Bengali bag

Yesterday, AJ and I went up to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. I backed some supplies and put them in a bag I brought home from India (see photo to the right). The writing on the bag is in Bengali - one of the many languages spoken in India. While I was pushing AJ on the swing at the large children's playground, I looked down at the bag and realized that most people wouldn't recognize the writing as Bengali. Without knowing better, they might have thought the writing was Arabic and assume that I was Muslim - I am an International Everyman after all (see prior post). All of a sudden, I became very self-conscious of what people might be thinking and kept expecting parents to pull their children away from me as if I were a terrorist. That feeling persisted for the rest of the time we were at Golden Gate Park - a couple of hours. I'm not proud of my response and, as far as I could tell, no one noticed the bag or thought anything of it if they did. But it did give me some small appreciation for what it must feel like to be a victim of racial profiling and the assumptions people sometimes make based on little or no information.