albeit albedo and giving other things away

"Hey," I said, as I sat down next to my PoC friend, "there's a lot of white people here."

I thought I had said it softly, but she later told me that I had said it "kind of loud." Ano...

We had arrived to find a Peace Thingy basement of a hundred plus seated folks, deep in "Dave Matthews Country," and I looked around to find that it was about as white as the performance of Eve Ensler's "The Good Body" that I seen some weeks before. Both times, I'd say, about 97% of the audience passed as white.

Of course, my mixed race friend and I had happened upon front row (and yet discount) tickets for Eve's show, and it's kind of hard to notice anybody else but Eve and her sixty five inch balance ball with seats like those.

As I think about the basement scene now, reflecting on how uncomfortable I felt in that space, I realize that it was mostly white men that "took a staring" to me, to coin a correctly spelled phrase, whereas the audience of "The Good Body" was mostly (about 97%) middle and upper-class women.

I suppose there are reasons why the male gaze is, for the most part, distinctly male.

As I talked about the overwhelming albedo of that space with my PoC friend -- I was going to write hapa kepani, but I just learned about the claim of cultural appropriation wrt to these terms -- I realized why I might have felt that way.

I'm sure most of you have walked into a room and felt the collective eyes upon you. But how many of you have felt that that "mob-eye" (the Salient Mien or Mean? haha) stayed upon you still, long after you take a seat? When I feel that collective eye, I'm not sure what to do. Should I look back at the atomic men gazing my way, like a Star Trek nerd modulating her shields to throw off some unasked-for unrequited tractor beam? Should I defer, kowtow and avert my eyes? escape the space ("the goggles do nothing!") or just take it with a statistically insignificant grain of salt?

I told my friend that I realized it may not be "their fault." They might be looking at me slightly more often, consciously or unconsciously, for whatever reason, but they probably don't realize what it means when everyone else does the same thing, like some Tragedy of Cow-eye Grazing-angle Commons.

In a small group, you can ignore such visual vibes as the numbers are small and the effect is all but suspect. But in a large group, I realized, if 99% of the audience looks at the other one percent just slightly more often, then on a collective scale, it could easily add up to something more than a little disconcerting.

It's like how google doesn't index "the" to save space, so one googler told me, as a little bit of The Everything adds up to the lot of lots. Except that in such an amply "albedo" space like the one I had occupied and then left, we were just getting indexed, getting parsed and crawled more than we might like, and in real life I can't so easily shoo these spiders off.