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| Jay O'Shea photo credit: Calvin Alagot |
As I approached the cash machine, another person walked up from
the opposite side, a few paces before us. A slim, white woman whose expensive
casual wear and designer sunglasses marked her as one of our Westside
neighborhood’s more affluent residents, she turned and looked at me instead of giving
her attention to the ATM. I offered a smile, acknowledging that she had reached
the cash machine first and had dibs on it. When she returned my smile with a
scowl, I expected the snappish disdain that well-off women in West LA so
commonly project toward other women, but not the question she asked.
“Can
you come back?” she said.
“Excuse
me?” I asked, assuming she meant “Can you step back?” That seemed peculiar
since I stood a good six feet away from her but I would have been willing to
accommodate the request.
“I need
to make a deposit,” she said.
“Go
ahead,” I said. “You were here first.”
“I said
I need to make a deposit. So you need to go and come back later.”
“What?”
Incredulous, I struggled for words. Finally, it kicked in and I understood what
she was asking, or rather demanding, of me.
“No,” I
added.
“You
know what?” she said. “Forget about it. OK, just forget it. I guess I’ll have
to wait.”
She stormed
past.
Grateful
for my IMPACT (and other empowerment self-defense training), I turned to my eight-year-old
daughter and said loudly, “OK, so this woman is looking for a confrontation and
wants it to be someone else’s fault. She may be dangerous and we need to be
prepared.” I knew that wasn’t it, not exactly, but I wanted to deflect her
implied accusation and make sure any bystanders knew she was the threat, not I.
Huffing,
crossing and uncrossing her arms, and making a show of endorsing her check at
distance of twenty yards from me, she pulled out her phone and stood watching
as I deposited my own check.
Perhaps
my tank top and skate shorts marked me, in her eyes, as poor. Maybe my baseball
cap and visible deltoids read as masculine. Or my dark hair, short, muscular
stature, and my daughter’s brown skin rendered us ethnically ambiguous in a
city whose largest “minority” is multi-racial. Whatever it was, it suggested to
her that I was a self-evident threat. In a weird leap of logic, my position as
threatening and socially inferior meant that it was my obligation to defer my
errand in order to protect her safety. Anything less than complete capitulation
confirmed my status as dangerous.
I had recently
attended a women’s self-defense conference where speakers pointed out that
white women’s ostensible right to protection exposes others, usually men of
color, to violence. People of various backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses (people
of color, working class people, the poor) have historically been seen as a
self-evident threat to elite white women. In the interest of protecting these
women, white men inflict violence on marginalized people, who are rendered
vulnerable precisely because they are seen as dangerous. Fear and entitlement
come together to create violence.
Middle-
and upper-class white women play into this system when they come to expect
protection, and come to associate people who seem different with threat.
Someone who lives at the intersection of different identities from my own (in
terms of race, immigration status, or gender expression) could have faced far
graver consequences than the social aggression I encountered at the ATM. The
criminalization of the poor, people of color, and those whose appearance or
behavior seems non-normative ultimately serves the needs not of women, white or
otherwise, but of a racist patriarchal system. Criminalization endangers the
lives and the safety of ordinary people and deprives the innocent of their
freedom. Criminalization is as much a threat to justice and equality as other
forms of violence.
This
woman’s actions can’t be, of course, considered effective self-defense. She
missed clues that might have signaled my true intentions: do muggers often
bring their children with them to an attack? Do they usually have their wallets
out and checks in hand? She was responding to a narrative she created – that
the person behind her in line showed up just to attack her – rather than the
actual circumstances: that more than one person had a check to deposit at an
ATM in a major city just after the close of business hours. Worse, in her
suspicion, she provoked a confrontation where none needed to happen.
Even
so, the flip side of acknowledging that we are responsible for our own safety
is realizing that we are responsible for how we interact with others. Just as women
need to let go of a desire to displace responsibility onto someone else, we
also are accountable to how we demand
safety. We are accountable to the social violence that continues in the associations
of criminality with difference. We do not have the right to criminalize the
ordinary actions of those who appear different from us in the interest of
safety.
As
self-defense practitioners and advocates we need to make explicit the
difference between safety and protection, between boundary setting and
criminalization, between intuition and stereotyping. We need to remind
ourselves, our students, and others that we are responsible for the conclusions
we come to, for the narratives we create in our minds, and the actions we take
in response.
Jay O'Shea
Author, martial artist, and
empowerment self-defense instructor, Jay (Janet)
O’Shea is the author of Risk,
Failure, Play: What Dance Reveals about Martial Arts Training. Recipient
of a UCLA Transdisciplinary Seed Grant to study the cognitive benefits of Filipino
Martial Arts training, she gave a TEDx Talk on competitive play. She is
Professor of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA.
