Dear White Woman I Nearly Hit With My Car This Morning:

Here is the sequence of events from my perspective. I stopped at the stop light, in the right lane. It was early enough in the morning that I did not quite have my wits about me. But that doesn’t matter. I saw a group of five white women, all dressed alike, in tight-fitting black shorts and sports bras, tanned and ready for TV, cross the street in front of my car. I watched them with mild interest, following them to the right with my eyes a little. The light changed; I stepped on the gas and there you were on the left! I shoved my foot down on the brake. You had straggled behind the group, a group I assumed was complete. You, dressed like the others but with frizzy blond tresses, made a palms-up, angry gesture, as if to say What the fuck? Or Watch where you’re going! Maybe you wanted to insult my intelligence. Maybe you were ready to bring it to the level of racism. I’m glad I don’t know that. Of course I considered it. I let you pass.

You had slipped into my blind spot, first behind a big shade tree in the traffic island and then behind the column where the windshield and the drivers’ side window come together on my car. My friend Abe once told me, “You always hit the second deer,” and—sorry to conflate you with a fawn, trust me there isn’t anything salacious or degrading about it—here I could see the principle in action. You blamed me in your reaction, but the light was green. Pedestrians have the right of way, but I couldn’t have seen you. You ran into the crosswalk, and though I think the laws here require cars to stop for anyone in a crosswalk, that rule assumes a visible person.

This interaction made me think first of your privilege, I will be honest, not just as a white person but as a pedestrian. I will presume that your feelings of entitlement made you certain that you had the attention of all drivers, and the right of way despite the green light—Who could not have seen you? Who cares about the green light?—and that the task at hand, of catching up to your colleagues, remained at the top of your agenda. No one enjoys feeling left behind by one’s peers, especially when it comes to sports. What would the law have said if I had hit you? Would the law favor one of us over the other? I will refrain from thinking the worst—at least today, anyway.

Our altercation made me think of many other misunderstandings, Dear White Woman, both personal and historical, and of how the assumptions we make based on our own perceptions and needs can be just as correct as other people’s, and yet still cause confusion, injury, and death. This takes place between individuals, groups, and nations, so that any way forward, if it can exist, must circumvent the question of blame, at least at first, and begin by listening carefully, taking a gentle deposition, in order to discover how two or more narratives became snarled, and begin our fumbling attempts to disentangle them.