Context and familiarity are overridden by skin color in white fear

Evidence

For instance: I was walking to my car one evening after a long day in the office when I saw the spouse of a colleague and raised my hand to say hello. But a peremptory glance let me know she was not interested. She seemed afraid. The fact that we’ve had dinner together and shared jokes, or that her partner writes about race, didn’t seem to matter. I was black, and it was dusk. … She hurried along and I got in my car. It’s Princeton. It’s a patrolled campus parking lot. The black guy is wearing an expensive suit. Doesn’t matter. The object of fear, in this instance, has only one identifiable quality: skin color. We see potential danger whenever we see these people. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 197

Categorization

• XREF: The author’s personal anecdote of being feared despite all contextual cues anticipates the function of anti-black habits overriding conscious knowledge that Glaude develops later in the book. — connects to: An inserted black body makes invisible whiteness and its amnesiac temporality visible — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 519