2020-05-28 – Harvard versus the University of Chicago. That’s what stood out for me when I read the New York Times story about the white woman in Central Park who called the cops on an African-American man who asked her to put her dog on a leash.

We all have our prejudices and one of mine is to be judgmental about my fellow UChi graduates.

And it’s not just the UChi connection. There are career similarities with both of the participants. I have a dog and I know that it creates issues when you encounter people on the street or in parks. And for that reason, I have little patience with people who leave their dogs off leash in places where encounters like that are likely to happen. When I see it, I am tempted to take out my phone to record the incident. Kit always tells me to put the phone away. It is a hostile act.

So here we have two people in a nasty confrontation who are uncomfortably close to me. I can’t write the behavior off to some other cozy prejudice.

Of course, I don’t have to write the story off to cozy prejudice, all of the media and social media are there to do it for me.

But I’m not writing to rehash those prejudices. I’m writing to say how terribly ordinary this story was—with the emphasis on “terribly.”

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