Impotence

I would like to share a very sad story that didn't happenend to me, but definetely impacted me. A friend of mine, who is Mexican-American had a very sad racist incident with an elder Caucasian neighbor. As she was driving to her assigned parking space; the neighbor was going on reverse, she honked at him to make him aware she was there. He got mad and approached her and cursed in her face then proceeded to make racist comments about her nationality. She was in total shock and stiff; as he got closer to her, she warned him: “step back I have pepper spray” so he furiously went back to his car. A neighbor saw the aggression and chased him off. My friend was trembling, because she felt harassed and devalued because of such agression. She called the police and they got both statements, nothing happened because to the police’s point of view she was overreacting and the neighbor never had intentions to physically hurt her. What has to happen then?

She lived by herself and was afraid of her neighbor, she went to the office and the Caucasian administrators told her the same that she was overreacting. She then told them that she wanted to end the contract because she didn’t feel safe but they didn’t let her. She then had to pay to end the contract and leave. When she was telling her story to me she said that at one point she believed everything the neighbor said because she was petrified, she believed in the stereotypes and insults he was communicating to her aggressively. By the end of that day she got sick with high temperature and migraine. She even told me that it took her weeks to mentally recover from the incident.

All the authorities in that scenario seemed to agree with the elder Caucasian male and totally marginalized my friend. The authority figures preferred racial invisibility and didn’t want to dig deeper.  She did everything to defend her cause and even talked to corporate, but nobody wanted to get involved with the racism act.  When I was hearing her story I felt impotent, furious, mad, aggressive, weak, powerless, frantic, sad, etc. I mean, it was a deep issue because she was a woman and was being harassed by a man who deliberately approached her and insulted her. On top of that, the police did nothing, and the complex’s administrators did nothing to protect her. The police and the office manager didn’t act with equity in this case. They took it as an overreaction and not as an act of racist aggression. My friend had a witness and other people also complaint with the manager. It is of my belief that the elder Caucasian was lucky enough to get passed by thanks to the shared ethnicity of the authorities in place.