Translation for 140 languages by ALS
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowline.
Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sail.
Explore. Dream. Discover
.
---Mark Twain

3/29/10

Racism in Mega grocery (Pto Vallarta)

-
Yesterday, after training, I went shopping in Mega supermarket. It's a big chain down here. Clad in gym clothes with an empty Gatorade bottle I strolled from one end of the gigantic store to the other with several ambles through various aisles...but I just couldn't shake them. When I was near the produce section there appeared a security guard; when I was picking out a steak there appeared a security guard; when I went to the dairy section to get butter there, coincidentally, appeared another guard. In fact, it made for a big ass coincidence in this vast, brightly lit mega store. The name is appropriate.

But knowing my money spends just as well as Mexicans' and white people's I complained to one of the managers. In Spanish I said more or less the following:

Even though I am a black man I am not a criminal. Your security guards do not need to follow me all around the store. I see the same two or three guards here and there and here! I'm not blind; and I'm not here to steal. I don't need bodyguards...or shadows...or spies. I don't need them to follow me...it's more than offensive--"Si por supuesto, senor!"--tell them to stop. 


My reason for mentioning I went there straight from training was to show that I wasn't even wearing pockets! The motherfuckers were just racist. I probably, no, I do have more money in my sock drawer than these morons pull in a month yet "I" am "prone" to steal. Because that's what black men do: we steal. Yes, they're ignorant but, after all, isn't that what is racism.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

Blog Archive