The other week I posted two pictures of myself side by side: the first from 20 years ago and the second taken this year, in which my dead eyes and grey beard show how hilariously poorly I’ve aged.
I got lots of likes, however, amid the good-natured jabs, an old friend off-handedly commented that I looked like a terrorist.
She didn’t mean anything by that -- she’s an actual a friend, a good person – and since Facebook is where we elect presidents and not the place for serious discussion, I let the comment go unchallenged. But I was curious, since the photo was just my face, I wasn’t holding the head of a journalist, what about me looks like a terrorist?
I’m being disingenuous. This was not the first time that’s been said to me. Occasionally, when I wear a certain kind of cap low on my face and I catch sight of my own reflection, even I think, “I wouldn’t want to sit next to that guy on a plane.”
Getting an extra scrutiny at the airport is mild compared to what some people endure because of the way they look. Recently, a student in my class told us his roommate’s parents had joked that their son was rooming with a thug. My student was laughing as he told the story, but we all know “thug” is the new N-word -- the acceptable pejorative for whites to use on TV -- and I couldn’t have been the only one to notice his voice cracked even while he was laughing.
If we wish to actively resist our nation’s current descent into madness, might it be worthwhile if even my fellow NPR listeners -- we “children of the light,” as Saul Bellow derisively called liberals -- checked our own occasional impulses toward short-hand judgery?
Anyway, all I really wanted was for someone to say I looked cute.
I’m Dan Libman, and that’s my perspective.
