When I was six years old, a friend came up to me and showed me a game.  He said, “Slap me five!” and I did.  He then flipped his hand, said a word I won’t repeat followed by the word “side”, and so I flipped my hand too and slapped him five again.  At the time, I had no clue what any of that meant, but it was new, so I dutifully repeated it to my good friend Ayanna Cherry. She did not appreciate it the way I had, and I was sent to the principal’s office for the first time.

What I did not know back then was that I’m neurodivergent, and as such, I often don’t understand the social ramifications of my actions. Another great example of this is when my friend Eric was talking about his apartment burning down – I immediately said “Awesome!” and tried to slap him high five, since my house had burned down when I was eleven.  As with Ayanna, my sentiments were not appreciated; this time, I was left hanging, literally and metaphorically, wondering why we were not connecting over our shared experience.

That’s the problem, though, isn’t it?  Shared experiences.  How can anyone judge whether something is shared when what we see, how we act and how we react are all tied to an unknown history?  I grew up in a neighborhood of mobsters, watched them all pack up when Gotti got arrested, and within the year my neighborhood switched from Giuseppe Verdi to blasting Wu Tang and Despacito at all hours of the night.  Who can truly share my experience? 

And who would guess that experience when looking at me?

I’m a fifty-year old white-passing male-presenting individual who speaks fluent slang, loves Latin food, and has been arrested multiple times. I scan every room I enter for threats before I even register where the light switch is.  I ran errands for cigar-smoking made men and ran for my life from a set of crowbar-wielding maniacs in the same year that my voice changed.  Those influence every thought I have and every decision I make, and yet all that people see is a clean-shaven white male with a European name. Even when I take my headphones off, KRS-One blasting through the speakers, wearing my Hawaiian bone necklace my wifey scoured the internet to find for me, eating arroz con pollo with a side of maduros, they still see the same thing – just with new qualifications.  “He just likes foreign food.”  “I wonder why he likes that music”.

It’s a weird thing – this rewriting of who you are with what people define you as. I’ve been accosted by police more times than people would guess based on my skin color (but perhaps not my size, manner of speaking, or zip code), and I’ve even had police draw their guns on me as a kid. At the same time, I’ve walked away from those situations with no real legal or physical repercussions – something that is decidedly a “white” experience. Being considered simultaneously sinner and saint in the legal system is an irony not lost on me, although accepting that duality did allow me a measure of freedom to decide my own path. 

And honestly, isn’t that what we all want in the end?  The ability to choose who we want to be, what we want to do, and how we want to do it, without people’s preconceived notions, judgements, economic status, dress codes, food choices, or arbitrary facts or decisions altering the entirety of our lives? Maybe it’s other people’s brains that don’t work right, because I’ll never understand what makes someone deny another person a job, or a seat at the table, or an apartment simply because of their name, or their skin color, or their culture.