Rules For Safety For Non-White Women: Getting Into A Strange Man’s Car May Save Your Life
The cognitive burden for BIPOC spans from microaggressions to getting shot for ringing a doorbell.
The first rule of safety for women is to never get into a strange man’s car. In fact, even if he has a gun, safety experts unanimously warn, it’s still better to run and risk getting shot than to get taken to a “second location.”
But on a lonely mountain road, I gladly jumped in a strange man’s car — but only because the alternative was to knock on someone’s door for help. My calculation as a person of color in a strange majority-White place, one where people have a lot of guns, was to take my chances with the man in the car.
I was newly in Aspen, Colorado, on a writers’ residency. Coming in from sea level New York City, I’d been felled by altitude sickness for two days. When I finally felt well enough to get outside, a stroll down the mountain road felt so revivifying, I kept going. I turned around when it was still plenty light out, but in an unfamiliar place, I missed the turnoff to my cabin and kept walking up the wrong part of the mountain, partly deceived by my cheap cell service that displayed an offline map that made it seem like I was on the correct path.
After sundown in the Colorado Rockies, the thin mountain air turns immediately frigid. I also recall the residency hosts warning fall was the season for extra caution, as bears were out fattening for hibernation. It seemed to get dark in an instant. My knapsack held only my ineffective phone and a flashlight with which I lit my way. There was no traffic. The only evidence of life was the cozy glow from the expensive homes dotting the mountainside.
Earlier in the day, I’d heard gunshots. It was too early for hunting season, my hosts said, and surmised it was one of their neighbors doing target “practice.” On my way down the road I did see someone shooting on their property, and I made sure to shout hello. Once contact was established, they considerately waited for me to walk past before resuming.
Now, seeing the warm glow of the houses, all I wanted — weary, not having eaten in days, dehydrated from vomiting, the temperature dropping — was to be back in my cozy cabin on the residence’s property. I fantasized about someone letting me warm up as I called my hosts to come to get me.
But some instinct adamantly would not let me walk down one of the long driveways to knock on a door.
I was thinking of Yoshiro Hattori.
In 1992, sixteen-year-old Yoshiro Hattori, a Japanese exchange student was going to a Halloween party in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with his white homestay brother; the two rang the doorbell on a house with Halloween decorations outside, but it wasn’t the right one. Realizing their mistake, the two began to return to the car when Rodney Peairs, the homeowner, emerged from the house holding a 44-magnum gun. Hattori turned, Peairs immediately shot and killed him.
This week in Kansas City, Ralph Yarl, also 16, also ringing the doorbell, was immediately shot by the homeowner from inside the house. Nonwhite people, even children, are immediately seen as threats/monsters/non-human. Yarl, despite being shot a second time at point-blank range, managed to run away; yet, he had to go to three houses to find help. At the third house, he only received aid after complying with the demand he lie on the ground with his hands in the air — which he did before he lost consciousness.
Decades earlier, Peairs and his wife Bonnie similarly confronted with a dying child, did not come out of their house until after police arrived, some forty minutes later. Bonnie Peairs in fact shouted “go away” at a neighbor who arrived to help. Rodney Peairs was acquitted of manslaughter. Hattori’s bereaved father responded through a translator, “The verdict is incredible, unbelievable.”
To be sure, these two cases are distinctly American occurrences that go beyond racist fever dreams — just two days after Yarl’s shooting, a 20-year-old White woman was shot and killed in upstate New York for driving down the wrong driveway; guns are clearly part of the equation, but race is always a catalyzing factor.
That night in Aspen, as I continued to trudge my Asian self up the mountain, shivering and scared, I noticed a lone cyclist was making his way down. He was gaining speed, but in desperation, I jumped in front of him; his bike skidded for a hundred feet until he managed to stop. Then he turned and said to me, oddly, “I thought you were my girlfriend!” Despite this strange interaction, I told him where I was trying to get to, and he affirmed (with a working phone) that I was severely off course. So severe he’d had to come back for me in his car.
It was pitch dark by the time he came back, finding me by the light from my flashlight. I was cold and nervous and realized no one — including my hosts — knew where I was. I typed out an email to my husband “I’m getting into a car with a man named Jay” and put it in the outbox, hoping it would automatically send if/when the phone reconnected. I should have cc’ed my hosts but at that point, my hypothermic brain thought, “well, if something happens to me, they’ll read about it on the news.”
“Jay” drove me back — the drive took twenty minutes. He dropped me off and I gratefully invited him to the public event weeks later that would be part of my fellowship. He showed up with his girlfriend, who was indeed, improbably, Asian — an adoptee. I later told my hosts what had happened, and they were aghast; they fixated on the danger of bears, while I was more concerned about humans with guns. It seemed absurd to have to explain to them how White people can ring doorbells without considering if they might die because of it.
Never, ever get in a strange man’s car as a woman. Unless you’re a person of color and the only alternative is to seek aid by knocking on a White person’s door in a place that is likely to have guns. A mistake that could cost you your life.
