A memory blindsided me this morning.
Like others before it, and others that will come, it just came out of nowhere to remind me who I am, where I came from, and how it matters. Always. So walk with me down this lane no longer forgotten, and remember this: it's always more fucked up than you think it is. My experience is nothing compared to what African Americans go by every single day in America. I can not imagine it. I would never need to have "the talk" with my children, if I had them. I do not have to worry where my hands are, when I am pulled over by a cop, which I haven't been for years. I do not have a fucking clue what all that shit is like... But I feel it. I see it.
And I know its name.
France. 1995. Summer.
The place is Mulhouse, eleven miles from Germany, fifteen miles from Switzerland. I was there with a colleague, on a field trip, and we decided to go check out an art exhibition in Basel. We got in the rental car and off we went. As we reached the French-Swiss border, we noticed an unusual police activity, but we were aware this might happen. After all it was France, 1995. The GIA was all over the place, seeking to expand the raging civil war in Algeria to the former colonists, there were bombings in Paris, everyone was on edge. The French officer at the border line checked our documents, and looked us over.
I am a 6 foot, 170 pound very easily tanned male, at the time 32 years old. My colleague had even darker skin than mine, not tanned as I was, but naturally dark, still we were both white males, only Mediterranean white males. He was a little shorter than me, and his facial features placed him easily in North Africa, if you were looking for it. After one look at him, looking at my tanned self would make me his sibling, almost, despite my very Roman nose. The French officer gave us the papers back and motioned us forward with his arm, and in the same movement he signaled his Swiss mirror. As we entered Switzerland, the guards just hailed us and we were on our way.
We got to the exhibit, had lunch after a very weird experience at a Swiss bank to exchange currency (at the time there were still no Euros), where I traded a bunch of Portuguese bills for a couple of Swiss ones and a few coins, while the cashier was looking at me like "Enjoy your cup of coffee." We had lunch, looked around a bit and turned around, headed back to France, using the same border crossing as before. The Swiss officers let us exit just fine, but... There was a welcoming committee on the French side. No less than eight GIGN officers (the French SWAT) and three or four border police officers. They signaled us to park at a reserved area and politely ordered us out of the car. A crew of other agents, looking like mechanics, started to immediately tear the rental car apart, while we were escorted separately into a nearby building.
The door closed behind me, and a single civilian dressed agent was waiting inside, probably BAC (anti-crime unit). He asked me to empty my pockets on a table, then placed me against the wall and frisked me thoroughly, then proceeded to inspect my belongings. He went through my wallet, leafed through my pocket Moleskine, got all my cigarettes out of the pack and inspected them, one by one, and then disassembled the Zippo I was carrying to the bare bone. I was just jaw dropped watching all this, trying to keep my cool, as I knew exactly what was happening. They suspected we were Arab terrorists. He finished the inspection and asked me what we did in Switzerland. I answered as best I could, but when I finished talking, he looked at me and said "You did go somewhere else, didn't you?" Oh, shit.
Did he know I went in a bank in Basle, or was he just throwing a spit ball at me. I was NOT going to play that game, fuck that! "Yes, I went into a bank in Basle, we had no Swiss francs and we wanted to have lunch." He nodded, "Wait here, please." And he left the room. After 30 minutes or so he came back, apologized and told me I was free to go. I met my colleague outside the building and we both went back to the car. It was as if it had just left the rental station, perfectly neat, like no one ever touched it. There were no GIGN officers in sight, just a normal Summer day at the border. I looked at my colleague, he looked at me. "Let's get the fuck out of here." And we said nothing else about it ever again.
As I was driving us back to Mulhouse, I realized the only thing that kept us from being thrown in a dark hole for God knows how long, was the fact that, despite our appearance, we were just two very European, very white dudes. It started to boil my blood. What if one of us was Arab? What if we had flipped out?
What if they didn't believe us? Were the Swiss really tagging us in Basle? What the fuck! And then it hit me, like a ton of bricks. That was what white privilege was about. And it made me sick to my stomach, not that we had been treated fairly, despite the mistaken identity, but that so many others in our place would have gone through hell.
It took me 32 years in Europe to realize I was a privileged white man, but when I arrived in this country and was going through the green card, legal residency and naturalization process, it took me 5 minutes.
"How long do you think the whole thing will take?" I asked the attorney handling my case (I was lucky we could afford one). And his answer was: "You are a white, European, well educated man. You'll have no trouble at all."
I arrived in the USA to stay on September 18, 2008. My Green Card was issued on April First, 2009. And it was no joke.
