A Shift in Perspective.

• Author: Puterbaugh, Dolores T.
• Position: On discrimination and experience

IF YOU ARE MAN of a certain age, this experience is seared into your brain with the same power that was a hit to the body when it occurred. You were joking with the pretty young cashier and, for the first time--or perhaps just the first time you had noticed--the smile you received in return was not frank friendship. It was not boldly flirtatious. It was not the hesitant smile of a shy woman in response to masculinity. The smile from a pretty girl on that dreadful day was the patient, patronizing smile of a young woman to an old man telling a grandpa joke.

You know, deep in your sternum, that something has shifted, and that you have been moved into a category in which a particular trait, age, is the defining feature. You are old... and a man, yet no longer seen first as a man. It is humiliating, shaming, disorienting; you feel like a fool. You wonder how often this has occurred without your noticing. It takes work to shake yourself off, to keep being friendly and accept that what returns to you has changed its shape.

Women have a similar experience. It occurs earlier if they are blessed with daughters. It is the day she walks into a place with her daughter, or another, younger woman, and realizes that the gaze of assessment and admiration, from both men and women, rests on the child and not on her. The gaze that made her a slouching human comma, arms across her chest, in early adolescence and was ignored, resented, or gleefully exploited later is gone. Its absence echoes. Worse, she feels ashamed and guilty that she is some sort of horrid Snow White's wicked stepmother, envious of her child. That is usually not the case, of course, but there has been a shift in the universe. It is useless to explain this to her husband; he will say something true, sweet, and profoundly unhelpful, like, "But you are even more beautiful than the day we married." His wife knows that she has begun slipping down the social ladder.

This is relevant because I was asked to give a talk on responding to discrimination, especially racism, in our society. The person making the request is someone I have known through church work for 20 years, but it has been a while since we have met face-to-face and I had to ask, "You do remember what I look like, right?" because I appear as north-western European--Celt, German, Swede--as the ancestry research says I am. Yes, she remembers and the multicultural team wants me to do the talk.

If you cannot get in touch with the part of...