SEEING RED OVER WHITE, BLACK, AND BROWN: This Saturday morning, I found myself cycling up some long grind of a Hope Ranch hill on my way to do an interview. Heading my way from the opposite direction was another cyclist, coasting happily downstream, leaving a spray of gravel in his wake. In that brief second where we passed I got a better look. “Black cyclist,” my brain registered. I wondered in that moment if his brain was similarly registering, “White cyclist.”
Of course, it’s not quite the same. Black people make up less than 3 percent of the population in Santa Barbara County. And it wasn’t really that long ago that real estate covenants in Hope Ranch barred the sale of any properties to black and Jewish people. But that was back in those good old days — infused in amber — when we could eat pancakes at Sambo’s without being made uncomfortable by the name (finally changed this past week) or the paintings of big-lipped pickaninnies on the wall. America, we are told, is forever losing its innocence. For some of us, obliviousness might be more like it.
For the rest of the ride, I ran a quick inventory of racial stereotypes. As a kid growing up in the D.C. suburbs, I’d subliminally concluded black consumers leaned toward green products. When it came to the plastic jugs of so-called fruit drinks sold at the corner store, white kids went for the red and black kids for the green. It was a law of physics. When it came to cigarettes, you never saw a black Marlboro Man, but black guys could forever be seen sucking down a menthol in the magazine ads. And those ads didn’t lie. I remember watching a boxing match with a friend’s father; a black guy was fighting a guy wearing a Mexican flag on his satin shorts. At one point, my friend’s father became exasperated. “Don’t you know,” he shouted at the Mexican boxer, “you can’t hurt a black guy by hitting him the head?” I filed that biological curiosity away for safe storage. And as a white teenager growing up in the ’70s, my stereotypes were stereotypically stereotypical; when it came to being badass and cool, black people pretty much set the gold standard.