DWM: Driving While Mexican

Years have passed -- 35 of them, to be precise -- since I trained at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina as an initial entry soldier. I went on, over time, to receive a direct commission and become an officer, leaving behind enlisted days (though I benefited from that experience tremendously) and South Carolina. I have not been back until this year -- earlier to visit our Columbia-area campus briefly and today to visit my daughter Lizzie and my son-in-law Blaine. Lizzie and Blaine have been living in southern South Carolina now for three months. While they like it, they have run into a phenomenon with which they had never had to contend while living in California: racial discrimination.

Lizzie, my little professor (another Dr. Mahlou), reports that her classrooms contain mixed races who work together peaceably but self-segregate, with African Americans sitting on one side of the classroom, Caucasians on the other, and the others in the middle. She has talked to them about desegregation in their classroom, but they insist on sitting with their friends -- and their friends generally come from the same ethnic/racial group. Lizzie, who has found this voluntary segregation to be disconcerting, has intermixed them for projects, but for regular lecture-listening, they go back to their color-coded seats. By comparison, Lizzie grew up in an area that was racially blended, not merely mixed. As a result, her two closest girlfriends were Hispanic and Asian, and her boyfriends were (in order) African American, Hispanic, African American, Caucasian, Hispanic. She married Blaine, who is Hispanic. Typical Californians, my other children also grew up racially blind. Shane also married Hispanic, and Noelle's significant other, Ray, is African American. Donnie is as Caucasian as they come, and I am mostly Caucasian with a drop of Native American blood that "took" as far as my facial features are concerned.

Years ago when Lizzie graduated from the University of California at San Diego, President Clinton (in office at the time) asked to be the graduation speaker. (That created an interesting atmosphere for graduation: thorough searches and secret service men armed with machine guns sitting on the rooftop overlooking the graduation field.) For unknown reasons, President Clinton had chosen UCSD as the place to roll out his diversity policy. Lizzie and her classmates found the president's speech odd as they looked around the graduation rows and could hardly find any two students of the same race sitting together. Now, seeing the situation here in South Carolina in which the Caucasians generally hold the best jobs, the African Americans generally work in the service field, and the Mexicans constitute the labor pool (of course, not 100% of the time, but the general tendency is in this direction), she understands why the president felt a need for a diversity policy.

Blaine, however, feels the small prejudices the most because he is of Mexican descent. He gets pulled over by the police about once a week for unknown reasons. They run his license or plates and then let him go without explanation. He is convinced that he is pulled over for DWM (what he calls "Driving While Mexican") which cannot, of course, be fined. He drives the kind of car that Caucasians typically drive, and he dresses in ways that the Caucasians generally dress. He holds a supervisory position within the university system, and so he talks the way that Caucasians generally talk. He was born and raised in California; he did not know that he was supposed to act differently from the mainstream population. When Lizzie's department chair met Blaine briefly, she reacted mostly to his skin color. Trying to help Lizzie decide to accept the job offer, an acceptance that would be based on Blaine finding a job, the chair mentioned that Lizzie should talk to one of the sociology professors who had done a lot of research on the immigrant pool in South Carolina. When Lizzie explained that Blaine was not an immigrant, that he had been born and raised in the USA (albeit to parents who were Mexican immigrants), the chair amended her response to note that this sociology professor speaks Spanish. She did not know how to respond when Lizzie said that Blaine does not.

One wonders if this kind of thinking is a legacy from pre-Civil War days. Does attitude last a century and a half?

Lizzie and Blaine yearn to come back to California where their mixed-ethnicity marriage is common. There is value, though, I believe in remaining in South Carolina and being an example (maybe even trend-setter) to others.

Yes, I know that all people from South Carolina -- as all people anywhere -- are not necessarily alike. Still, I am praying for the SC police force to look past skin color and stop unfairly pulling Blaine over for DWM.

I would love to hear from any South Carolinians. Is my/our perception wrong? Is there some explanation that I do not know? Please weigh in!