I didn't know what white privilege was, but this is when I knew I had it

I was living in a town in western Iowa at the time and stopped by a bookstore in the local mall, a middle-brow chain that had stores in malls all over the country and was one of the first to go bankrupt after Amazon started taking over the industry.

I was the only customer in the store just then and perusing magazines at the newsstand, just killing time because there wasn’t much else to do in this town in western Iowa. The clerk behind the counter was the only employee and I can’t remember exactly what he was doing but I assume it was just general clerk-y things because he was paying no attention to me.

After a few minutes idly flipping through magazines, I was joined by another customer, his presence only vaguely registering with me because I was engrossed enough in my Time or Newsweek or whatever magazine I was reading—probably one that isn’t published anymore—to pay attention. Within seconds, a third person joined us: the clerk, who hadn’t been paying attention at all for the last five minutes. He stood next to us suddenly, rearranging magazines on the shelves that seemed to have been arranged just fine the whole time I’d been standing there. He didn’t quit, either, pushing magazines around until he became such a distraction that I noticed he just kept rearranging the same magazines over and over.

I also noticed, at that point, that the customer next to me was black, a young man so run of the mill in his overall appearance that his color is the only distinguishing feature in my memory. Nothing stood out about his clothes, his hair, his manner, at least nothing for me to remember, 20-some years later. Certainly nothing about his appearance should have lead a clerk to suspect he would walk out with a magazine stuffed inside his shirt anymore than a clerk would suspect I would do that.

But his ordinariness apparently didn’t register with the clerk because he kept rearranging magazines with his eye on the other customer, looking past me like I wasn’t even there. If he was trying to pretend he wasn’t racial profiling, he was failing to the point where he might as well have just stood there and stared straight at the guy. I wondered why he even bothered to pretend to rearrange magazines at all, he was that obvious.

What struck me was that none of this seemed to register with the customer. He kept flipping through magazines looking for something that grabbed his interest, ignoring the clerk, as if being watched was standard procedure, something that happens so often that he no longer even notices. He left after a few minutes, and when he did, the clerk evidently decided the magazines were sufficiently well arranged and went back to his position behind the counter. I left, not knowing if he even knew I was ever in the store.

At the time, I thought that maybe this was an isolated incident, a single racist clerk or maybe a racist manager who forced the employees to act just as racist with a demented security policy. But over the years I’ve watched at other stores as other clerks trailed or followed or otherwise kept an eye on other black shoppers who were no more likely to steal something as any white shopper. In fact, I found out later that another store in that same mall had such a policy, the manager believing that black people couldn’t afford anything in her store so they came only to shoplift (she was fired when corporate found out about it).

I had never heard the term white privilege at that point in my life (it may not have even existed then), but I already knew what it meant. I didn’t have to worry about being pulled over for a broken tail light so the cop could run my name through the system, just to see what turns up. I would never be suspected of committing a crime if the suspect was described as a white male. Women will never clutch their purses a little tighter when I walk by on the sidewalk. And I can browse at a bookstore magazine stand all I wanted without arousing any suspicion from the clerk, but a black man—one as ordinary and run of the mill as me—couldn’t set foot in the same store without being eyed every second he was there.