A Racial Comment, Mortal Kombat, and the Lens of Expectation

A few days ago I was out getting lunch, which I normally pick up and bring back to my office. Usually, I’m too lazy to put on my coat as the places I tend to frequent are a quick few steps from my building’s door. So I typically brave the weather for a few seconds, go in, and quickly walk back.

On my way back though, something odd happened. I was walking along and heading the opposite way, on my left, were two young, college-age kids. As I passed, one of them cocked his head to me and say something that sounded like “Hey Kinlee, what up?”

For a split second, I had several thoughts race through my head. At first, I was confused and unsure what the guy had said. I then had a brief thought that I could just shrug, ignore the guy, and walk inside with my lunch. The thought then occurred to me that, maybe, the guy was saying some kind of racial shit to me.

As I’ve gotten older, these kinds of incidents have become a bit less frequent. They still happen mind you, but as both the times have changed over the years… racial incidents just simply don’t happen with that much regularity.

Again, in a matter of a second or two… all these thoughts went through my head, and I ended up turning around, and yelling out “What did you say?” at the backs of the guys walking away.

It’s interesting to note that, were I a younger person… I would have just slinked away. Confrontation was never a my strong suit. And I’ve found that as I’ve gotten older, my tolerance for this kind of thing has just zeroed out.

So I’m on the sidewalk by my building, holding my lunch, out in the cold without a jacket and yelling out at two kids. Without missing a beat, the kid who said something to me spins around and begins talking to me. And as he does, I’m looking at his face, my body tensing up and preparing for who knows what.

And in his eyes, he’s earnest. Eyes that are wide and kind, smiling even if you can believe that.

“You know… Kinlee… Mortal Kombat? He had this hair… ponytail…” I’m not sure I heard the name/reference correctly, and in the matter of a second or two I realized that he wasn’t throwing out racial stuff at all. He was talking about a friggin’ video game character.

It’s been ages since I’d last played any version of Mortal Kombat. And I had no idea who this character was. I kept getting confused and was asking did he mean Raiden? At a certain point I was convinced he was saying Chun-Li, and referencing Street Fighter instead.

I think this mix-up delighted the guy, because I saw him laughing when I asked if he said I looked like “Chun-Li, the WOMAN?”

We spent an awkward minute talking about this character, and I’m still not sure I heard it correctly. I loked over a list of Mortal Kombat characters, and Quan Chi is the closest-sounding one of them (though he doesn’t seem to have any hair).

By the end of our talk, I was laughing a lot, and said I’d have to look into the characters some more. The guy I spoke with was quite friendly, and… well, pretty much that: really, really friendly.

What kills me is that in a split-second, I went from high adrenaline (some guy said a racist comment to me) to a complete 180… where I was just talking with some guy about video games. It was an incredibly fast move from one emotional extreme to the other.

In looking back, I feel like the lesson I learned was one of expectations. Out there on the sidewalk, with my lunch and without my coat… I learned that the world presents itself in many ways. How I choose to filter the world, the lens with which I view things – I realized it’s a malleable thing.

If you walk around expecting the worst in people, that’s likely what you’ll see. Walk around expecting kindness and the best in people, that’s what it comes down to I think. Looking back on that afternoon, it felt like the world took its big finger, and tapped me square on the shoulder, reminding me that I need to change my point of view.