Using terms like "harassing" and "suspicious" can be an excuse for discrimination and prejudice

 

Once a week I go the same underground kiosk to reload my “smart card” for use on the public transit system here. This is located right above the Metro tunnel rail line, and used to be available to buses to bypass surface travel in downtown Seattle. The tunnel was originally built to accommodate light rail trains, mainly to provide convenient transportation to and from the airport, which has been considerably curtailed during the pandemic. Bus service in the tunnel ended when the city decided to approve a needless extension of the Convention Center at the far end of the tunnel. Today, nearly three years on, it is only 30 percent completed and the project is already nearly broke. It always had the potential of being a white elephant even before the pandemic. Bus service is back on the surface streets, for the inconvenience of all.

But that isn’t what I want to talk about here. The tunnel is virtually empty these days, particularly since downtown office buildings have few tenants working inside, while restaurants and most retail stores have even less consumer traffic. It is not that there is no one making any money; with an unemployment rate of 7.2, while “high” is still low enough to suggest that there are people working “remotely,” which explains why one tenant can afford to spend money on 100 new laptop computers even when there doesn’t seem to be anyone around to use them.

So here I am standing by this kiosk to reload my smart card with a payment by debit card. Here I am all alone, maybe a half-dozen people down below waiting for the next trains, and expecting to hear that message over the tunnel’s public address system I always hear within minutes of when I arrive here, with those surveillance cameras everywhere being monitored by people who are just your average off-the-street Joes who wear a “tougher” looking uniforms than their colleagues who sit in empty warehouses or parking lots—and are just as paranoid. Here they come, one right after the other: King County Metro does not condone harassment, and that riders are to report any “suspicious” behavior. It never fails. To me, this is not only “harassment” of me, but it is also constitutes “discrimination” since it makes assumptions based on the way I “look.”  

The Washington state law in regard to “unlawful” behavior on public transport only uses the term “harass” in this sentence: Unreasonably disturbs others by engaging in loud, raucous, unruly, harmful, or harassing behavior. Believe me, Metro or its drivers do not take this kind of “harassment” with any seriousness even when it does happen, which usually involves having phones on speakerphone instead of the required headphones, loud, vulgar talk, or commonly these days, refusing to wear a face mask; it is in the case of the latter that you often encounter belligerent or physically threatening behavior; “ironically, it is this type who feel they are being “harassed.”

But “harassment” is more often meant to imply a “gendered” meaning in this day and age. Just because certain people have “concerns” about harassment in certain environments doesn’t mean it is actually happening; in fact when “harassment” is reported, it is more likely the complainer is engaging in retaliation over complaints about their own behavior, usually of the “rude” or failure to abide by rules variety. Metro’s “report it to stop it” sexual misconduct campaign is clearly gender politics, because it just isn’t the “epidemic” that gender politicians want you to think it is. I’ve been riding Metro buses five days a week for at least 25 years and I just can’t think of even one incident that qualifies. There might be on occasion some “sexualized” or other vulgar talk in the back of the bus, but if so the women who sit back there are just as guilty of it. It really is just more a “political” than reality-based “problem.” Those who have been victims of it may disagree, but in context it is just another bludgeon to beat on males with.

I have read more than my share of company anti-harassment policies, and while “discrimination” is worth just a line or two, three-quarters of their content deals with “sexual harassment,” with the usual dozen bullet points that makes sure every tiny detail is covered that a female could possibly imagine taking offense to and interpreting as having a “gendered” intent. But for those who feel the sting of prejudicial or discriminatory behavior every day they walk out the door and keeps piling up, all this just seems like self-serving “whataboutism.” “Discrimination” or even prejudice is typically not “defined”; you are just supposed to know what the words “mean,” and there is wide latitude to “define” them by what they “don’t” mean. This is where the term "rational discrimination" comes in.

I don’t think a day has passed when I haven’t been observed by someone sitting inside somewhere and feel the need to “beep” their car. I cut down on “shopping” as much as possible because it just burns me up to be followed around. I’m supposed to have drugs sell, I might be a child rapist, or I’m “stealing” someone’s job. Whatever I’m doing, it can’t be anything a “normal” person does. If you work in one of those “easy to hire, easy to fire” jobs, all it takes is for someone who doesn’t like “your kind,” or against whom “red flags” of paranoia arise, are that person has to do is make up some reason why you make them “uncomfortable,” and you are out of a job, because your employer doesn’t want any “trouble.” What about your “rights”? What “rights”?

But discriminatory behavior should be obvious even when intent is not “clear.” I was on a bus when a driver who I believe was South Asian refused to allow an elderly black man on the bus because he supposedly wasn’t allowed to bring a “shopping cart” on the bus. Are we talking about one of those grocery carts? No, it was what “normal” people would call a shopping “basket” with a relatively small, foot-square footprint, and I made my opinion on the matter known. I have seen presumably homeless people haul all their personal belongings on a sledge inside the bus that was rather considerably more inconvenient to other riders than that. This is probably the only driver this man will ever encounter in his lifetime who would call his little shopping basket a “cart” and refuse him service. This was clearly unreasonable and deliberate discrimination, and I filed a complaint about it as such to Metro.

I’ve experienced many “small” incidents that was clearly motivated by the driver’s prejudice against certain “ethnic” groups—in fact I have frequently complained about I saw as a “culture” of discrimination against Hispanics at Metro, practiced by white, black and Asian drivers. In my personal experience, this could be relatively “small” but deliberately prejudicial behavior such as not stopping at the designated stop location and showing preferential treatment to other groups (white or black) who didn’t even bother to stand in line—or being expressed in ways that go beyond the pale of the merely “rude.” Most buses that begin their routes in downtown Seattle do so in tunnel-like overpass that runs through one section of the original Convention Center building. The bus I take makes its stops on Fourth Ave. before it turns on Pike Street where it travels east until it makes it final stop on the route on the street side of the Center just before it makes the turn into the tunnel for a rest stop.

But this driver (a black male) had a different idea of his job. I had observed him belittling a few passengers out of personal enjoyment rather than for committing actual infractions, but as yet he hadn’t targeted me. As the bus was making the turn on Pike he suddenly demanded to know why I was still on the bus. I told him I always get off at the last stop at the Convention Center. He told me he didn’t go up that way. Confused, I told him that this bus always “goes up that way,” and he told me that he wasn’t “all” drivers, and he had his own “rules.” I informed him that he was mistaken, but he was intent on insisting on his “power” he had as the driver, and before he went another block he told me get off the bus; the driver then made a turn a Sixth Avenue (three blocks away from the Center tunnel) which I had never seen any bus do before, but apparently to “prove” to me that he wasn’t going “that way.”

I had to walk another six blocks up to take care of some personal business, and on my way back I discovered that this very same bus (I had taken down the bus ID number to report the incident) was parked in the overpass tunnel—meaning that the driver had made a turn back on Fourth to go back up Pike again to complete his assigned route; all of this just so that he could get away with bulling and discriminating against a rider just because he “could.” I waved at the driver to let him I saw what he did. While I generally suspect that Metro doesn’t take any complaints against driver behavior seriously, I think in this case the driver was “transferred” to another route, because I haven’t seen him since.