In terms of noteworthiness, this is more appropriate for Twitter than for Blogger, but there's no way I can get it down to 140 characters.
I get into the elevator in my apartment building. I'm carrying three shopping bags, my purse, a parcel, and two newspapers, so the man in the elevator (maybe 50ish?) asks me which floor. I tell him my floor, he presses the button, and then he starts talking.
He has this sort of patter/banter thing going on. I suspect he makes his living in sales. So he sees my newspapers and says "News! What's in the news? Riots and arrests! Terrible stuff! Oh well, it's not like we were in it!" Then we reached his floor and he got off.
He just automatically assumed I wasn't in it! What a weird assumption!
It's true that I wasn't actually in it, but I should have been. Rightfully, if I were doing my proper duty as a citizen, I should have been in the labour march. But I was afraid of getting arrested because my driver's licence is expired. So why did he just automatically think I wasn't in it? I freely concede that I may in fact look as chickenshit as I actually am, but it seems an odd thing to explicitly assume to someone's face on 10 seconds' acquaintance.
In retrospect, I should have burst into tears and come up with a story about having been an innocent passer-by caught in the police crush at Queen and Spadina. Although that's disrespectful to the people who actually were.
Another weird assumption came a while back. I was in line at the grocery story, facing (but not reading) a turny magazine rack. A worker clearing out the carts - a lady maybe in her 40s who I often see behind the cash register - turns the magazine rack around so a men's fitness magazine with a picture of a muscley shirtless male is facing me. "Now isn't that nicer to look at?" she says.
Why would she assume I like men?
As it happens, I do like men (although I'm not so very into the overly muscley variety in the picture in question), but why would you walk up to someone and explicitly assume their sexual orientation in a situation where there's absolutely no reason to do so?
4 comments:
Privilege. When your position is the "norm", you get the privilege of assuming everyone else who you deem "normal" is in the same position as you. So, the man who wasn't pro-protester assumed that you wouldn't be either. The woman who talked about liking men assumed that you were heterosexual, because she is and that is a privileged position in our society.
Heterosexuality I can see that theory working with, but whether or not you protest is a function of politics + personal preferences + your schedule for that day.
IMO, this is the very common phenomenon of people assuming that their experience is universal.
It is a form of privilege, as Whitney says. But I have experienced it within communities not thought to be privileged.
I think that the privileged position is agreeing with the status quo, or at least, not wanting it to change in an extreme way. Or maybe I'm just biased because I think that in the US, where I live, conservatives, who are much less likely to not just protest, but to agree with protesters who disagree with the status quo (Tea Partiers nonwithstanding), are the ones who have more privilege. They seem to be able to express much more radical views than liberals.
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