When minding your business helps bullies flourish
When is it ever OK for a mother to call her daughter a "bitch"?
Writer’s note: The post below was written three days ago. But yesterday afternoon, I saw this Instagram post to teach people the hand signal for “help.” I learned quite a bit of sign language in Girl Scouts and forgot all about this. Click the video. Learn the sign. If you see it, do NOT ignore it.
There have been a handful of times that I’ve contributed to the bystander effect. I’m not particularly shy about sharing my opinions. But I’m also born and raised in the third largest city in the U.S., where people keep their heads down and mind their business. In a metropolitan area with 2.72 million people, we’re too busy trying to juggle our own lives to (usually) become busybodies — give or take a few garden police.
Every blue moon, I run into a situation that challenges this theory — or whether to choose to be the one person in the room who proves people care.
There was that time when I observed a guy darting into the same revolving door opening as the girl he was with — grabbing her by the back of her neck as soon as they entered the building. I was running late for work, but the look of fear on her face caught my attention.
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She wouldn’t make eye contact with me or anyone, and this guy was clearly not intending to let her out of his sight. I turned away, intending to catch my train. But I just couldn’t do it. I got halfway out of the building and returned to look for her.
Then there was that time when I was in a Metra train station and observed a mother scowl at her 5- or 6-eight-year-old son. She blurted out, “You ain’t gone be shit, nigga” in front of a lobby of white people. My eyes widened and my neck snapped back, looking from the mother to the son. As far as I could tell, the kid was just playing around on the floor. I don’t know what set her off, but I wondered if he would grow up to be one of those men who makes a point of dating anybody but someone who has physical features like his mother. (I’ve seen this happen way too many times. If the first woman you love treats you like this, it can have a lasting effect.)
But how could I judge her lethal words when I had said something worse the same night? In that same train station and on the same day as the mother-son altercation, 17-year-old me had just slammed down a pay phone (in the days of pagers, not smartphones), after yelling at an ex-boyfriend that, “I hope you get shot in the heart so you know how I feel.”
Clearly, that relationship was on its last leg, but I didn’t really want the man to die. I just wanted him to be as heartbroken as I was while being all dressed up and standing alone — and getting no explanation for two days. Everybody in that train station had to have heard me yell that retort into the pay phone. Even if they didn’t, the rain cloud hovering over my head should’ve made them pull out their own umbrellas.
There was that other time I was walking my dog and saw two boys surround another student and take off the latter person’s jacket, throwing it onto the ground. Jacket Student scurried to put the coat back on. One of the two boys would yank it off again. I slowed down, wondering why this person was trying so hard to hide behind a jacket on a clearly hot summer day. I saw this play out at least three times. The white T-shirt that the Jacket Student was wearing underneath the coat didn’t have anything particularly interesting printed on it.
And even though my Hound mix usually wants to sniff every single blade of grass as we walk, this dog was in a big rush to get past that school playground before I could figure out what was going on. It wasn’t until I got to the end of the block that I realized I couldn’t tell if Jacket Student was a boy or a girl. All I saw was a head full of curls rushing to hide behind the jacket. I realized what may have been interesting to these two boys wasn’t what was on the shirt but what was under the shirt: breast buds.
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Is the bystander effect making people think no one cares?
I could’ve misread the three occurrences — well, not the kid. There was absolutely positively no way in the world that a mother should speak to her child like that, slurs included. (I stopped defending the n-word in college.)
But I’d had about enough of minding my business with a recent neighbor. At least two people in the building had started calling her, “That lady who curses out her daughter.” The odd part about this description is I’d had conversations with this neighbor multiple times, and she was cheerful or happily gossiping. I’d complimented their daughters’ hair and how it looked like mine after a fresh conditioner — thick and fluffy. (The oldest daughter immediately covered her hair with her hands, as though that was something to be ashamed of. I raised an eyebrow, telling the girl her hair was gorgeous. Their father, who popped up occasionally, was about my complexion and confirmed why their hair texture was different than their mother’s straight, thin hair.)
I never heard the mother (who looked like a white woman with a good tan) raise her voice at other adults, including when she was upset with her landlord. But her oldest daughter (who looked like a light-skinned Black person) would catch all kinds of hell on the way to the car and getting out of the car.
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The mother would start screaming at her oldest daughter from the car all the way up until they got to their condo unit. And while she was yelling at the oldest, she was holding the hand of the youngest daughter (same complexion and hair type as the oldest daughter). It was wild to see this on my outdoor surveillance camera almost every day — a mom having an affectionate moment with one daughter that looked like something out of a coloring book while treating the other child like a character in an Iceberg Slim street fiction book.
In one video clip, the oldest daughter darted behind a tree with a pizza box in her hand. The mother, while still holding the youngest daughter’s hand, was using every single curse word she could think of and telling the oldest “to go stay with your fucking father then.”
When I wasn’t deleting camera video footage, I could hear these public altercations almost as loud as my television. After the zillionth time of ignoring this mother constantly call her daughter a “bitch,” what finally made me go from disappointed to angry was the mother snapping “BLACK BITCH!” at the top of her lungs while her oldest daughter stormed into the house. (Yes, the mom was still holding the hand of the youngest daughter.) And that was when “minding my business” ended.