He tells me it’s my white privilege that makes me act so uppity. Not just in general, but specifically about a woman of nebulous Middle Eastern descent wearing a babushka getup creeping behind me at the train station and piggybacking off my ticket to ride as the automatic doors opened upon “receiving” what amounted to my rectangular paper dick. He looked at me with a silent urgency after it happened, as though I should know what was going on when the only vision I had was peripheral. What am I? A fucking owl that can turn my head all the way around to see what’s taking place behind me?

So no, I didn’t know what she was doing until the moment had already passed. It was a surreptitious, almost invisible movement. She was clearly seasoned in the operation. The only “evidence” I might have had to fathom her looming presence was that unshakeable feeling you get when you know someone is right behind you. An innate, primordial instinct that can raise the hairs on your neck and send a shiver down your spine. Although I felt this feeling, I ignored it. As “modern,” “civilized” society has taught us to do—ignore our gut reactions and instead cater to something resembling “politesse.” And the “courteous” thing for me to do was to say nothing after this babushka scuttled by, relying on her false “innocent old lady” veneer to avert anything resembling a consequence for this public transportation raping. Maybe it’s also a white privilege to use the word rape “casually.” But there is no other word that fits quite so well. Because here, too, the concept of consent is involved.

It would have been one thing if the woman had bothered to grunt or gesture or make some kind of head nod amounting to an “ask” for what she did. And, had she done that, my proverbial “white guilt” would have gotten the better of me anyway and I would have conceded. She could have counted on that, as so many “non-whites” do. It’s a black and brown privilege or (POC privilege, if that’s the preferred catch-all) to call white privilege about everything. And yeah, probably everything is white privilege. So a small tradeoff for getting to enjoy said privilege is being called out about it with extreme derision now and again. Just as Micah so often felt obliged to “take me aside” and speak to me about my apparently offensive behavior. I had offended him and “his kind” (he was Mexican, by the way) so many times at this point that it was a wonder he still wanted to be friends with me. Shit, I was starting to not want to be friends with him because it was exhausting. Always having to be on my toes about what I was saying and doing. And now, after he had been the one to spotlight this freeloading, faux train rider, he expected me to just act “chill” about it. As though there hadn’t been a gross violation.

On the train into the city, Micah proceeded to regale me with all the reasons why Babushka had every right to fuck the system in any way she could—including taking advantage of me, some simp who actually paid for her ticket. Upon mentioning that I didn’t deserve to be fucked over as some sort of de facto “grand representation” of “the system,” he seethed, “God, Laura. You’re just so fucking clueless. It’s incredible to me that you’ve even managed to get this far in life without any basic understanding of how the world works. And what the fuck harm did she even cause you by doing it?”

He had been making comments like this to me more frequently of late. Cutting remarks referencing how I not only lived in a bubble, but was content to stay in one. I guess if he lived in one, he’d want to stay in it, too. But since he didn’t, that privilege wasn’t an option. Of course, I resented (and increasingly so) how he was always so eager to emphasize that I was a naïve know-nothing with little experience of the world. Especially since, considering the context of how we met, it couldn’t have been further from the truth. It was the summer of 2019, before the world was about to change forever. And yet, in the end, not at all. I had gotten a job at Come One, Come All!, an atrocious chain restaurant that was really just glorified fast food. For whatever reason, they hired me. I was the only white server in the place. And yeah, it had been my experience that service jobs never wanted to hire white people. Assumed we’d be too “lily-livered” (in addition to “lily-skinned”) for the job, I guess. Or maybe that we would demand too many rights. But the manager wanted to bang me, so I was hired. I met Micah on my first day. He took me under his wing for a time, before he lost all hope regarding my service skills.

Despite the many broken plates and botched orders, I was one of the best-loved servers there. It was my “attitude,” I feel. Because you really can’t find “service with a smile” anywhere anymore, which made me a fine and rare exception to the rule of sourpuss servers at Come One, Come All! (and pretty much any other minimum wage-paying job). Micah was among the few people who didn’t start to shun me for it because I was the one getting all the tips, even though they all saw me as, hands down, the worst server. It was here, too, that cries of white privilege and racism were made. The other servers felt that the largely white clientele was being distinctly preferential toward the only employee who happened to “look like them.”

The environment became so hostile that, after six months, I finally left. I had saved up enough money to get by until I found something else. Something, apparently, that wouldn’t be in the service sector, where whites were unwanted. Of course I can’t speak for “everyone” at “every restaurant,” but that’s what it feels like. That white workers are bullshit outsiders only slumming it for a time before they move on to something else, and are too lazy to do any of the real work in the restaurant business anyway. Well fuck them all. I had been as stereotyped as any POC my entire life. For being some dainty gringa who was easy to take advantage of and push around. I think the raping babushka triggered all of those insecurities and long-standing resentments for me. Oh wait, is saying “triggered” a white privilege, too? I don’t know what’s “right” anymore and, according to Micah, nothing I ever thought and did was. Which makes me wonder why he wanted to be friends with me at all. Was it so he could do his part to single-handedly educate one white person at a time on “how to be”? On a side note, Sheila Heti should write a sequel to How Should A Person Be? called How Should A White Person Be? Except it would probably sell more copies if it wasn’t written by a white woman.

Before Micah and I even got into the city, our outing was so soured by the time we arrived to the station that all I wanted to do was get the hell away from him. But, like I said before, the required “politesse” of modern civilization conditions us to ignore all of our true feelings, push them aside in favor of “being nice.” Which it was evidently impossible for me to be anyway. No matter what I did, I was branded a white cunt. Even when someone did something to take advantage of me. And that, by reacting with outrage, I was somehow only further proving what an unempathetic bitch I was “allowed” to be purely because of my whiteness. Thinking about this the entire train ride as Micah lectured me, once again, on how I was the fuckface for expressing what I “falsely” viewed as my rightful anger about Babushka clinging to me like a parasite to secure a free ride, I was truly almost ready to just tell him that I wanted to walk around in the city without him.

But then, as we were getting our tickets out again to run through the machine so that the doors would open to let us out, something so incredibly full-circle occurred. The same woman latched onto us, this time homing in on Micah as a means to get through the doors and scurry into the city. The difference was, Micah actually managed to lock eyes with her, defying her to do it to someone who she could truly see. And what Micah wanted her to see was “one of her own.” How she ought to at least, in some subtle way, ask for permission to piggyback on the cost of his fare. So she gave him a slight head cock and, in turn, he nodded his assent, subsequently shoving his ticket through the slot and moving through as though he had no idea he was behind her this time. As for me, my non-consensual experience went unacknowledged after it was over. As though Micah knew he would be broaching a hornet’s nest if we discussed it further. The hypocrisy. The fact that he at least got to willfully decide on being taken advantage of.

I decided to go through the motions of hanging out with him for a few hours, and when he was ready to leave, I told him I wanted to stay a bit longer. That he ought to just go on without me. He didn’t put up a fight about it. It was obvious we were both “being polite” at this juncture, and had reached our capacity for continuing to do so. As he left for the train station, I got the distinct sense we would be seeing less of each other after that day. It wasn’t just because of our disparate reactions to and interactions with Babushka’s parasitic behavior, but because some schism between us had been brewing from day one. A schism we were made, by society, to perceive in ways both subtle and overt all the time.

Micah had told me Babushka did what she had to in order to survive, and that it was something I could never understand or be sympathetic to. He told me the system forces people to become this kind of person, this kind of parasite. Yet after that day, I came to a different sort of conclusion. That the system pits us all against one another in order to keep thriving. It was set up so perfectly to do just that. And while we’re all quibbling over who paid for what—therefore, who “deserves” what—the system only flourishes all the more amid such arguments.

Finally walking back toward the station, I felt as though I was coming around to what Micah had said all along to justify Babushka’s “rape.” Except that when a different parasite tried to do the same thing to me anew, I stood my ground firmly, refusing to feed the ticket into the machine until he backed the fuck away from me. I wasn’t going to be seen as the “weak link” again. I refused. And yet, now, I couldn’t decide anymore if it made me weak to “stand my ground” in this way, or to “show kindness” by letting the presumptuous affront roll off my back. Once more, an act as simple as taking the train had transformed into a political issue. Then again, Micah had told me that everything was always political; most white people just didn’t want to see it until after 2020.