What Old Spanish Ladies Taught Me About Equality

while they cut me in line at the supermarket

The old ladies in Spain had me on superalert mode when I first arrived here.

To be fair, it wasn’t just the old ladies. The older men would cut me in line too. It happened at bakeries where I could never figure out if there was a line or not.

I would just kind of stand around hoping that the person behind the counter had been keeping track of who arrived when and that they would call me when it was my time.

Which most of the time, they did. But there were a handful of other times when they would just ask who was next and an older Spanish person would either blurt out what they wanted or would just step to the counter.

And I took that racially.

They did it because I was Asian. They did it because I was foreign. They did it because I was invisible to them. They did it because they knew I couldn’t speak Spanish. This is what “micro-aggressions” are.

Like many, I’d experienced similar instances during my 20 years living in NYC and during my 14 years growing up in Ithaca, NY. Some were big. Some were small. Some were ignored. Some were addressed.