The stigma of our kind surfaces in mixed-race settings, or at least it has in many of my work settings, in which people are essentially coerced to work together. This is not a phenomenon I have noticed in combat arts settings, but often—though now to a lesser degree—in the workplace, which is something of a subset or microcosm of our greater society. Currently race-based shame occurs most in my life on mass transit more often than in other settings, as the example below demonstrates.

This past autumn, before the cold came down, before everyone with sense would begin driving with their windows up, I was waiting at a bus stop, across the street from another stop that was packed with people offloading from a commuter bus. I was not alone at my lesser stop, as an elderly black woman stood near to me. We had nodded to one another courteously.

As she stood reading her bible and I stood reading mine—Moby Dick—a loud non-too-rhythmic thumping invaded our space, louder and louder it came like the iron shod hooves of an invading heathen army. The bard of this incivility invasion chanted the news of the heathen world, of ‘niggers, bitches, hos, shit, muvafuca’s, dicks and booty,’ and we did wince, like parishioners outside of a soon to be defiled sanctuary.

We closed our books as one and looked to each other, her with an apologetic sad-lipped frown of social guilt. Indeed, us humans seem to be particularly haunted by the worst representatives of our own certain subtypes, not relishing the thought of our strand of the collective human genome being twisted out of all recognition and writhing through society like an alien spermatozoa worrying Sigourney Weaver through the bowels of a space hulk.

To our horror, as we turned away, the light turned red, and the screaming drumbeat of obscenity railed at the world we were cursed to occupy. Not even looking at the offender, embarrassed as she was, she cast sad eyes at me in a kind of abject apology. Curious as to exactly what this debased ho-banger of a cretin looked like, I looked to the traffic stop to see a small red pickup truck—once exclusively the vehicle of country music inspired rednecks—to see a tall thin blonde white boy with a yo hat cocked sideways as he rapped out to his anthem. The groan that escaped from my throat and the rolling of my eyes perplexed and compelled her to turn and gaze upon the fall of my race into the moral degeneracy that she had hitherto had thought was exclusive to her own people.

Her look was one of amazement. She remained kind to the end, declined to laugh, although I did that for her as I paced in circles and look to the God-abandoned sky in a state of shame.