Monday's Opening Thought: May 31, 2021

This week’s opening thought: The discussions around “getting back to normal” have been ramping up lately. In the workplace, on the news, from the lips of the President of the United States. So many people just want to “go back to normal,” to roam free and do whatever they want with no restrictions. What some folx still refuse to acknowledge is that what they want is a particular narcissistic kind of “normalcy.” They refuse to see other people’s “normal.” “Normal” for way too many people - Black people, Brown people, Indigenous communities, AAPI communities, people with disabilities, queer communities, trans folx - is dangerous on multiple fronts. It’s a world of gaslighting and liabilities that many of us are not looking forward to diving back into.

You want “normal?” Well, let me share with you a piece of my “normal” that I wasn’t looking forward to engaging with again as we collectively are forced to segue back into “normalcy”: my “normal” experience shopping for groceries.

As I shopped this past weekend for groceries for the week it was the first time in 15 months where I found myself facing all of my pre-pandemic woes around shopping:

-White people practically pushing past me and damn near through me to get to something on a shelf when I’m not obstructing their ability to grab items in any way.

-White women invading my personal space, often going under my arms while I’m grabbing items from high shelves or trapping themselves between me and a shelf.

-White people taking up entire aisles with their carts, oblivious to my existence or need to get down an aisle.

-White people acting like me saying “excuse me” to move past them obstructing movement is egregious behavior and looking at me as such.

-Security guards following me around sections of the store.

-Self-checkout cashiers watching me like a hawk, counting my scans to see if I’m ringing up all 10 yogurts in my cart and wanting to look in my cart.

I haven’t had to deal with most of these things, especially not all in one trip, for over a year. But we’re “getting back to normal” so here we are, back to oscillating between feeling like a criminal, invisible, and a person people view as an inconvenience on a grocery run. “Normal” represents oppression for me, and not just in the supermarket. And I know I’m not alone. I’m not the only one viewing “normal” as a return to being disregarded, ignored, harmed, killed on a broader scale.

I’ll take a few more months of “not normal” please and thank you.