The doorbell dinged. He walked in, looked quickly left and right, and headed down the aisle to the corner with the motor oil and the milk. I could see him from my register, both in my direct line of sight and in the reflection of the curved mirror above his head. He was bare-chested in the summer heat, still with the rounded shoulders of a boy, but wearing loose adult-sized gray sweatpants. He glanced around again and reached into his waistband. Tucked securely behind the elastic was a thick roll of cash. He tucked the money back in and walked up to my till.
We were just beginning our transaction when the store owner burst out of his office and started shouting at the boy. "Empty your pockets. Let me see it." The boy and I both reared back. "I saw you on the camera. You were stealing. Let me see it."
The boy went flat behind the eyes.
I was caught in a bind. Defy the store owner on his own property, when he had been my manager for only a few weeks? Or risk looking useless, like I hadn't been paying attention when a customer walked in and behaved in a furtive manner? All I could do was speak the truth, come what may.
"He wasn't stealing. I was watching him the whole time. He wants to buy some money orders."
The boy didn't have any pockets, a bag, or even a wallet. All he had was the roll of $250 in small, limp bills. My manager grilled him some more before grumbling back to his office. I helped the boy with his task. His grandmother had sent him to buy money orders to pay their utility bills. He had a note in her careful handwriting, with the names of each service provider and the amount to pay. At twelve-years-old, he was trusted to do an adult task with a fairly large sum of money. He was polite. I thought he was a good-looking kid. I tried to treat him with the same deference I would any other customer, the same respect I would show any other neighbor. It was the best I could do to offer him some dignity without acknowledging the racially-charged incident that he had just endured. I was still on camera, after all, and my job was on the line.
I recognize that the incident I describe is potentially fraught with implicit racism. I, the white person, interceded between the Muslim immigrant from Pakistan and the urban black youth. I had already read some James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver by that point, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything about my sensitivity, awareness, or lack thereof. What I can share is that I approached this scenario from the perspective of a poor person, and to me it reflected the clash of sub-poverty and the middle class. When I write about poverty, my privileged status as a university-educated, wealthy Caucasian is not always enough to convince even fellow progressives that income inequality has anything to do with anything. Nearly everyone seems to agree that poverty and low moral character go together, and that this particular Venn diagram overlaps almost completely with race.
A skeptic will instantly wonder about that roll of bills. Where did the boy get so much cash? Why was that household operating on a cash basis anyway? Why didn't they just use a bank? This is a perfectly understandable middle-class reaction in the face of the shadow economy of sub-poverty. Almost all sources of income available to the sub-poor are cash-based, because customers prefer to pay that way. Landscaping, housekeeping, child care, odd jobs, even light construction and vehicle maintenance can easily be booked through a licensed, bonded, and insured contractor by those who are willing. The sub-poor take whatever jobs we can get, and the budget-minded pay informally at the lowest rate we can negotiate. I could go to the Home Depot parking lot and, within a quarter-hour, bring home a day laborer who would work under the table. The sub-poor are usually unbanked, and the primary reason for this is that we can't collect enough capital to maintain the required minimum balance or pay monthly service fees. My bank once tried to charge me $22 for being overdrawn by eleven cents. As a member of the upper middle class, I can spend that on lunch without thinking twice; at sub-poverty, it was a week's groceries.
When the Black boy walked into the convenience store where I worked, I identified with him. I too had been sent on adult errands with hand-written notes as a child. I too felt the heavy weight of responsibility when I carried any amount of cash, knowing the household revolved around the safe transit of that money until the transaction was complete. I saw how his clothes and shoes reflected his poverty, because I had also worn poorly-fitting hand-me-downs and beat-up old shoes throughout my life. I read in his expression that this was not his first experience with being accused of shoplifting, and I understood, because I had also been treated like a thief based on my clothing and appearance. I saw resigned humiliation where another person might have seen anger. I knew from his formal manners that he had been brought up in a strict household, just like I was, because politeness is a survival trait in poor neighborhoods like ours.
I wonder if he did survive. If he did, he'd be thirty-five this year. I wonder what he thinks when he hears the news, every time another unarmed Black person is killed by police.
When I heard the news about Alton Sterling, it affected me in the same way as the news about Eric Garner. Poor men, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Neither of them would have been in the situation they were in, where they were vulnerable to police attention, had they not been resorting to informal work as street peddlers. The first thing I did when I learned of the tragedy of Philando Castile was to do an Internet search about his life. I wanted to know what he did for a living, because I couldn't picture a middle-class person being a police target in that way, and I had a strong intuition. He was ambitious and working hard, but he wasn't there yet. He wasn't safe yet. Maybe if he could have afforded a higher-end vehicle, he would be alive today, invisible to police scrutiny.
Police come to our neighborhoods with certain expectations. They get called out to the same areas over and over again. Police look for patterns of suspicious behavior, but they also learn to look for a certain condition of vehicle or manner of dress. Nobody ever asked Bernie Madoff what was in his backpack. Where I grew up, there were regular incidents of all sorts of crime, from theft and drug deals to rape and stabbing. Most of us were law-abiding but too poor to move elsewhere. We knew to watch out for particular neighbors, but how could an outsider? We dressed alike and we drove similar cars, if we drove at all. We shopped at the same stores and had the same street addresses, only with a different unit number at the end. "Birds of a feather flock together," that's what people think. To be poor and to look poor is to look suspicious. To live in a "dangerous" (read: poor) area is tantamount to complicity.
Why does it seem like open season on Black people lately? Why do unarmed civilians keep being shot to death in different regions of the United States? It feels as though police in these situations are interacting with a different version of reality, as though they're wearing virtual reality goggles and fighting an evil avatar, when the live person who stands before them is simply going about his business. They see what they expect to see. They see threats. They see danger. They don't see vulnerability, or even cooperation. I think part of what they see is poverty.
Poor people are seen as parasites. Poor people are seen as criminal lowlives. Poverty is seen as a just punishment for low moral character. I know this from my origin as White Trash. Nobody has ever acted afraid of me based on my skin color, but my experience of poverty links me with the poor Blacks, poor Hispanics, and poor Southeast Asian immigrants who have been my neighbors. We are not regarded as full participants in society, we are not seen as honest citizens, and we are not seen as safe or trustworthy. We are "no angels." When one of us is targeted by police, we are automatically presumed guilty, not just by law enforcement but by commentators after the fact. Often we fall under that watchful eye based simply on our material circumstances.