BROWN FEMALE PRIVILEGE

I'm a single white 41-year old male. I rent a small and miserable room in an unpopular part of town so that my rent is low enough to allow me to work part-time and travel quite a lot. Of course the woman upstairs is a single mother and she can afford a gigantic 7-room appartment for herself and one daughter, all on a 22-hour a week job, thanks to the welfare state, but that's not what this piece is about.

One of the disadvantages of living in a cramped space is that you have to rub shoulders with fellow roomates a little too often, and from a little too close. While each room is entirely seperate and has its own lock and mailbox, we do share bathrooms and common hallways. One of the other renters is a 22-year old Haitian immigrant. She came in about a year ago and never really adapted to the place. She spends an inordinate amount of time wandering aimlessly in the corridors, hugs the bathroom for literally hours, keeps pestering the intendant, and is generally a nuisance. I would already be considered a monster just for saying this out loud, because tolerance only ever works one way: WE the local people have to tolerate THEM. But again, if that was all there was, I wouldn't say a thing.

However the situation culminated recently when that girl had a breakup (or something, I don't know her that much) and started behaving in a completely random and unacceptable manner. She started making noisy fusses in the common areas at any time of day or night; she literally lied down and started sleeping in the middle of the hallway or in front of other tenant's doors, with her pillow and everything. One night, she was completely drunk, as well as deeply intoxicated on something else. Around 2 AM, she started trying to break into random tenant's appartments. She tried breaking in my place by barging and pulling on my door. I had to go out and try to reason with her (impossible) and escorting her back to her own room. But she came back, at 2h30, then 3h10, then 3h40, then 4h10. On her fifth "visit", I called the cops.

They came in around an hour later. And what did they do? They politely asked her to stop doing that and to go to bed. So of course she kept doing it, and around 6 AM, another tenant also called the cops. They came back and asked her one more time to please not do that then left. She finally ran out of energy around 7h30 and went to bed.

Now you ask, "How is any of this sexist or racist? Did the cops do anything wrong?" No, I don't really think so. But an old trick of mine is : if I suspect that something could be sexist or racist, I flip it around to see if the outcome would be different. Now try picturing this situation instead. If I, as a 41-year old white male, got completely drunk and intoxicated on powerful psychotropes, and tried breaking into a 22-year old girl's room in the middle of the night, and the cops arrived...do you think they would politely ask me to stop and then leave?

It's pretty funny just to think about it. And yes,I understand that the cops have to do assessment of risk and so on, that I'm considered more "dangerous" by default and I should just accept it and so on. But the main beef I have about situations like these is this : showing people that they can get away with more deviant behavior than other people because of their identity is not a good way to integrate them.