"Label Us Angry"
by Jeremiah Torres
It hurts to know that the most painful and shocking event of my life happened in part because of my race—something I can never change. On October 23, 1998, my friend and I experienced what would forever change our perceptions of our hometown and society in general.
We both attended elementary, middle, and high school in the quiet, prosperous, seemingly sophisticated college town of Palo Alto. In the third grade, we happily sang “It’s a Small World,” holding hands with the children of professors, graduate students, and professionals of the area, oblivious to our diversity in race, culture, or experience. Our small world grew larger as we progressed through the school system, each year learning more about what made us different from each other. But on that October evening, the world grew too large for us to handle.
Carlos and I were ready for a night out with the boys. It was his seventeenth birthday, and we were about to celebrate at the pool hall. I pulled out of the Safeway driveway as a speeding driver delivered a jolting honk. I followed him out, speeding to catch up with him, my immediate anger getting the better of me.
We lined up at the stoplight, and the passenger, a young white man dressed for the evening, rolled down his window; I followed. He looked irritated.
“He wasn’t honking at you, you stupid fuck!”
His words slapped me across the face. I opened my stunned mouth, only to deliver an empty breath, so I gave him my middle finger until I could return some angry words. He grimaced and reached under his seat to pull out a bottle of mace, spraying it directly in my face, barely missing Carlos, who witnessed the bizarre scene in shock. It burned.
“Take that you fucking lowlifes! Stupid chinks!”
Carlos instinctively bolted out the door at those words. He started pounding the white guy without a second thought, with a new anger he had never known or felt before. Pssssht! The white guy hit Carlos point blank in the face with the mace. He screamed; tires squealed; “fuck you’s” were exchanged.
We spent the next ten minutes half-blind, clutching our eyes in the burning pain, cursing in raging anger that made us forget for moments the intense, throbbing fire on our faces. I crawled out of my car to follow Carlos’s screams and curses, opening my eyes to the still, spectating traffic surrounding us. I stumbled to the sidewalk, where Carlos pounded the ground and recalled the words of the white guy. We needed water.
I stumbled further to a nearby house that had lights in the living room. I doorbelled frantically, but nobody answered. I appealed to the traffic for help. They just watched, forming a new route around my car to continue about their evening. The mucous membranes in our sinuses cut loose, and we spit every few seconds to sustain our gasping breaths. After nearly five minutes of appeals, a kind woman stopped to call the cops and give us water to quench the burning.
The cops came within minutes with advice for dealing with the mace. We tried to identify the car and the white guy who had sprayed us, and they sent out the obligatory all points bulletin. They questioned us soon after, asking if we were in a gang. I returned a blank stare with a silent “no.” Apparently, two Filipino teenagers finding trouble on a Friday evening raised suspicions of a new Filipino gang in Palo Alto—yeah, all five of us.
I often ask myself if it would have been different had I been driving a BMW and dressed in an ironed polo shirt and slacks, like a typical Palo Alto kid. Maybe then the white guy would not have been afraid and called us lowlifes and chinks. I don’t think so. He wasn’t afraid of us; he initiated the curses and maced us from a safe distance. He reached out to hurt us because he was having a bad day and we looked different.
That night was our first encounter with overt racism that stems from a hatred of difference. We hadn’t seen it through the smiles and happy songs of elementary school or the isolated cliques of middle and high school, but now we knew it was there. We hadn’t seen it through the clean-cut, sophisticated facade of the Palo Alto white guy, but now we knew it was there. The “lowlife,” “chink,” and “gangster” labels made us different, marginalizing us from the town we called home.
Those labels made us angry, but we hesitated to project that anger. At first, we didn’t tell anyone except our closest friends, afraid our parents would find out and react irrationally by locking us in our rooms to keep us away from trouble. But then we realized that the trouble had found us, and we decided to voice our anger.
We wrote an anonymous article in the school newspaper narrating the incident and the underlying racism that had come to surface. We noted that the incident wasn’t purely racial, or a hate crime, but proof that racist tendencies still exist, even in open-minded suburban towns like Palo Alto. Parents, students, and teachers were shocked, maybe because they knew the truth in what we were saying. Many asked if it was Carlos and me who had been maced, but I responded, “Does it matter? What matters is that some people in this town still can’t accept diversity. It’s sad.” We confronted the community with an issue previously reserved for hypothetical classroom discussions and brought it into the open. It was the least we could do to release our anger and expose its roots, hoping for a change in those who chose to label us.
After the article, Carlos and I took different routes. I continued with my studies, complying with my regimen of high school classes and activities as my anger subsided. I tried to lay the incident aside, having exposed it and promoted self-inspection and possible change in others through writing. Carlos remained angry. Why not? He got a face full of mace and racist labels for his seventeenth birthday. He alienated himself from the white majority and returned the mean gestures of the white guy to the yuppie congregation of Palo Alto. He became an outsider. Whenever someone would look at him funny, he would stare back, sometimes too harshly.
On the day after finals, he was making his way through the front parking lot of school when a parent looked at him funny. He stared back. The parent called him a punk. Carlos exploded. He cursed and gestured all he could at the father, and when he sped away in his Suburban, Carlos followed. Carlos couldn’t keep up with the Suburban, so he took a quarter from his pocket and threw it at the back window, shattering it to pieces. Carlos ran away when the cops came to school.
Within two days, students had identified Carlos as the perpetrator, and he was suspended from school as the father called his lawyer, indicting Carlos of “assault with the intent to hurt.” Weeks passed until a court hearing, and Carlos attended anger management counseling, but he was still angry— angry that he was being tried over throwing a quarter and that once again “the white guys were winning.” His mother scraped up the little money she had to spare to afford him a lawyer for the trial, but there was no contesting the father’s accusations. Carlos was sentenced to a night in juvenile hall and two hundred hours of community service over some angry words and throwing a quarter. He became a convicted felon.
He had learned once again that he couldn’t win against the labels thrown at him, the labels that hurt him more than the mace or the night in juvy, and so he became more of an outsider. In both cases, the labels distanced us from the “normal” Palo Altans: white, clean-cut, wealthy. That division didn’t always exist, however; it was created by the generalizations “normal” Palo Altans made through labels. To them, we looked like lowlifes, chinks, gangsters, and punks. In truth, we were two Filipino Americans headed toward Stanford and Berkeley, living in a town that swiftly disowned us with four reckless labels after raising us for ten years. Label us angry.