A Lesson From The Racist Bus Driver
A Pakistani immigrants guide to dealing with racism in 2022
I jogged to the end of the bus line, finding number 25 at the back. With a few people left to board, I had time to get my snapper card and breathing under control. I watched each person snap on as the mid-’40s, been-in-the-sun-too-long pale skin bus driver greeted them with a lazy afternoon smile. His eyelids fell closer to his cheeks than raising to his forehead. Then I stepped on, doing my usual raise-both-eyebrows-and-smile-with-my-lips-sealed greeting. What was left of his lackluster smile immediately dissolved into a mute face — as if one had seen an old enemy that they could do nothing about. I’d seen people look at me like that before. Eye’s pinched close, lasering in on my face, inspecting my skin tone and calculating what to make of it.
What was that? I thought, walking to my seat. Did he just? No, he definitely did. I’d hopped on enough Wellington buses and seen enough bus driver faces to notice something there. Why did he change his expression so decisively when I was the focal point of his attention? His expression was dauntingly similar to when someone had assessed me head to toe then made eye contact — not the flirty kind either. It was more of the ‘you are inferior to me’ kind of eye contact.
Nah — surely not, I told myself. This doesn’t happen here. I gazed with my mind’s eye, remembering who stepped on the bus before I did, then inspected the bus, pretending to scratch my back. I was, unambiguously, the darkest person on the bus — the close second coming to a woman whose Bondi Sands fake tan was a week old and worn off. Still, I was willing to concede my theory. Why should I worry about this? I’ll get off the bus in ten minutes and never see the driver again. Headphones on, Imagine Dragons vibrating through my eardrums, I’d let it go.
The bus arrived at my stop. I stood up off my seat, near the far-right corner, giving me a clear panoramic view of the bus — inside and out. I saw a woman at the front door. She wasn’t getting in for some reason. What is she waiting for, I wondered. As I hopped off the back door, I understood why. The Asian woman was struggling to get her baby stroller on the bus. I would’ve taken ten to fifteen seconds to realise I was at my bus stop, gather my things, stand up, shuffle to the door, tag off, then walk to the front where the Asian woman was. That’s ten to fifteen seconds of her fluffing about for no apparent reason.
I walked up to her frustrated, wondering why the driver hadn’t helped her up yet.
“Can I help you out?”
“Oh, yes, thanks.”
I grabbed the front of her stroller, tilted it up and stepped backwards on the bus. Luckily the baby was fast asleep.
“Thank you,” she said, letting out a deep breath.
I put the stroller down, nodded and smiled back. It shouldn’t have been me that you are thanking right now, I thought.
“You’re welcome,” I replied.
Walking to the front door, I turned towards the driver on my way out to catch that smile I had seen before but was not privileged enough to receive. I earned it this time.
I sat on my bed, boiling in my own soup and simmering in disbelief. If this event happened in a vacuum, maybe I’d let it go. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened at the end of New Zealand’s first lockdown — June 2020. Beyond COVID, social justice and racism were also on our minds. Catalysed by the social unrest in America, Aotearoa was having conversations about race, racism, and equality, which resurfaced the 2019 Terrorist attack in Christchurch. For some kiwis, Aotearoa was on top of the moral landscape compared to other western countries. For others, the reality was much bleaker. Aotearoa wasn’t as ‘racism-free’ as some would suggest, and our eyes and ears were honed-in to sense racism when it dropped like Thor’s Hammer or when it fell like a single feather from a bird. And sometimes, we noticed it even when it was nowhere to be found.
The availability heuristic suggests that we unconsciously manipulate the probability of something happening based on how readily available those instances come to mind. If a seagull’s shit lands on or near you a few times, that’s the first thing you’ll think of whenever a seagull’s around. Or, if you watch countless YouTube videos of plane crashes, you’ll feel more anxious the next time you’re on a plane, thinking the probability of it crashing is higher than it actually is.
Videos of social injustice and articles about discrimination that circulated social media dialled the availability heuristic knob for racism all the way up. Perhaps that was it. Or was there another reason to believe that my eyes didn’t lie? This wasn’t the first time I’d seen a face like that, and it usually followed other discriminatory behaviour. I was ‘randomly selected’ four consecutive times at airports to be checked. My white, blonde-haired girlfriend at the time couldn’t believe my luck at first. She soon realised the absurdity. I turned it into a betting game. “For every time I get checked, you’re buying me a drink.” Of course, I knew the probability of winning the bet was in my favour only because social equality wasn’t.
Still, I was skeptical. If I believed racism was all around me, I could easily construe any action or phrase as racist — victimise myself through pure will. But I refused. I’d experienced worse things like being called “a terrorist who should go back to his own country” to worry about this. I spoke with friends, explaining my experience on the bus, and asked them what they thought. Unsurprisingly, and to my disappointment, there was no consensus. Some were utterly appalled and uncomfortably apologetic. Others found my experience challenging to understand and emotionally alien. Some accepted my word as truth, while others respectfully questioned my interpretations. Confused, I was questioning my experience of discrimination. Was I looking for something that wasn’t there? Did I misattribute the bus driver’s racist behaviour when it was simply benign or had another plausible explanation?
An implicit bias is an attitude towards specific people and groups without someone’s conscious knowledge. We have unconscious preferences for — or aversions to — certain stereotypes. Research in implicit biases shows that people are quicker to associate ‘bad’ words with middle eastern names and faces and ‘good’ words with white names and faces. The same outcome was present with black and white names and faces.
Predictably, this spawned the narrative of implicit racism. Scientists started testing in narrow scopes like police departments and school boards and found implicit racism there too. Police officers and teachers treated non-white people differently — although in subtle ways. You wouldn’t notice this individually, but collectively, with enough data, it was obvious.
What about explicit racist hate like the 2019 attack on the Mosque in Christchurch? Or abuse against Asians following the initial COVID-19 outbreak? The challenge of overcoming prejudice, implicit or explicit, is complex — but we try. We see news articles and videos highlighting discrimination. We gasp in disgust and condemn the acts within our social groups. Sometimes we channel our attention and efforts through social expressions — share Instagram posts here, sign petition there, and write a paragraph or two for good measure. Then we carry on about our day. These social expressions feel effective but often lead to little change. According to Daryl Davis, there’s another way.
Davis is a black man who focused his attention on the source of social prejudice in the late 90s by infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Davis first experienced racism in 1968 during a Christmas parade. His scout club was part of the parade, and Davis was the only black kid in it. As the scouts marched, showing off their uniforms with glee, a group of white adults threw rocks and plastic bottles at them. At least that’s what Davis thought until he realised they were only being directed at him. Davis, a 10-year-old boy, was the singular target of their hate. “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me” he wondered.
Forty years later, from his desire to answer that one question, Davis met with ‘Mr Kelly’ — a highly ranked Klan leader. In his book, Klan-destine Relationships: A Black Man’s Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan, Davis explained why he never felt offended when Mr Kelly told him that black people were ‘inferior’ to him. Instead, he invited Mr Kelly to his home for dinner numerous times.
“Why should I be offended by someone who knows nothing about me? He met me 10 minutes ago. He saw the colour of my skin and made this assessment. So why should I be offended by someone who is telling a lie … Who doesn’t have the foresight to see that he’s wrong — I want to learn more about this and see where he’s coming from….”
“…[Mr Kelly] would come to my home … I would invite over some of my other friends — my Jewish friends, my black friends, my white friends, other people — just to engage in conversation with Mr Kelly. Other than me, I wanted him to experience different people … I genuinely liked this guy, and I could see him beginning to like me. I did not like his ideology, but I saw the humanity in him. And he was seeing the same thing in me … We became friends.”
Through Davis’ grounded curiosity and intelligent rhetoric, he was the “impetus that led to over 200 people leaving the KKK.” Mr Kelly was the first to retire his allegiance to the Klan seven years after their first conversation.
Acts of racism in the news or social media make us feel like things aren’t progressing. Earlier this year, a Muslim girl was beaten at Otago Girls College. But racism and discrimination are now the antitheses of petrol prices— they’re at an all-time low. As a result, there is a kind of shift in the power of minorities. No one wants to be seen or heard discriminating against others — they’ll be cancelled into the abyss. If I said ‘x’ person or ‘x’ organisation was discriminating against me because of my ethnicity, many would flock to my defence without a care for the truth of my conviction. Zero tolerance for discrimination changes the playing field and shifts the goalposts for what we focus on and deem unacceptable — expecting more from human nature than it can deliver. There’s seems to be little thought to discern between the actions, the intentions that precede those actions, and the level of ignorance underlying both.
I’ve felt righteous in my desire to identify and evaporate discrimination to the point where I’d forgotten the bigger picture. I’ve noticed a paradox in describing my experiences that are validated by those who already agree with me. I mistook validation of my expressions as impactful change. But my condescending approach left those I wanted to effect confused and angry without a positive change in their beliefs — and isn’t that the ultimate goal? If I want real change, I’ll need the courage to accept and understand those who don’t accept — or don’t understand — others with the compassion and patience to allow them to change. How was Daryl Davis able to change the minds of those who were vehemently racist?
“The source is ignorance. I Address it with exposure and conversation. We spend way too much time talking about the other person, talking at the other person, talking past the other person; why don’t we spend a little bit of time talking with the other person?”
Orson Scott Card wrote, “you can’t change what you don’t understand.” I wish I didn’t, but I’ve got a responsibility. First, to temper my judgments and look to understand the actions and words of those who, on the surface, look to discriminate. If I find discrimination, explicit or implicit, I have the courage to sit through any discomfort and show them their ignorance without contempt.
I did this when I first moved to Aotearoa in 2004 at 8-years-old. The kids who swung racial slurs at me later became my friends. Not because I gave into their derogatory language, flushing any self-respect I had. After the nine-eleven terrorist attacks, I knew their words were a by-product of the news media’s rhetoric — I couldn’t hate them for saying what was said. I didn’t overcome their ignorance by attacking their words with my own. Instead, I behaved true to my nature and talked about my country and culture. They eventually concluded on their own what Maya Angelou, the black poet and civil rights activist wrote: “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”
An optimist at heart, I generally see the good, the humanity in people — even in those whose ideologies and behaviours are morally different to mine. But in recent years, I fell into shallow judgments. I saw a bus driver looking at me with hate and assumed the worst. I did the same thing again a few months later at a party, with an opportunity for confrontation this time.
I walked downstairs into the garage of a two-story house and looked around to get a gist of the party scene. About twenty-five young professionals around their early to late 20s, all white, were scattered around a giant homemade beer pong table. Some were sitting on a set of scruffy 90s upholstery couches, dazed. Others were shaking hands, exchanging names and professions. A handful were in the far corners, retrieving daunting stories with depth — giving each other pseudo therapy sessions. And in the middle were the rest of the lot, yelling profanities, throwing ping-pong balls inaccurately, and laughing with relief or embarrassment.
After my quick assessment, I took a few steps in the garage and heard a man’s voice from the far end of the ping-pong table.
“Holy shit,” he yelled, merging with my line of sight. “You are so fucking tan, bro.”
My heart rate jumped a few beats as everyone’s gaze shifted towards me. I don’t mind being the centre of attention, but I’d prefer doing it voluntarily. Not this again, I thought, as if someone started boiling a jug in my consciousness.
“I know bro,” I yelled with an unconvincing smile and blistering eyes.
I walked over and looked him dead in the eyes. I stopped, looked at my feet, and let out a deep breath. “Why should I be offended by someone who knows nothing about me?” Daryl Davis’ voice echoed in my mind.
“Yeah, bro,” I said. “I’m from Pakistan. Tell me what you know, and I’ll fill in the gaps.”
“Holy shit! Really?! I Just know it’s next to India.”
“Good start,” I said, smiling. “Here’s the most important thing: our curries are way better.”
