Race-Colored Glasses and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

I was reading a blog post recently, phone in hand, doing that ordinary scrolling thing where you think you're just passing a few minutes, and then one sentence stops you cold because it says more than I think the writer meant for it to say. Hello, and welcome to Surviving Chronic Illness, life in a body that rebels. I'm Tate. Today I'm straying away from the chronic illness discussion and talking about something that has always been a part of this country's culture, and one that has been openly presented with pride, more so in recent years. I'm talking about racism and more specifically the subtext of what people say and write, the racial details people include in stories, and what those details can reveal about fear, assumption, and the way we see each other. The blog post was about a woman alone on a train platform. She described the moment carefully, the emptiness, the waiting, the feeling of being by herself in a public place where you suddenly become aware of every sound and every movement around you. Then two rail workers appeared. And in the post, they weren't just two rail workers. They were two Latino rail workers. That word sat there in the sentence like a chair slightly out of place in a room. Not the whole story, not the main event, just a detail, but a detail with weight. The woman later understood that these men weren't a threat. They were watching over her, guarding her really, until the train came in. They had noticed she was alone, and instead of ignoring her, they stayed nearby in that quiet, decent way some people help without making a production out of it. That part was lovely. That part should have been the center of the story. Two workers saw a woman alone and made sure she was safe. But my brain snagged on the description. Why did I need to know they were Latino? What was that detail doing in the sentence? I'm not asking that as a dramatic accusation. I'm asking it as a real question, because language has fingerprints. The words we choose usually come from somewhere, even when we don't stop to inspect them before they leave our mouths or our keyboards. People love to announce they're not racist. And I mean they love it. They say it with the confidence of someone presenting a receipt. I'm not racist. Full stop, case closed. Nothing further to discuss. Please collect your complimentary innocent sticker on the way out. But then those same people will tell a story about an encounter with someone, and if that person isn't the same race as they are, the race often gets mentioned. Not always, but often enough that I've started noticing the pattern. I was walking down the street and this black guy. I was in the store and this Asian woman. I was waiting for the train and these Latino workers. And I always want to pause the story right there and ask, gently if I'm feeling charitable, less gently if I've already had a long day. Was that part necessary? Did their race explain what happened? Did it change the action? Did it help me understand the event? Or did it tell me what you noticed first? Because those are not the same thing. Description can be useful. I understand that. I'm a writer. I like detail. I like texture. I like when a story has enough physical reality that I can stand inside it for a minute. But not every detail is neutral. If I say a man was wearing a bright orange jacket, that might help you picture him. If I say a woman had a cane, that might explain why she moved slowly. If I say someone was a rail worker, that tells you why they were on the platform and why their presence had a purpose. But race? Race often gets slipped in as if it's just scenery, when really it can be a signal. Sometimes it's the signal flare of someone's discomfort. Not always on purpose. That's the uncomfortable part. Most people don't sit down and say, Today I'll reveal my subconscious bias through a poorly chosen adjective. Most people are just telling a story. They're remembering a moment. They're trying to explain how they felt. But that's exactly why the language is worth looking at. The unplanned words are usually the ones that show the wiring. In the train platform story, the woman felt uneasy at first. She was alone. Two men appeared. That could make a person alert. I understand that. I've been alone in places where my body started gathering information before my brain could organize a polite explanation. Who's nearby? How far is the exit? Is anyone else around? Can I move if I need to? Fear is physical before it's philosophical. It doesn't wait for a committee meeting. It arrives in the stomach, in the shoulders, in the way your hand tightens around your phone. So I'm not mocking her for being aware of her surroundings. I'm questioning why the racial identity of the men became part of the way the moment was framed. Would she have written the same sentence if they'd been two tall, blonde, blue-eyed Swedish rail workers? Would their whiteness have been mentioned as part of the tension? Or would they have just been rail workers? That's where my mind went. Because whiteness so often gets treated as the default setting. It doesn't need naming. It's just people. Everyone else becomes specific. Everyone else gets labeled. And once someone is labeled, the reader is invited to bring along whatever associations they already have, whether the writer intended that or not. That's where stories get slippery. A racial descriptor can change the temperature of a sentence. Two men appeared. Two rail workers appeared. Two Latino rail workers appeared. Those are three different sentences. They don't create the same picture. They don't ask the listener to bring the same assumptions into the room. And yes, sometimes race is relevant. If the story is about racism, race is relevant. If the story is about cultural identity, race may be relevant. If someone's experience is shaped by how they're seen in the world, race may be central. I'm not saying we should pretend race doesn't exist. That's not awareness. That's just denial wearing a clean shirt. Because that's what happens too often. Someone tells a story about feeling nervous around a stranger, and the stranger's race becomes part of the explanation. Even when the stranger did nothing wrong, even when the stranger was helping, even when the only danger in the scene was the storyteller's assumption. That's the part that bothers me. The men on that platform turned out to be protectors, not threats. They were doing something kind. And still, the first version of the story marked them by race before it marked them by care. I keep thinking about what it must be like to move through the world, knowing that your body can become someone else's plot twist. You're just standing there in your work clothes, doing your job, waiting for a train, buying milk, walking your dog, checking your phone, living your ordinary human life. And across the platform, someone's fear has already drafted a version of you that you didn't audition for. That's exhausting to imagine. And for many people, it is an imagination. It's Tuesday. This is where the I'm not racist announcement starts to feel too small for the size of the problem. Because racism isn't only the cartoon villain version. It's not only slurs and burning crosses and people in old photographs looking proud of things they should have been ashamed of. Sometimes it's the little internal flinch. Sometimes it's the detail you include without asking why. Sometimes it's who you describe and who you leave undescribed. Sometimes it's assuming danger first, then kindness later. And then when kindness appears, acting surprised. That surprise has a history. It comes from somewhere. I've had enough conversations in my life to know that people get very defensive when you point this out. They hear the word racism and immediately start building a courtroom defense. I didn't mean anything by it. I was just describing them. You're reading too much into it. I notice everybody's race. That last one always makes me want to pull up a chair and order tea because no, most people do not describe everybody with the same precision. They describe the people who feel marked to them, different to them, noticeable to them. And the question isn't whether noticing difference makes someone evil. The question is what meaning gets attached to that difference before the person has done anything. There's a difference between seeing someone clearly and seeing them through a filter you inherited. We all inherit filters. Family gives us some. Culture gives us some. Television gives us plenty because apparently television looked at humanity and said, what if we flattened everyone into categories and then added commercials? News coverage gives us filters. Neighborhoods give us filters. Fear gives us filters. The work is not pretending we don't have them. The work is catching ourselves before we mistake the filter for eyesight. And yes, that can be uncomfortable. Good. A little discomfort won't kill us. Most of us survive far worse than being asked to think about why we chose a word. I don't want people to become so terrified of saying the wrong thing that they stop talking altogether. Silence doesn't fix bias. It just makes it harder to examine. I want more honesty in the pause before the story gets told. A small pause. A half second. Enough time to ask, do I need this detail? Am I describing the person? Or am I smuggling in my fear? Would I say this the same way if the person looked like me? That little pause could change a lot. It could make a sentence cleaner. It could make a story fairer. It could keep a helpful person from being framed as suspicious just because the storyteller had to catch up to their own assumptions. And I know some people will say, Well, how are we supposed to describe anyone anymore? Carefully. That's my answer. Describe what is relevant. Describe what happened. Describe the behavior. Describe the action. Describe the setting. If race is part of the story, use it thoughtfully. If it isn't, ask why it wandered in and made itself comfortable. Because people are not seasoning. You don't sprinkle race into a story for flavor. There's my private chef brain showing up for one second. But even there, the point stands. When I'm cooking for one family in a household, I don't add an ingredient because my hand wandered over the jar. I add it because it belongs in the dish. If it doesn't belong, it changes the whole thing. Words do that too. A single word can tilt the listener towards suspicion or sympathy. A single word can make someone sound like a threat before they've lifted a finger. A single word can reveal the story underneath the story. And sometimes the story underneath is I saw their race before I saw their humanity. That's a hard sentence to face. But I'd rather face a hard sentence than keep repeating a harmful one. The train platform story could have been beautiful without that racial label. It could have been about being alone and realizing two strangers were quietly looking out for her. It could have been about the relief of misreading a moment and finding care where she expected danger. That would have been a powerful story. It still can be. But the racial detail changed the angle of the light. It showed the fear before it showed the kindness. And I think we need to get better at noticing that, especially in ourselves. Not as a performance. Not so we can walk around congratulating ourselves for being enlightened. Please, no. The world has enough people giving themselves awards for basic decency. I mean noticing in the small, private, irritatingly human moments. The moments when we're telling a friend what happened. The moments when we're writing a post. The moments when a description slips out and we hear it. Really hear it. And think, wait, why did I say it that way? That question is useful. Not comfortable. Useful. Because the goal isn't to prove we're pure. The goal is to become less careless. I don't think people change by insisting they have no bias. I think people change by catching bias in the act, preferably before it climbs into the driver's seat and starts steering the whole story. And when we catch it, we don't need to collapse into shame and make everyone else babysit our feelings. We can just do better with the next sentence. That's small, but it's real. The next sentence. The next description. The next time we tell a story about a stranger, the next time we notice who we name by race, and who gets to remain simply a person. That's where the work lives. In the ordinary language we use when we think nobody is grading us. I keep picturing those two rail workers standing on the platform, close enough to help, far enough not to scare her more, doing a quiet good deed that probably didn't feel like a grand gesture to them. They were just there. And being there was enough. I wish the story had trusted that. I wish it had let them be two people doing something decent before making them carry the extra weight of someone else's first assumption. That's the part I'm taking with me from this. Not a grand lecture, not a neat little bow. Just the image of a platform, a woman waiting, two workers nearby, and one word in the sentence making the room colder than it needed to be. I'm trying to pay closer attention to the words I reach for first, because those first words often know what I haven't admitted yet. I'm Tate, and this is Surviving Chronic Illness, life in a body that rebels. Thanks for being here. You're welcome to send me short personal messages through the text link. I can read and reply, but only the last digits of your number are visible to me through that link. For longer messages, please reach me through the website. And please know I'm not able to respond to solicitations, sales offers, guest pitches, or promotional outreach. And if you'd like to do something tangible to help people living with sarcoidosis, please consider making a donation to the Foundation for Sarkoidosis Research, or FSR, at stopstarcoidosis.org. I'll also put a link in the show notes. Small pronunciation detour before we close. It's sarcoidosis, not sarcoidosis. Sarcoidosis. Koi, like the fish. Except instead of a calm pond, you get appointments, scans, and forms with boxes that are never quite big enough. After 20 years of living with the disease, this mispronunciation has become one of my small pet peeves. I'm not proud, I'm just accurate. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please follow the show, share it, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Friday. So until next time, stay safe, be happy, and most of all, keep breathing. And remember, sarcoidosis is only rare until you're the one living with it.