The Beauty of Bodega Bay - It's not the people
Yesterday I drove up to Bodega Bay with Shab. in the Corvette. A nice car, a cute woman, a great view of the Pacific Ocean, what could make a day trip like that go wrong. Well ... I'm here to tell ya. The lady at the visitor's center was actually pretty cool. She pointed out all the sites, and suggested a nice short hike along the western edge of the city.
So that's where we went. Neither of us brought a camera, but the walk along the cliffs overhanging the Pacific Ocean was humbling, calming, and whatever other adjectives you can wrap your head around to describe viewing an ocean from several hundred feet up. When we finished the hike, we got back in the car and were planning on heading north along highway 1 to check out the local beaches.
About a half-mile away from the parking lot we just left, we saw two California Highway Patrol (CHP) cars rushing toward where we just came from. For those of you who know me and have followed my blog at Moluv.com for awhile, you might have an idea of who they might have been looking for.
On several occasions, Shab and I have been pulled over by police for no good reason. They'd accuse us of doing something wrong, ask for my license, registration, and proof of insurance, then let us go when they saw how squeaky clean I was, and that all of my vehicles were fully paid for. At that time I was posting the events regularly on my blog. Two weeks after my last post, an article appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle with a large graphic detailing specific instructions for CHP to single out interracial couples: written in a CHP manual. Mind-boggling. I know.
One of the last hikes we took at the Redwood Regional Park in Oakland, sometime last fall, two park rangers sat in ambush behind my car to grill me about carrying a stick on a park trail. The ranger asked for my license, ran a background check and let us go. The question I ask myself to this day is how did they know to wait for me at my car? An obvious answer is that someone had to see me get out of the car, THEN call the rangers, but the fact that someone would do that ... in Oakland ... in 2004, just seems unreal.
So, when I saw the two CHP vehicles rushing to the sparsely populated trail parking lot in Bodega Bay, it seemed like a little bit of history repeating. Just one CHP car driving slowly might not have been too conspicuous. Two vehicles on a road that only leads to one place is not so inconspicuous. When the driver of the second car saw me going the other way on the two lane road, he grimaced at me. I guess he realized he was too late.
That alone was irritating enough, but after our coastal drive, we stopped at a gas station in Guernville to see if we could get some information about the forest parks. As soon as I walk in, the gas station attendant has a surprised look on her face. When I approach the register with maps to purchase, she finds some reason to leave the register. No one called her. No lights or buzzers were flashing or sounding off. She just left. So, I decided not to purchase the maps, and just look through them to find a park. At this point, I'm looking through the maps at the register, and she doesn't come back, so I returned them to the rack. Correction, she comes back into the store, just not to the register.
Now some of you may be saying, "Mo, you're reading a little too much into these events." To which, my reply is, after you've seen subtle stuff like this happen all your adult life, you begin to develop radar for it. At Moluv.com a post was started by a white guy who accused me of "bringing up the race card" in an interview. The interview was initiated by another white guy who wanted to learn from a black person what it was like being black in the design community because he sincerely wanted to know. So, you can imagine the how the "complainer" must have felt when the interviewer intercepted his post and explained what the interview was about.
Racism can come from a lot places. It's just not white folks. There just happen to be more of them around here than any other group. I've experienced racism on different levels from many different groups. It's ugly in all its forms. Whether it's coming from someone whose white, chinese, japanese, latino, samoan, persian, philipino, italian, black, or whatever, it's always hurtful and unproductive. It just so happens that the people I consider to be my closest friends either come from one of those cultures, or are made up of a mix of them. In the circles I hang out in, there is very little room for racial intolerance, so whenever I run into it, it's always a surprise.
For those of you paying particularly close attention, you may have noticed that I did not indicate the background of the clerk at the Bodega Bay visitors center, the CHP officers, the rangers, or the gas station attendant. The mere act of having to designate someone by race is something that feels demeaning to me. The truth of the matter is that in the case of the rangers and highway patrol, they may have simply been responding to a "valid sounding" call by a "concerned" citizen. So, to point out their race would be irrelevant. It really doesn't matter except for where we make it matter.
I guess I'm just sick of it. [[END RANT]]
So that's where we went. Neither of us brought a camera, but the walk along the cliffs overhanging the Pacific Ocean was humbling, calming, and whatever other adjectives you can wrap your head around to describe viewing an ocean from several hundred feet up. When we finished the hike, we got back in the car and were planning on heading north along highway 1 to check out the local beaches.
About a half-mile away from the parking lot we just left, we saw two California Highway Patrol (CHP) cars rushing toward where we just came from. For those of you who know me and have followed my blog at Moluv.com for awhile, you might have an idea of who they might have been looking for.
On several occasions, Shab and I have been pulled over by police for no good reason. They'd accuse us of doing something wrong, ask for my license, registration, and proof of insurance, then let us go when they saw how squeaky clean I was, and that all of my vehicles were fully paid for. At that time I was posting the events regularly on my blog. Two weeks after my last post, an article appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle with a large graphic detailing specific instructions for CHP to single out interracial couples: written in a CHP manual. Mind-boggling. I know.
One of the last hikes we took at the Redwood Regional Park in Oakland, sometime last fall, two park rangers sat in ambush behind my car to grill me about carrying a stick on a park trail. The ranger asked for my license, ran a background check and let us go. The question I ask myself to this day is how did they know to wait for me at my car? An obvious answer is that someone had to see me get out of the car, THEN call the rangers, but the fact that someone would do that ... in Oakland ... in 2004, just seems unreal.
So, when I saw the two CHP vehicles rushing to the sparsely populated trail parking lot in Bodega Bay, it seemed like a little bit of history repeating. Just one CHP car driving slowly might not have been too conspicuous. Two vehicles on a road that only leads to one place is not so inconspicuous. When the driver of the second car saw me going the other way on the two lane road, he grimaced at me. I guess he realized he was too late.
That alone was irritating enough, but after our coastal drive, we stopped at a gas station in Guernville to see if we could get some information about the forest parks. As soon as I walk in, the gas station attendant has a surprised look on her face. When I approach the register with maps to purchase, she finds some reason to leave the register. No one called her. No lights or buzzers were flashing or sounding off. She just left. So, I decided not to purchase the maps, and just look through them to find a park. At this point, I'm looking through the maps at the register, and she doesn't come back, so I returned them to the rack. Correction, she comes back into the store, just not to the register.
Now some of you may be saying, "Mo, you're reading a little too much into these events." To which, my reply is, after you've seen subtle stuff like this happen all your adult life, you begin to develop radar for it. At Moluv.com a post was started by a white guy who accused me of "bringing up the race card" in an interview. The interview was initiated by another white guy who wanted to learn from a black person what it was like being black in the design community because he sincerely wanted to know. So, you can imagine the how the "complainer" must have felt when the interviewer intercepted his post and explained what the interview was about.
Racism can come from a lot places. It's just not white folks. There just happen to be more of them around here than any other group. I've experienced racism on different levels from many different groups. It's ugly in all its forms. Whether it's coming from someone whose white, chinese, japanese, latino, samoan, persian, philipino, italian, black, or whatever, it's always hurtful and unproductive. It just so happens that the people I consider to be my closest friends either come from one of those cultures, or are made up of a mix of them. In the circles I hang out in, there is very little room for racial intolerance, so whenever I run into it, it's always a surprise.
For those of you paying particularly close attention, you may have noticed that I did not indicate the background of the clerk at the Bodega Bay visitors center, the CHP officers, the rangers, or the gas station attendant. The mere act of having to designate someone by race is something that feels demeaning to me. The truth of the matter is that in the case of the rangers and highway patrol, they may have simply been responding to a "valid sounding" call by a "concerned" citizen. So, to point out their race would be irrelevant. It really doesn't matter except for where we make it matter.
I guess I'm just sick of it. [[END RANT]]
posted by moluv at 7:24 PM
2 Comments:
Hi Mo,
I've been frequenting your blog and portal site for quite some time and it was only recently that I saw your posts regarding the lame CHP and your kali practice.
To keep it short, let's just say I have a really long history of being subject to racially motivated "events" and since I moved to the West Coast, I thought things would have changed. Wrong.
One of the more poignant run-ins I've had with the CHP happened in Summerland, CA when I was out one night around 9 or 10 PM checking out dynoflagellates (glowing single-celled organisms) with some friends from the UCSB Marine Bio Center.
I was waiting by my car for some of our other friends to arrive and an unassuming and seemingly friendly CHP officer pulled up alongside and asked what I was doing. I told him and then he asked for my license and registration. Then, he asked if I was carrying any weapons. I said no and being completely amazed by the glowing tide, I was in a great mood and even offered to let him look for himself. He declined and proceeded to call in my info. He detained me for somewhere around 5 minutes all the while refusing to tell me what he was checking on and refusing to return my documents.
Well, apparently he was calling for backup because 2 other CHP cars pulled up on us all C.O.P.S. style and screeched to a halt in the dirt inches in front of me. They cut off traffic and now a line of locals (probably coming out to do exactly what my friends and I were doing) was forming and rubbernecking as I was unceremoniously bent over on my hood and frisked "for my safety," they said. When I asked, "Is this absolutely necessary?" These good ole boys just repeated "it's for your safety, sir," and then kicked my heels wider open.
Then, once they had done this. Officer #1 comes up and hands me my documents and then apologize for the "inconvenience." They ask if I go to UCSB and when I say, "No, but I do TEACH there," they look at each other blankly and the lughead who frisked has the nerve to ask me what I teach. I tell him, "Multimedia design," and I can almost hear the sludge in his head churning as he strains to pronouce multimedia. "Multimedia, huh? whoah, I couldn't even teach LEGOS." No shit. And someone lets you carry a gun?
Then they asked me once more what I was doing there and I considered explaining what dynoflagellates are like, "you know, they're these tiny little sea creatures that spank themselves in the dark" but thought better of it. No sense confusing the poor bastards. Then these guys tell me that there have been a rash of bank robberies in the area (WTF, in Santa Barbara?!!?!) and the car BEHIND behind mine fit the description of one of the suspect's cars. I'm sooo sure. It was another friend's car, but that didn't matter, did it? Meanwhile, about half a dozen of my friends were all watching this from the rocks, scared that I was going to get brained or something.
The next morning, I read the local rag and there's a picture of a 40 something white male who was apprehended in the afternoon on the same day I was harrassed. He was charged with bank robbery.
Now tell me, PLEASE, how an Asian male in his 20's could have possibly matched the description of the suspect?
Thanks for letting me rant, it feels good to vent a little righteous anger sometimes.
Tough story. I'll make sure to keep an eye out when passing through Summerland.
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