Halloween costume almost got me arrested.

The man looked at me suspiciously and said, "We almost had you arrested."  He was still wary.  He was checking me out.

Me.  In costume

Body language is the most powerful communication.

I had been simply standing quietly in the bright noonday sun, having arrived early for a class I was to teach.  It was Halloween.  I had prepared my class to see someone new as a substitute teacher that day.  Some adults had noticed me through a window, profiled me as a dangerous menace, and made emergency calls to summon help.

I got to experience something useful.  I learned what it is like to be perceived as being dangerous per se.  I wasn't "presumed innocent".  I got to experience what it was like to be a large black or Hispanic man, or perhaps a person of any race or ethnicity who looks strange.  Or perhaps simply anyone with a conspicuous disfiguration.   
  

My costume consists of three things:  a hat with long stringy hair, a mouthpiece with ugly teeth, and a tee shirt with a painted on tool belt and painted hairy chest.  I carried a hammer.

I looked like a rough workman, racially white, but with the bad teeth and bad hair.  I was at a local private high school, St. Mary's in Medford, Oregon, awaiting the start of a class that I teach on Writing for Publication, i.e. blog writing.  The hat with stringy hair changed me from a middle class teacher into an unkempt worker.  The bad teeth brought me down another notch.  The fact that my shirt signified skilled worker, not homeless vagabond, did not cancel out the impression.   I appear to be a workman, so the hammer would be a tool, not a weapon, but in the context of my hair and teeth and generally frightening appearance, the hammer was defined into something menacing.

Bad hair and teeth meant I was trouble.

Me. One minute later, out of costume.

Apparently several adults in the school saw me, set off alarms, and school authorities hastened to me to look over the situation so they could apprise the police. It makes sense.  In an world of Sandy Hook and other school shootings the adults are wary as they should be.  What I appeared to be was a suspicious and dangerous guy.  I set off red flags of warning, so they carefully came close to me and the closer they got the more frightening I was.

I did what a white middle class American man can do, but a large dark skinned American of any socio-economic status cannot do.   I changed.  I took off my hat with its stringy hair and took out my fake teeth.  

Bingo!  I changed status. 

I was now a middle class white guy.  I said I was a teacher here, room 206, mentioned the names of the Vice Principal and the course I was teaching.  I smiled.  I looked innocuous and tried to sound friendly.

They were slow to believe the new me.  The impression I had set, and the introduction I had been given in my description persisted. ("There is a scary man standing by the bicycle rack near the door!!")  First impressions matter.  I dropped names of fellow teachers and the principal, I mentioned "Mod 2", an insider term for the course program, I invited them to accompany me to my class, which would start in about 3 minutes.  I worked to appear "legitimate."  After a minute or two they relaxed.  I was ok.

Stringy hair

I came away from the experience with a few lessons.

1.  Realize the privilege I carry as a white male born into a middle class home.  It is very useful to be presumed to be a law abiding citizen.  Once I affirmed that that was who I was, I was accepted.

2.  Realize how dangerous it is to be presumed by others to be dangerous.  In costume I was doing nothing wrong.  I was simply standing, waiting for class to start, but with bad hair and teeth was judged to be dangerous.  Had police, and not just inside school authorities, been called, they would have arrived understanding the situation to be that a dangerous man was at the school.  They may have arrived assuming the worst, guns drawn.  They might have interpreted my actions to have been non compliant or an act of aggression.  People get shot by police when they assume the worst.

Bad teeth

3.  Realize how much more dangerous this would have been had it been at night, for a night class,  when the fact that I was simply standing quietly might have been harder to interpret, or have been interpreted as more suspiciously.  

4. Realize how few cues are required completely to change how people read a situation.  A hat with stringy hair and a bad teeth mouthpiece changed my status from safe to dangerous.

5. Realize that the decisions others made about me were built around visual first impressions, not anything I said with language.  I was simply standing quietly. 

Humans read body language and we profile.

A recurring theme of this blog is that candidates for president are doing extended public presentations of themselves, and that the most important part of the presentation is appearance, tone, attitude, demeanor.  Not policy.   Readers of this blog with a strong policy orientation have disagreed. Yes, policy matters. It needs to be congruent with the overall character developed by the politician.   A politician who presents as a dominating unapologetic politically incorrect bully needs to voice policies that are congruent.  Trump does.

But I consider my experience on Halloween to be evidence that people have a deep, primary response to non verbal cues, and they come first and those impressions are persistent.