Reflections on RAOK

R.A.O.K. -- also known as Random Acts of Kindness. I promote them. But rarely do I like to talk about my own. Talking about the random acts of kindness you personally do, I believe, can undermine the act itself. What I mean by this is that I feel that by telling others about the moments when you do something kind for someone at random one can easily slide into a moment of hedonism -- a moment of boasting about your perceived innate kindness, rather than an opportunity to inspire others to follow suite. To avoid falling into this self-tooting of one's horn, I prefer to keep these stories to myself. Seeing as how I love to talk and share my life stories (or something that loosely resembles a story, because who am I kidding? I babble a lot), I consciously choose to avoid talking about the RAOK I do. After almost every instance of a RAOK, I find myself falling into an intense state of self-reflexivity. This state I more often than not move into is more than likely the reason I prefer to keep my RAOK to myself. A recent RAOK I did occurred about a month ago, and it has lingered in my mind longer than usual. Therefore, I am momentarily forgoing my habitual ways of not sharing my RAOK. This isn't necessarily to attempt to inspire someone or make someone think about something in a different way -- I am really doing it for more selfish reasons. Writing it out enables me to re-digest it.

Enough with the disclaimer. About a month ago I was crossing Guadalupe, the drag that runs on the Westside of campus directly next to CMA, on a mission for food. Heading north en route to feed my face with something yummy from Spicy Pickle, I was stopped by a girl probably about my age for money to buy something to eat at Jack-in-The-Box -- a common occurrence not only in Austin, but particularly on the drag. When one hungry stomach meets another I sympathize, for I am sure she was much more famished than I. Seeing as how I am a firm believer in seeing the outcome of your investments -- that is to say, I am hesitant to celebrate the act of money donations, I offered to buy her lunch, instead of giving her my spare change. She agreed. And without hesitation, we walked into Jack-in-The-Box. We briefly chatted while in line, and I told her she could order whatever she wanted. When it was our turn to order, she asked for some breakfast tacos and a shake. After some playful banter with the energetic black transgendered woman taking out order, I told the girl that I was going to head out and that I hope she enjoys her meal. After moments of silence from both of us, my social anxiety kicked in, and so I decided to leave. I smiled, said goodbye, and walked out the door. Patting myself on the back, I felt happy to at the very least fill her stomach and at the most give her hope that someone -- even a stranger -- can care about her. And so, I bounded across the street in the direction of the Spicy Pickle. Arriving at my destination hungry and happy, I swung open the door in anticipation to fill my own stomach and immediately the hunger pain shifted to a nauseating sickness. Never before had I experienced so consciously my class position. The scents, sights, and people were significantly different from the space of the Jack-in-The-Box. Instead of a black transgendered woman standing behind the register, it was a straight-edged, white girl taking orders while clean-cut (by Austin standards this means well-maintained facial hair) white dudes preparing the food behind her -- as opposed to the predominantly Hispanic employees at Jack-in-The-Box. I never felt a more overwhelming feeling of guilt. Here I am an upper-to-middle class graduate student at the University of Texas attempting to make someone's day by giving them food and maybe some hope in a greasy paper bag. For someone who spends her days critiquing capitalism and it's spawn: gluttonous consumption and taboo class issues, here I was blatantly participating in it by performing my class identity. Often, I do indeed realize and reflect upon my own privileged position, but words really cannot describe the overwhelming feeling that came over me the moment I walked into Spicy Pickle. I seriously felt physically ill -- a wall of privilege knocked the wind out of me.

So, after replaying this scenario out in my head and reflecting upon my actions and the girl I met that day, I am left in a state of total distraught. One thing this experience did was snap me out of sleepwalking through my life as a privileged individual. Undeniably, I don't think about this everyday nor through every action I make, but I certainly have more moments of awareness because of it. As a woman with an often ambiguously read racial and ethnic identity, I think I can easily slip into a mode of being where I easily and sometimes aggressively point to occurrences in my life experiences that exemplify how I have been easily slotted into a not-so privileged position. It gives people some amount of social capital to talk about how they come from something or somewhere not-so-great to a position of higher privilege, but continue to encounter moments of some kind of -ism (racism, sexism, etc.). Grappling with all of this can be quite exhausting. While this whole experience can easily allow me to say to hell with doing anything like this again, I'd rather not completely disregard my act. Keeping this experience in mind brings a new layer of awareness to anything and everything I decide to do -- particularly when it comes to RAOK. What ever the underlying politics may be from doing such acts, there's something inexplicable and potentially powerful about giving someone your time and, thus, cultivating the opportunity for an exchange of smiles and dialogue (no matter how awkward your social anxiety makes it) to occur between strangers.