This reminded me of something that happened when I was 18. Accepted into a private liberal arts college that was about 20 minutes from my high school but which none of us had heard of before, I was sitting in the coffee shop, reading and people-watching. I idly noticed a group of students at the next table over talking about this service project they had completed the weekend before. The group had gone into "the city" - Cleveland, in this case - and had helped kids do some gardening or build a playground. All of these years later, I can't remember WHAT they were doing, only that there were kids and they were helping them. I wasn't paying super close attention to what they were saying until I heard, "God, I couldn't believe how poor they were. Those poor kids, I mean, I don't know what their life must be like everyday. Doing this made me really realize how much I want to help people." Now, the youthful enthusiasm and raw feeling aside, there really isn't that much to examine in that statement beyond unpacking the notion of "help". But that isn't what I did at the time. It was the next statement that caught me. The group began to describe in detail a Virgin Mary grotto up on the side of a hill, talking about how "cool" it was and how amazing and admirable it was that poor folks still hold on to folk traditions instead of just watching TV or something like that. What caught me was that, with their description of the grotto and the rest of their words, I realized that they were talking about MY neighborhood, the one where my grandparents lived, where I had gone to elementary school. My emotional or political or personal development at age 18, combined with how much I was struggling at this college anyhow, meant that I felt embarrassed by their comments, as though they could see through the cafe divider and know that I was one of "those people." I felt like I was part of their tableau and the conclusions they were drawing made me deeply uncomfortable, even alienated.

It's hard to look at anything with compassion, curiosity and zero judgement. The tapes play in our heads: "papers blowing around a streetlight, must be poor here, oh is that tagging, what annoying hoodlums they are" or "white nuclear family looking out of place on Lake Street and somewhat afraid, probably Republicans from the suburbs."

I'm trying, really trying, to just listen and look without defining and judgement. It's one of those life lessons I'm feeling all embroiled with. It's also astonishingly difficult, particularly when I realize just how much of my history is based on gaining recognition and even a kind of strength through the articulate nature of my judgements. In some ways, and my friends will laugh, these days I am feeling quite mute.