Rude Cabbies & Racism

As a partial response to a recent hachet job on cab drivers in the Bay Citizen, I'm re-publishing the below post from a few years ago.

In his classic study, The Nature of Prejudice (1954), Gordon Allport described prejudice as an

"Aversive or hostile attitude toward a person who belongs to a group, simply because he belongs to that group, and is therefore presumed to have the objectionable qualities ascribed to that group."

People with these "objectionable qualities" are often described as being: ignorant, lazy and stupid but you have to watch them because they're clever and dishonest and they'll cheat you if they can. Although different groups have different stereotypes assigned to them (Blacks, Chinese and Jews for instance) they are almost all universally described as being "dirty" and "smelling bad."

One could argue that it is usually members of the "lower" classes who are looked down upon (pun intentional) and, since they do most menial labor, this stereotype might have some basis in fact. A laborer working in cotton fields or a cab driver working all day in the hot sun might not smell too good after a 10 hour shift.

In my opinion, however, this argument is mainly a rationalization. The real reason for the stereotype is the desire of one group of people to feel superior to another. As Allport emphasized, prejudice is "Psychologically powerful. Racism makes people feel good."

In San Francisco 2012, of course, being a racist is not PC. Putting people down for being bus drivers, waiters, janitors or cab drivers, on the other hand, is cool. In fact, the same stereotypes formerly reserved for people of color or non-gringo ethnicity are now openly applied on the basis of class. Bus drivers and cab drivers make particularly good targets for slander because most of us do belong to minorities of one kind or another.

This allows modern hipsters to feed their petty power lusts without thinking of themselves as bigots.

The racial subtext to stereotypes of cab drivers comes home to me every few weeks when a customer gets in and tells me, "It's great to have a driver who speaks English." Well, I think we all speak English - although some of us have accents. I think that what the guy really wanted to say was, "It's great to have a white cab driver."

Being "white," however, does not necessarily save me from being stereotyped.

• Despite the fact that I take at least one shower a day and am neatly dressed when I work, I've been told that it was disgusting to ride with me because I was "filthy" and "stank."
• In my 28 years of driving, I've never intentionally taken a customer "the long way" but I've had  over a hundred people complain that I did so - a few of whom called either the police or my company. Although it's hard to pick a favorite among these, I think it might be the guy who called to say that I cheated him because I drove him from California and Polk to Pine and Baker using Pine instead of California (You need to know the city to fully appreciate this).
• Oh yes - the only person I ever intentionally took "the long way" was an attractive woman who I thought was flirting with me. I wanted more time to find out. As it turned out she was. I made up for my transgression by buying her dinner.
• I've been told that I was stupid (a thing that always interests me) a couple of hundred times and both the "A" and "MF" words have been used on me more frequently than I can count.
• I've also had two women spit in my face. Four different men have punched me and several others have tried to do so. I've had three attempted or threatened robberies that I managed to stop before they really started. Once a guy on the street walked up and hit me with a beer bottle for no apparent reason. Two different people have threatened to kill me - the last one because I refused to take an illegal left from the far right lane on Broadway across four lanes of traffic onto Stockton during rush hour. Dude said he was late for work.

Perhaps you, gentle reader, are thinking, 'What did he do to cause such behavior?' I have a real simple answer. I drove a cab.

I'm working on a more direct response to the Bay Guardian article that should be finished in a day or two.