Member-only story
When I Stood up to a Black Cop
Culture Shock in South Carolina
I grew up in New York City. It was a typical working class neighborhood. There was an Armenian lady across the street who watched my baby brother when Mom went shopping. There was a Chinese girl my mom sometimes cared for. There were white kids and black kids and brown kids that I played with and walked to school with and argued with and studied with.
When people asked me where I was from, I never minded answering because it was understood that I was American, that I had the right to be there; the question was just curiosity about my heritage.
Then I moved to a small town in South Carolina to work as an engineer. Suddenly the question, “Where are you from?” made me tense up. Because the implication was very different. Suddenly I was foreign.
Oh, people were nice about it. I found out, by accident, that if I dressed in traditional Indian clothes people were actually nicer to me then if I dressed in my normal blue jeans and t-shirt. They would go out of their way to be helpful. But they still saw me as “different”.
When I went to lunch with friends, people stared at us. I had co-workers from all over. My regular lunch group included a blond woman, a black man, a Chinese guy and a couple of white men. The waitresses were unfailingly polite…
