Beyond the Bus

When he was attending a black-tie affair recently, Byrd, in his tuxedo, was approached in the men's room by a white man who "had decided I must be in charge of the towels. I could've gotten angry, cursed the person out. Or I could have ignored it. Or I could do something to make them reflect. . . . So I reintroduced myself, 'Hi, I'm Dr. Byrd.' " He considered the embarrassed "oops" a lesson learned.

Sherell Daniels wishes she hadn't bothered.

"I was in Whole Foods in Tenleytown and this older man, white, thought I bumped into his cart, but I didn't," she recalls. The man kept loudly and sarcastically saying 'Excuse me,' Daniels says, and she ignored him. Standing at the store's customer service desk minutes later, she saw the same shopper approach.

"Oh, you were rushing to cash your welfare benefits," she heard him say loudly.

Daniels fought back her first instinct, to bombard him with the list of her accomplishments, tell him she was a lawyer, an Ivy League graduate. Instead, she silently seethed. Outside the store, she waited for the old man to emerge.

"Don't you ever speak to me that way again!" she shouted. "My ancestors are why you're here!"

When she turned to walk home, she saw the man following her. Anger turned to uneasiness, and she went to get the store security guard. The man walked away.

"Actually, I regretted saying something," she says. She believes that people who hurt others do so because they're wounded themselves. "I know nothing about his life experience," Daniels says of the old man. "You can't change people's hearts. It's a heart condition." In the end, "I was just wasting my breath, wasting my time."

Jack Dovidio is a University of Connecticut social psychologist who has studied race relations for 30 years, focusing on subtle racism.

In the post-civil rights era, Dovidio says, racism shifted from the sanctioned cruelties of segregation to something more complicated.

"It's like a virus that mutated into a new form, one more difficult to recognize and therefore more difficult to combat," Dovidio says in a telephone interview. Even white people who consider themselves vehemently anti-racist are surprised to learn that they nod more frequently at other whites than blacks during conversation, for example, Dovidio says.

"Black people can feel it like you know a dog's going to bite you," civil rights attorney Donald Temple says of the everyday indignities. "The energy level changes, you feel that coldness." A woman enjoying an afternoon of shopping feels her blood pressure rise as salesclerks hover too closely, or security guards wait outside a restroom door. One client, Temple says, was surrounded by police as he left a bridal shop because some employee found him inexplicably "suspicious." He had just selected a gown for his Russian fiancee, Temple says, and had the receipt for the dress deposit in his pocket.