My New Job

So, my new job creates some blog problems. I’m working for the state government. My department is one of the many parties that becomes involves when a child has been removed from their home due to allegations of child abuse or neglect. I’m working mostly in a support personnel function. I’m not directly involved in the work involved in removing the children, placing the children, creating case plans, finding permanency, etc. That’s stuff for social workers, lawyers, judges, and advocates, and I am not any of those. I am the person who makes sure the paperwork of the social workers, lawyers, judges, and advocates is done correctly and efficiently, and gets filed where it’s supposed to. That sounds pretty boring, but believe me, it’s what I really enjoy the best. I don’t think I have that thing that can make me deal with the front line; what I do have is a fascination with information, organization, and supply lines, and that makes me ideal for being the person who supplies and furnishes the front line, so that’s what I do.

This also means that I have access to a lot of very confidential information. Such as: on my work computer, there is a software program that allows me to look up the details of any court case that has ever happened in my state. Such as: when I attend court hearings to familiarize myself with the process, I have access to documents that only relevant parties to the case have access to, and this includes some potentially very private information about the private and public figures in the court room.

I have just gone back and edited a few of my old posts that made more specific references to the job I have and what I do. I’ll be returning to some of my old posts and redacting other information. At my previous job, I had grapevine access to potentially confidential information, otherwise known as gossip. Gossip is already in the public sphere, whether it should or shouldn’t be, so posts I already made relating some vague gossip or anecdote aren’t exactly wrong or problematic. But now that I have a job where I have access to things that should never be in the public sphere, I want to make sure I avoid even the mistaken impression that I have revealed something confidential and inaccessible to those without a security pass. This is partially to cover my own ass, but mostly out of respect for the responsibilities I have; as a representative of a government, I want to illustrate that I take privacy very seriously.

That’s a long explanation for this: you may see the word [redacted] popping up in some old blog posts as time goes on.

Now that that’s out of the way.

So! Like I said, my new job involves some work with the courts. Good lord, courts are an archaic fucking maze. It’s been equal parts fascinating and exhausting to learn about how courts actually work, down to the day-to-day crummy details. I’ve encountered more than a few surprises when realizing just how different the reality is from my general perception as a citizen mostly uninvolved with court processes. I’ll never again be able to hear somebody say, “Well, just take them to court!” as a vague answer to a vague dispute without jumping in like an asshole to tell them just how much of their life that’s going to suck out like an open hatch on a rocket ship.

I’ve been allowed to sit in on court proceedings, and read court documents, and I have unfettered access to court opinions and procedures. That last bit isn’t confidential, really, but unless you’ve had some serious dealings with the courts, it’s never stuff that really makes it to the public sphere, because god, who wants to know? I have learned a lot about the wide gulf between the legislature and the courts, and how one poorly-defined word in one poorly-defined bill turns into a new government department and millions of new tax dollars to pay for industrial-grade covers for everybody’s ass. I have also learned a lot about turning printed words on a bill into a daily process, and how the best way to understand how the law actually works is to ask the law clerk who runs the files. And I assure you the law rarely works in the way you imagine it, with structure and forethought and flow charts — usually it works because one person in one department said, “Okay, let’s do it this way,” and nobody else disagreed, because they didn’t want the extra work. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked, “But why do we do it this way?” and gotten as an answer, “Because Tracy used to work up in records, and that’s how she liked the forms to look, and I guess we just never changed it. I guess it doesn’t make sense, now that you point it out.”

I’ve been really interested in learning about the alternative life I could have had. When I ran away, I avoided courts and social workers completely. I’ve often wondered if that was the right decision. At the time, I didn’t know how to verbalize that what I experienced was abuse, and nobody seemed to know how to ask me the right questions, which could have barred me from getting the resources I really needed. I also had very short-term goals: stay away from my father, find somebody willing to feed me, find a bed to sleep in, don’t get pregnant, don’t do drugs, get to school tomorrow. I couldn’t even conceive of long-term goals like getting to college, learning job skills, getting therapy. That’s all stuff I think going to court could have gotten me, but only after jeopardizing — or taking out of my control — some of my short-term goals, and I was too terrified to do that. Which led to me holding on to anything and anybody that could achieve my short-term goals, which led to Flint and his family. So, you see why I wonder what could have been.

After I ran away, I developed an intense interest in medical rights and access. If I got pregnant, as a teenage runaway not in the system, could I get an abortion? It wasn’t an academi subject, and every time I read a newspaper article about a new restrictive law for minors, I got physically ill. I searched out information on DIY abortions, along with DIY dentistry and medical interventions, all things I wasn’t sure I could get if I needed them. I came to the conclusion that I wouldn’t be able to perform an abortion by myself, much like I couldn’t perform dentistry for myself, but if it came down to it, I was pretty sure I could figure out how to fuck up bad enough to go to the emergency room but not bad enough to kill myself. That would be enough to force the hand of doctors, insurance agents, and the law, and I could get the care I needed with hopefully few remaining injuries. I just want to emphasize: I had nights where I forced myself through methodical daydreams about how I would pull teeth out of my own head with pliers, because I felt I had to be mentally prepared to injure myself enough to acquire medical attention without my father’s permission. I had nights where I reviewed where I could most quickly acquire the tools to create a failed abortion, if I had to get up out of bed and run to do it right that minute; I knew, somewhere in me, that not having sex with Flint wasn’t an option if I also wanted food and a bed to sleep in once I turned 18, so I had to be prepared for the consequences of that. So I hope you can understand why I am 100% against restrictions on minors acquiring medical care without parental notification or consent; this is not an academic or moral or legal or ethical issue for me. This is a body memory of where the closest places to buy knitting needles are, and how late those places are open, and who I could potentially con five dollars out of, and what excuse I could give them.

So, I’ve taken some of my time at work to learn about this state’s current restrictions on abortion care for minors. How it plays out in the courts is probably very different from how it plays out in your mind, and I wanted to lay out some information I found pretty interesting.

In my state, minors are required to notify their parents. They are not required to have parental consent, only notification. The notification has to occur before the procedure. Both parents have to be notified. There is a judicial bypass procedure, where the minor can go to court and petition a judge to allow her to bypass the requirement for notification. Before working here, that’s about all I knew. Probably that’s all most of you know.

Let’s start with a case example to move you through every aspect of how this actually works. I’m going to note the places I was surprised.

Let’s say you have a girl, we’ll call her Laura. Laura is 15 years old. She lives with her mother in a small town. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her father is somewhere in California. Laura is pregnant.

Laura calls her local hospital to ask if they provide abortion services. They do not. They tell her she must notify her parents. Laura states she doesn’t want to tell her mother, and the hospital tells her she’ll need a judicial bypass as well as an abortion. Laura calls her local courthouse and asks about judicial bypasses. They tell her that yes, she’ll need one, but no, they’re not sure how to provide one — they’ve never done it, and the judges refuse.

Surprise #1: Just because a service is required by law doesn’t mean there is anybody available to provide it. The law says that Laura is allowed to seek a judicial bypass — the law does not say that a judge is required to be available to provide one. Laura has the right to ask, but not to receive.

Surprise #2: Lots of judges refuse to process judicial bypasses. It’s not a requirement; judges are not forced to take every case presented. Many judges have no idea how to process a judicial bypass — they’ve never been trained. And many judges refuse because it comes up during election time: Did you know Judge Adam A. Adamson allowed 20 young girls to get abortions last year? Do you want a baby-killer on the court?

Additionally, if a judge has a personal pro-life conviction, they may simply refuse to take bypass cases. Even though a bypass only allows a girl to not notify her parents if she seeks an abortion, and does not legally mandate abortions, and even though this shit is their fucking jobs, these judges find that to be splitting ethical hairs. This is not a slur against pro-lifers — there is a pro-life conservative judge on our court, but you would never know it from the way they run their cases, because they run their cases like a judge and not like somebody with a personal agenda — this is a slur against judges who refuse to do their jobs due to personal convictions. Don’t be a fucking judge, then.

Laura’s local court system tells her that the courts in the main city will process judicial bypasses. Additionally, the hospital told Laura that the closest clinic that provides abortion services is also located in the main city, Cityville. It’s about four hours away. She’ll need to acquire transportation and possibly overnight lodgings.

Laura bites the bullet. She tells her mother. Though there’s a lot more conversations the two of them need to have, Laura’s mother agrees that abortion is the best option, and agrees to drive her to Cityville. The next day, Laura and her mother head to a clinic in Cityville. Laura speaks to a counselor privately, who assures her that their talk is confidential. She and the counselor discuss her options, and how she feels about them. The counselor determintes that Laura is of sound mind, aware of her decisions and their impacts, and still desires the abortion.

The counselor then tells her she’ll need to visit the county courthouse for a judicial bypass. Laura and her mother are confused. Her mother is standing right there with her in the clinic. Ah, yes, but where is her father? Her father must also be notified. Laura’s mother paws through her purse and finds the last known number for Laura’s father. She makes phone calls for about an hour, finally managing to track him down. She hands the phone to a clinic worker. Laura’s father identifies himself, and the clinic worker notifies him that his daughter is acquiring an abortion. Laura’s father immediately states that he is not Laura’s father, then hangs up.

In the meantime, Laura’s mother is trying to establish that she is, in fact, Laura’s mother. She has a SS card, but it lists her married name, and she has been divorced for a few years. She didn’t think to bring Laura’s birth certificate. The clinic cannot effectively establish that Laura is legally her mother’s daughter. That, coupled with the fact that Laura’s father refuses to admit he is Laura’s father and has effectively been notified, means that Laura (whose parents both know she is acquiring an abortion) must now seek a judicial bypass for parental notification.

Surprise #3: The law does not clearly state how to establish maternity or paternity. However, the law does clearly state rather extensive punishments for the clinic or doctor who performs an abortion without having established maternity or paternity of the minor. Thus, clinics may enact excessive bureaucratic measures to ensure beyond any legal doubt that a minor’s parents are actually a minor’s legal parents. So, you can (and do) have the situation where a girl’s mother and father come to the clinic with her, but do not have IDs, social security cards, or birth certificates, so the clinic sends the girl to the courthouse, since she is legally unable to notify her parents, who are standing next to her.

Surprise #4: The law also refuses to clearly state what “notification” is. Is it a phone call? Is it a letter? Is it a signed letter? Is it a signed and notarized letter? Again, clinics have no guidelines to ensure their compliance with the law, but they do know that non-compliance with the law will have them shut down. So, a girl can come in to a clinic with both of her parents, but if one of her parents refuses to sign a piece of paper stating that they have been informed of her abortion, she must go to the courthouse.

The clinic calls the local courthouse to try and find out which department is now handling judicial bypasses.

Surprise #5: The law does not state who is in charge of the paperwork and process of a judicial bypass. This is the same as Surprise #1 — a service may be mandated, but unless a service provider is also mandated, you do not have a service. That is, Laura has the right to seek a judicial bypass, but she does not have the right to a law clerk who will fill out and process her paperwork, which effectively means Laura may not have access to her rights.

Since the law does not state which department should process this procedure, in my state, a department has volunteered. There is no really definitive reason why this department should be processing judicial bypasses — they are not the department in charge of young ladies or something — they are just the one department that stated they would do it, so every other department that would have been more appropriate just washed their hands of it. This department tries to keep their work on the DL, since there’s always the concern that it’ll come out during budget hearings, and there will be obsessive picketing leading to a shutdown of their department, a la “Do you want your tax money going to baby-killers?” etc. Again, since no department is legally required to perform this procedure, and since it’s a politically volatile topic, no department wants to perform this procedure. Which means Laura has the right to a bypass, but potentially no ability to access it through the public system that refuses to engage in what is a completely legal process.

The clinic locates the appropriate department, which tells them bypasses are only being processed on Mondays and Wednesdays, because the judges hate doing them on Tuesdays. Laura and her mother will have to stay the night.

On Wednesday, Laura and her mother head down to the county courthouse. They locate the proper department and sign a few forms. An employee interviews Laura separately about her decision — if she is of sound mind to request an abortion, and why she is requesting a judicial bypass. The interviewer is surprised that Laura was sent to the county courthouse, since her mother had an ID, and her father answered the phone. The interviewer worries that the judge won’t approve the bypass.

Surprise #6: Since the law does not clearly state what “notification” is or how to establish legal parents, states with a judicial bypass laws create clinics that send minors to court at the first sign of any minor hitch. Again, clinics have no guidelines for compliance, but are subject to consequences if non-compliant. This means that, to legally cover themselves, clinics will often send minors who don’t need judicial bypasses to court. Not only is this a major funding drain on taxpayers — court is fucking expensive — it also runs the risk that the judge will refuse to hear the case or deny the bypass.

If the judge feels that notification and paternity has been reasonably established, they will not deliver a spurious judgment. If the judge refused to hear the case, the girl must now find a clinic willing to perform the abortion with the circumstances she has, or must return to court and re-argue her case in front of the same judge or a new judge. If the judge denied the bypass, the girl must find a clinic that will consider her circumstances as legal enough. If she cannot, she cannot acquire an abortion.

Surprise #7: She can appeal the judge’s decision, though, right? Yes, technically. She has the right to a public defender. But, again, the right to a service does not guarantee access to a service. In my state, public defenders refuse to take these cases anymore. Initially, they stopped taking them because they were never really required; most judges give the girls the bypass, unless they feel there’s coercion going on. But once they had stopped taking them, they ran out of defenders who were trained to take bypass cases. Additionally, taking these cases looks bad for them. You’d think a public defender — who may also, in their lifetime, defend people who have committed abhorrent crimes — would not be so concerned with public perception, but when was the last time a building that provided rehabilitative services to sex offenders bombed, or had their therapists shot in church?

So, a girl has the right to a public defender, but if there are no public defenders available, she has no access to her rights.

The interviewer asks Laura why she did not initially want to tell her mother, and Laura tells her the same thing she told the clinic worker: she thinks the baby might be her uncle’s, and he has been sexually abusing her for years. The interviewer, stunned, tells Laura that he is a mandated reporter and is legally required to report this to CPS. Laura is also stunned; the clinic worker had told her the interview was confidential. The interviewer now understands why the clinic sent Laura to them.

Surprise #8: Clinics deal with a lot of politically volatile issues. They conserve their efforts, and one can’t blame them. In my state, if a clinic suspects anything is awry with a minor, they will send them to court and let the court personnel suss it out. This also sometimes means that court personnel must tell a minor — who has previously been told everything she says is confidential — that they will, in fact, have to report her to CPS. Minors who know about this in advance do not attempt to seek abortions, or do not attempt to seek legal abortions, in order to protect their families. Clinics know this, and would rather that minors think “the state” called CPS, and not the clinic.

The interviewer puts in a call to Child Protective Services. Laura is removed from her mother’s care, and made a ward of the state. Laura’s parent is now officially the state. The clinic is able to notify Laura’s social worker that Laura is attempting to acquire an abortion. Laura is now able to acquire an abortion.

Okay, here’s Surprise #9: Up until the child abuse angle, I just gave you a very typical story. That’s not to say the child abuse angle doesn’t happen — it does — but it’s not as common for the child abuse angle to come out during a judicial bypass proceeding.

But let’s take a different angle on the story. Let’s say Laura never tells her mother. She manages to get a ride to Cityville, and manages to seek a bypass that day. However, she is far enough along that she requires a two-day procedure. The first day, she receives implants that will widen her cervix and cause spontaneous miscarriage. The second day, doctors will ensure the procedure took, and remove the implants. She can’t stay the night in Cityville. She doesn’t go in the next day. She spontaneously miscarries at home, and goes to the ER. She does not tell the ER doctor that she had an abortion. The ER doctor does not know to look for the implants, and leaves them in her uterus. I won’t go into the complications that can ensue from here. Rest assured, they are fucking gruesome. But this angle is less about the judicial bypass, and more about the lack of doctors and hospitals that will perform abortion services. That’s a whole nother blog post of anger.

So, welcome to the reality of legal restrictions on medical services to teenagers! This is a thing to keep in mind whenever you read about a new law taking shape or being passed. If the new law does not explicitly identify standards and procedures, and if it does not explicitly identify service providers, and if those service providers do not actually exist in your community, you now have a pretty good idea of the intentions of the lawmakers. Passing a law that is undefined and inaccessible is passing a law you don’t want to see enforced. When lawmakers passed this notification law, they didn’t want girls to actually be able to acquire bypasses. They didn’t even care if girls notified their parents. If they had cared about these things, the law would have actually addressed what “notification” means, what “parents” mean, and who provides bypasses. It did not address these things, because these were not the things lawmakers actually wanted to see happen. The lawmakers purposefully made a law where it is impossible to ensure compliance, but is entirely possible to be punished for non-compliance. They made it this way because they did not want to see compliance. They wanted to see a full stop.

Laws restricting access to medical services are laws restricting access to medical services. They are not laws creating family talks, better worlds, or moral teenagers. They are laws creating restrictions to medical services, which people do not seek unless they need them. Laws creating restrictions to medical services are laws creating restrictions to services people need and need desperately. You can argue that the lawmakers had some kind of noble intentions in mind — I will not buy it, but you can argue that. But you cannot argue that once the law has been in effect and created an inability to comply, and yet remained unchanged. If this was a law about notifying parents, it would have addressed how to notify parents. If this was a law about how to seek a bypass, it would have addressed how to seek a bypass. Since it didn’t address either of those things, this is obviously a law about something else. You only get one guess about what that something else is.

No, I Do Not Exist

Still adjusting. My new job is awesome, but very tiring, and very confidential. I’m still sussing out just how much to talk about, and whether or not talking about it will also necessitate me breaking my golden rule and deleting or redacting some of my earlier posts that relate to work. Not because they are suddenly bad posts, but because as a government employee working in a very sensitive area, I recognize that my opinions and what I choose to share might have more weight than it really ought to. So, it’s a dance, and I haven’t bothered learning it yet.

Because I am busy! My new job requires a new commute, and a new schedule, which has eaten a full hour of what used to be my free time. I didn’t think that one hour could make such a difference, but until I adjust, it seems like every minute of my time is spent feeding, bathing, and clothing myself for work the next day. Which sounds pretty whiny — everybody has to do that — but I am coming from the Job O’ Doom where I had the ability to make drearily long blog posts just about every day, when I wasn’t making CD mixes, that is. I have been learning in this last year about priorities, which was a bit of a theoretical word when I had all the free time in the world to meet all my priorities, but was just too full of ennui to do so. Now it is not theoretical — I only have so much time a day — and my priorities don’t include blogging right now, or at least not in the way I used to. Maybe I will learn brevity! And we all laugh.

I just wanted to pop in to say:

Last night I watched the movie Opapatika, which is a Thai fantasy-action film that turned out to be much more entertaining, complex, and poignant than its poorly chosen English translation (STREET DEMONS) and its Netflix-written summary (STREET DEMONS FIGHT IN OTHERWORLD) may have otherwise indicated.

I was really struck by some of the gendered features of the film, even though it failed the Bechdel test enormously (which was no surprise). Afterwards, I tallied up in my head all the surprising features, and then spent a moment feeling really sad that these things add up to a pleasant and notable surprise, instead of run-of-the-mill treatment. The movie featured:

1. A standard women-in-refrigerators subplot for one main character, which was not notable at all. However, the actual “refrigerator” scene made it obvious that a rape had occurred, and yet somehow resisted all temptation to show the rape, show boobs, or show anything sexual at all, even if only to accentuate the horror-sex of the rape. A main character walked in on the tail end of his wife’s murder, which was obviously following a rape. The murder scene was incredibly brief (you got to see her punched three times by the intruder, though she had obviously been beaten before the scene began), and even though she was only wearing a bra, at no point did you see more skin than her tummy and her shoulders. The entire scene obviously revolved around her husband and his point of view, which meant we only saw what he saw — and since he was more invested in attempting to save her life, killing her murderer, and cradling her corpse in his arms, we weren’t treated to a montage of skin flashes, her face in pain, or (the thing I hate the most) some part of her body moving jerkily up and down as the rapist thrusts. I could live without ever seeing that one again. I can only think of two other movies that depicted a rape scene without those quasi-pornographic calling cards (Osama and Turtles Can Fly, TRIGGER WARNING TIMES A THOUSAND ANYWAY).
2. There was a Jekyll/Hyde type character who, at night, turned into a horrible beast man who did horrible things. The film depicted the aftermath of his horrible acts, and once or twice showed some second-long flashes of things he remembered doing the night before. The gore was kept remarkably low, and the only time a woman is shown in his memories, there was only a half-second shot of him pulling a rope to lynch her. You don’t even get to see her dress, her body, or anything — you only know it’s a woman by the scream. I am amazed that the director managed to resist the temptation to illustrate just how evil he is by showing him raping a woman, or showing a woman who has obviously been raped. I can pretty well assume that in his nightly retinue of evil, he doesn’t cross rape off the list as too evil — but I didn’t need to see it to understand that point, and they didn’t try to show it to me.
3. There was a main female character who caused a significant amount of confusion and problems (some romantic) for almost all of the male characters. One even hated her. Nobody called her a bitch, or any other insult based in femaleness. This reminded me of the remake of Dawn of the Dead. At the very end, one of the asshole guy characters stays behind in their getaway vehicle to draw off the hordes. He’s wounded, and all he has is a gun. The zombies keep rushing in, and he keeps shooting them. At one point, the camera is behind his head (we can’t see his face) and a female zombie rushes on the bus. He shouts, “Bitch!” in a tone so jarring and loud that it’s obvious it was recorded and patched in after-the-fact, when some exec or focus group decided that maybe we didn’t notice that he was specifically killing a woman, and maybe we should. So you can see, when the standard is to add extra gendered slurs wherever they can fit, that a movie where a bunch of guys confront a woman angrily and nobody calls her a name is just some kind of amazing.

I don’t know when the last time I saw a movie that didn’t either 1) make sure we notice a female character is female by calling her a female insult, 2) depict a rape in unnecessary visual detail, and/or 3) establish a male character’s motivations/feelings/beliefs by showing him doing something unspeakably cruel to a woman who is awfully sexy for no particular reason. It is not like evil Jekyll/Hyde characters can’t rape men, for god’s sake, but we don’t use that to show their evilness, because then they would be evil and gay and that’s somehow worse than seeing them eat eyeballs?

Christ, I have to go to bed. This new schedule is death.

Not a Real Post At All

Even though I’m pretty much just waiting out the clock at my soon-to-be old job, I still have an impending sense of panic about getting everything done, borne partially out of Adult Child anxiety and partially out of a memory of how much it sucked unwashed balls when I started here and my boss could not tell me how anything worked. At home, I’m trying to focus on relaxing (for reals), fiction writing, and reading my Adult Child big red book (by the way, I’m poking my toes in the Adult Children of Alcoholic/Dysfunctional Families pool, but not enough yet to post about it).

SO! Not a real post at all. In fact, a ridiculous post.

Somewhere on my RSS feed, a fluff post popped up (cannot now remember from where, or who the author was) about the whole sexy vampire phenomena. The author was bemoaning the fact that all vampires seem to be sexy young teenagers who are interested in sexy young teenage things. Though the author was in hir twenties, zhe was already feeling like an old fogey, all “DON’T YOU KIDS KNOW HOW COOL OPTIMUS PRIME USED TO BE.” Zhe thought any vampire would just be out-of-touch, spaced out, and grumpy, even if they were impossibly beautiful at the same time. Just all sparkly and pretty and “NO I AM NOT LEARNING WINDOWS 7, YOU’LL ALL BE DEAD IN FORTY YEARS ANYWAY.”

I was thinking about what that would look like, when it suddenly hit me:

This is what a vampire would look like. Don’t believe me? Check out his IMDB quotes.

If you had to survive through centuries, you would be Creed Bratton, too.

Friends and Colleagues

A form letter I like to use for writing appropriate goodbye letters to hated workplaces:

Friends and colleagues!

On my last day here at (workplace), I want to express how (cheap lie) I am to have worked with all of you. My time here has been a (poor travel metaphor), and my experiences have really (sappy homile concerning spiritual growth). I have (excessive exaggeration) every moment I’ve spent here — from the day I (saccharine anecdote) to the times we (bland provincial reference).

I just want you all to know how much it’s meant to me to be here — I feel I’ve truly (verbed) my (buzzword) — and no matter where I go I will always “(inappropriate and ill-thought literary reference),” and carry with me the memory of (outdated inside joke). Really, I mean it — to me, (workplace) will always be (awkward colloquialism). I wish each and every one of you (highly generalized expressions of good will, as I am already forgetting your names). And let’s not forget (monkey reference)! Ha ha!

Love,
Harriet

Curious

The bear and I were watching a show that was discussing racial stereotypes briefly. The “Asians can’t drive” stereotype came up, and I had to profess ignorance. That was one I had never heard. The bear told me he’d heard that one plenty of times before, and since it was a stereotype that made it onto national television, I had to assume plenty of other people were aware of that one.

After thinking about it some, I went to google up some statistics, and got a better picture of what I think was going on. I grew up in an area with a surprisingly large immigrant population (albeit unsurprisingly segregated). There is a distinctly large Asian population here, but it’s comprised overwhelmingly of a very few ethnicities, generally not Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. I only bring that up because I know that in my mind, when I think “Asian” and don’t investigate the thought further, I generally think of some undifferentiated compendium of “ChineseJapaneseKorean.” I don’t think of Laotion or Hmong. If you were to ask me, “Are Hmongs Asian?” I’d say yes, but if you were to ask me, “What is Asian?” I’d probably say Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and might not remember the rest of the Asian world unless prompted. Admittedly, maybe that is just my brain. But it made me wonder if the “Asian people can’t drive” stereotype didn’t really take root here because the most identifiably Asian population in my hometown isn’t necessarily considered “Asian” at first glance.

There is also a very large Somali population here. In my hometown, it’s the Somalis who can’t drive. It’s also the Somalis who are “taking all the jobs” and “can’t take care of their kids” and “run down the neighborhoods” and “talk way too loud.” The first, second, and third of those assumptions never really took root in me for some reason, possibly because I grew up in a neighborhood with a very diverse mix of immigrants, and got to actually see immigrants working extremely hard (usually in jobs white people would never take), caring lovingly for their children, and tending their homes and lawns way better than my father ever did. In fact, the city was called on my house several times, and the police a few times, due to our general slovenliness and perceived threat of violence to the neighbors, so I’m pretty sure we were the ones bringing the neighborhood down, and not the Laotion guys who lived down the street.

The talk too loud stereotype and the bad driving stereotype did take root, though. I know they did, because whenever somebody is talking very loudly near me, or is speeding recklessly, in the split-second before I turn my head to look at them, this chime goes off in my head that says, “I bet they’re going to be black.” Anybody in my town with dark skin shares the same stereotypical space in my brain — if they’re speeding and talking loud, they’ve got to be African or African-American.

I didn’t used to notice this when I was a kid. In fact, I didn’t notice it until I went to a different town for college. That town had a very different demographic make-up, with a very small immigrant population, and an absolutely dismal proportion of African-Americans, who were nonetheless even more segregated. This escaped my notice entirely for about a year of college, until one day I was on the bus and I saw a Nigerian man. And I stared. I stared before I caught myself staring, and, horrified, forced myself to stare at my shoes the rest of the ride, asking myself what the fuck was wrong with me. It finally occurred to me — you haven’t seen somebody who isn’t white for almost an entire year. I stopped wondering what was wrong with me, and started wondering what was wrong with this town, and this college. And then I went back to wondering what was wrong with me, that I had never noticed this in all the college materials.

In that town, African-Americans couldn’t drive, and African-Americans spoke too loud. There wasn’t really any other ethnicity available to share that stereotypical space.

Now that I’m back in my hometown, I take note of it every time my brain clicks and whirs and spits out, “That shitty driver is going to be black.” I take note of the fact that, if they are black, my brain wants to file that away in a box called “Told you so, blacks are shitty drivers,” whereas if they turn out to be white or any other ethnicity, my brain wants to file that away in a box called, “What a shitty driver, moving along.” I really force myself to notice that I’m doing this, and sometimes I force myself to say it out loud — “I assumed that woman was going to be Somali because she was loud, and then when she was Somali, I felt smug.” (I do not say this out loud in front of the person I am pigeon-holing — I say it out loud just for myself, or sometimes in front of my bear.)

It feels really icky to say that shit out loud, to hear what I’m saying. I do it that way because my ex-friend Polar once went off on a racist rant, and hearing that shit said out loud made me realize how few places you have to hide racism anymore, once you’ve taken it outside your head and put it in public. Once I say, out loud, “I felt smug because a black person was loud, the way I expect them to be,” there is no way for me to chock that up to anything else. With Polar, she went on a rant with me about a solicitor who came to her house on an obvious pyramid scheme about flipping properties. Solicitors suck, and pyramid schemes suck, so I understood her fuming about how shitty it was and how angry it made her, thinking about how that solicitor was probably just going to go next door and scam some old person. I got that. But she just wouldn’t stop talking about it, and seemed to get angrier and angrier the more she talked. I don’t know what clicked it for me, something in the tone of her voice, but I finally asked, “What race was the guy?” And thus opened up a new wing of the conversation, called “Fucking Somalis.” I wasn’t yet at the point in my life where I was willing to shut somebody down cold, and end a friendship with them over a major breach in goddamn ethics. So I tried having a “rational” conversation with her about how maybe, just throwing this out there, maybe that situation wasn’t any worse just because he was Somali. Maybe it sucks to have a solicitor try to scam you, no matter what race they are. And maybe we should stop talking about how he’s a fucking Somali who you can’t even understand the way he talks hurfle burfle racist puke, and just move on to talking about something else, okay?

I finally accidentally shut down the conversation when Polar, getting increasingly backed into a corner, tried this one: “It’s not even what he was doing that bothered me! It’s just that he came to this country and took somebody else’s job!” Without thinking about it, I burst into laughter. “Oh, the coveted ’scam old people all day’ job? That’s a tight fucking market, how dare he take that job away from some sad white dude who has to work in an office with benefits now that the pyramid scheme is all sewn up.” I was being really generous at the time, all “oh, she’s just venting, I should help educate her” instead of “racism makes white people believe completely insane things and I am not going to entertain this conversation as if it is sane or reasonable.”

I’m getting really off track here. What I meant to say about all of this: there are a collection of racist stereotypes that I know intimately, but where I have grown up, they’ve been applied to completely different groups of people. If I hadn’t heard that “Asians can’t drive” thing on TV, I never would have even considered the fact that perhaps in other parts of the country, Somalis aren’t the bad drivers. Perhaps in other parts of the country, all the same stereotypes just get applied to the local demographic whipping boy. And I got curious about that. I started to wonder what other hometowns look like, how this process works everywhere — take a stereotype and stick it to whoever your town values the least. If anybody is comfortable sharing, I’d like to know who is the loud bad driver in your town. What ethnicity fills the slot of (any given stereotype)? I’m less interested in the ethnicities than I am in the stereotypes, since I suspect we’ll end up with a static list of stereotypes, and a rotating cast of characters to fill them. I’m interested in this because it’s like a Mad Libs of goddamn horrible oppression: pick some characteristic that white people, as a society, have decided is an accurate indicator of a person’s unfitness for citizenship (which is its own insane judgment to start with), and then just fill in the blank with whoever your most visible local non-white ethnicity is. Like, if I put out there: The worst drivers in my town are (ethnicity), and ask a local white person to fill in the blank, I probably now have a fairly accurate judgment of the demographics of their town.