The welcome wagon needs some work
Posted on August 23rd, 2007 by Jackie Danicki
I am home and so happy to be back in Cincy! This place is a sight for sore eyes. Even the heat is kinda nice after the cold, wet, gloomy time I had in London (though I enjoyed that dreariness while I was there).
Here’s a question for you:
Imagine a very big, burly man ‘accidentally’ shoved into your shoulder and (not so accidentally) swore at you as he passed. Imagine you’re a woman who’s not as big or strong as he is. Imagine none of the dozen or so people who saw this happen had anything to say about it. Imagine you’re the only person of your skin color in the whole crowd.
What would you do?
Filed under: Life
It will be interesting to see if we can have a conversation which deals with skin color WITHOUT things getting ugly.
Racist comments will not be published, and those who try to submit them will be IP-banned for good.
Here’s what I did:
I waited until the man had walked away from the crowd. I walked after him, and asked why he had roughed me up. He swore at me and told me to shut my mouth or he’d smack me. I asked him why he was so angry with me, as I had done nothing to him. He repeated his previous threats. I asked him if he threatens all the women in his life or just complete strangers. He walked away, telling me I was lucky he didn’t hurt me worse than he had.
I ask what others would do because I KNOW what my English friends would have told me to do: Nothing, because how did I know that the guy would not have pulled a weapon or gotten even more violent with just his hands?
I have a very hard time letting someone hurt me without at least giving them a hint of what I think of them. I held back a LOT in speaking to this guy, because I know how good I am at pushing people’s buttons and I had a feeling he might turn more violent if I’d said what was really on my mind. Which was: He is a bullying piece of shit who probably beats his girlfriends and his kids, because that’s what bullying pieces of shit do.
Maybe the best thing WOULD have been for me to say nothing. That’s what I’m thinking about.
If this was in a public place, I would have waited a couple of seconds to create a few feet of distance and then yelled something suitably patronising/ demanding after him, with the aim of raising awareness from onlookers. The aim is to humiliate, in a situation where there is safety in numbers.
If there were no people around, I would have done nothing. I also would do nothing if the crowd seemed likely to deliberately look the other way.
That’s an old-fashioned feminist style “self-defence” technique I learned- we don’t hear about such things as much now as in the 80s- wonder why that is. If groped or bashed in public, make a big, humiliating noise and draw attention.
Meanness in crowds makes it easier for bullies. Vicious cycle.
“what would you do?”
keep walking
Alice, yes, I’ve heard of that - loudly demanding, “WHY IS THERE A HAND ON MY ASS?” if some dickhead gropes you on public transport, for example.
In this situation, something told me that the person concerned would react much worse if confronted where others could witness. That’s why I waited until he had walked a fair distance away. I can’t say he reacted WELL or with civility, but I suspect he would have felt his pride were on the line if people had been watching, which would have elicted a more awful response.
Thing is, I’m glad I confronted him. But part of me (the sensible side?) does wonder if I am courting danger. I just f’n hate bullies so damn much, it makes me sick.
I confront bullies, too. Can’t help myself. Someday somebody is going to attempt to mug me and I will get myself killed.
Not sure if it would work in this situation but…
I was downtown once in a crowd when I felt someone trying to open the zipper on my work bag after “accidentally” running into me. I didn’t say anything right then, but when we stopped walking for a light and I felt them again trying, I turned around and said “Your girlfriend/wife is really going to like me if you touch me or my bag again, because if you do, you’ll go home with B***S the size of Kansas after I kick you there!!” He quickly walked away and I heard a few claps, a few “way to go” and about the same # saying “You are crazy!!!”
just my 2 cents……
Well, you shouldn’t go up against your instincts.
But maybe the fact he would have hated being humiliated could be a reason for doing it- I’d focus on what he might try to do under the circumstances, eg, people in an airport are unlikely to be armed, etc.
I still wouldn’t ever go after someone out of earshot though- the closer you are to others, the safer it is. And I definitely wouldn’t try to reason with anyone who has already shown they are unreasonable.
Interesting issue, wish there was more discussion and awareness of it, the discussion is too often polarised between passivity and guns, which misses most of what happens in reality, imo.
Any chance he was just nuts? I mean, not that he’s some “rational’ asshole who beats up his SO, but that he’s some aggressive bipolar schizophrenic. If it’s the latter, I’d just chalk it up to one of those things.
FWIW: I was the one white kid in a rough public school, so the junior high version of your incident happened just about all the time, including the do-nothing crowd (which occasionally included teachers). What I noticed is that it never happened without the perp having quite a large audience — 90% of it was about showing off in front of a defenceless minority. This sort of thing is color-blind: after all, I’ve never seen a photo of a lynching that had any less than 20 bystanders. It seems to me that if the street was just him, just you, and NO crowd, he wouldn’t have bothered.
If you take offense at the above analysis, I’ll accept my ban with no animosity.