GUILFORD — I take issue with Christopher Bridges essay expressing unhappiness about being incorrectly accosted for shoplifting at Hannaford's.
More to the point, I take issue with The Commons featuring this feast of innuendo and cloudy reasoning.
Bridges' allegation - “ask any person who doesn't have white skin […] their feelings about this place and you will get [...] an unshakable feeling that people are looking at us differently or that we're being followed,” etc. - is a gross and intellectually lazy statement.
My Brattleboro-based family includes several members who don't have white skin and dozens more in-laws who regularly visit our town who don't have white skin either. In 20 years, I have never once heard such a complaint.
Even if it were occasionally true, it is not necessarily evidence of racism. Should it surprise anyone that residents of the whitest state in the country take a second look at people “of color”? Chinese people are intrigued by Westerners with red hair. So what?
And teenagers and college students have been “profiled” as potential shoplifters since the advent of retailing.
This unfortunate event has more than one plausible explanation. It's unfortunate, to say the least, that some of the offended parties chose the most dramatic, divisive, and least-plausible one and ignored the others.