Took the subway down to meet my cousin, the first time I’ve taken the subway this year, and was pleasantly surprised to find that my Presto card worked without a hitch. After all this time, I thought they might suspend it or require me to verify that I still exist. Part of my motivation for taking the subway (apart from saving time) was to get some subway photos. Street photography on the subway is its own peculiar subgenre and I miss it. I started at Sherbourne Station and switched at Bloor/Yonge.
At Bloor/Yonge, I witnessed an anti-Asian incident. My wife had told me about a colleague who is ethnically Vietnamese and customarily rides the subway with her husband (also ethnically Vietnamese) and their children. She has given this up because racist encounters have become a regular part of the experience; it has simply become too unpleasant. So I was primed for something, but it didn’t play out in quite the way I would have expected. I was standing on the southbound platform on the Yonge line. On the northbound platform, there were people of Asian descent waiting for the train, each wearing a blue mask, each standing well apart from the others. It was obvious from their placement along the platform that each was travelling alone. A Black woman started at one end and walked down the platform, yelling No, No, No, as she passed each of them, then making derogatory comments about China and saying they needed to get the fuck back to where they came from. Each of the victims stood stock still and stared straight ahead, doing their utmost to ignore the woman. The woman continued to the far end of the platform, muttering to herself and giving the impression that she suffers from a mental health issue.
The usual platitudes we see on social media weren’t particularly helpful in this situation. For example, a personal reflection on white privilege wasn’t really going to take me or anyone else too far since the only white guy in the room was standing on the opposite platform. This was a racist encounter, but the perpetrator was a Black woman. While I don’t want to dismiss the possibility that whiteness has a bearing on this encounter (I think, for example, of the concept of lateral oppression) still, it’s not obvious and would almost require an omniscient eye to parse.
Then there’s the idea that silence is assent. Again, it’s a high-minded platitude but, honestly, there’s no such thing as an absolute rule. Context matters. I can’t imagine speaking out in this situation without coming off sounding like a self-righteous asshole. I have no idea what’s going on in this woman’s life. After nearly a year and a half trying to find her way through a global pandemic, her own points of vulnerability may have made life intolerable. Is she in an abusive relationship? Has she been the victim of racism herself? Has she lost people dear to her? My silence isn’t assent; my silence is an acknowledgement that I don’t really know what’s going on here. There is a context beyond my grasp, yet the whitest thing I could do is to presume that context doesn’t matter, that platitudes shared through Facebook memes have universal application.
Note about the photos accompanying this post: none of them has anything to do with the incident described above.