I have spent a good portion of my life feeling like I was invisible. I think it is a function of a number of overlapping attributes that have added to my cloak of invisibility and given me a freedom that I never really appreciated before. I am not by any standards conventionally pretty; I’m fat, I wear thick glasses, I have social anxiety so I get very quiet with new people. But I watch, I observe and I think. This is not to say I’m having a pity party, I’m saying that even beyond the privilege of being white, I present as a non-threat, non-target, non-entity, which means, I get away with a lot of shit.
One thing I get away with is smoking marijuana. I smoked in my car in the parking lot of bars for years. While other more, shall we say, “thuggish” people are targeted for arrest and assault, nobody seems to think once, let alone twice, about me. I get out of speeding tickets by looking all sweet and befuddled. I even back talk to cops when they harass other people and they just shrug me off. I protested Afghanistan and Iraq and watched others get hauled away by the police, while they left me alone.
I say all of this not to brag, but to say that the police are far from infallible and any of them who tell you that you should just do what they say without lip, yeah, I don’t do that. And I get away with it.
This is probably one of the most horrible things about our society, that someone like me just drifts along doing what I want and not worrying about being beat or harassed or shot by the cops (or other authority driven and armed assholes). I hate it because I am reminded that not everyone gets to be invisible. I hate that young men are dying in the street while I go free. I hate that whole swaths of our country are still treated with disgust, derision, suspicion, hatred, discrimination and violence. We should be ashamed. I am ashamed.
P.S. – If I had to choose a superpower it wouldn’t be invisibility. I want to be able to disintegrate things with my mind, it would make commuting super easy and I could better even the scales of justice.