You Only Bump Into People You Don’t Want to See

From Boston to DC. From DC to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. From Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Kigali, Rwanda, I’ve been on a plane for the past 36 hours.

I don’t like talking to people on planes. I know I should. I‘ve heard that you can meet the most fascinating people that way. But that’s not been my experience.

I meet the Swiss missionary who spends a 16-hour flight trying to convert me to some religion he made up. I meet the Mongolian businessman whose English is completely unintelligible but who insists on holding a conversation for the entirety of an 8-hour flight. I meet people who don’t know when to stop talking. I meet the people who think it’s OK to cut their fingernails on the food tray right next to me. But for some reason, I never meet fascinating people.

So I’ve developed a strategy. I use the Angry Black Man stereotype to my advantage. I try to look mean as shit as I get on the plane. I walk to my seat wearing a hooded sweatshirt, bumping DMX loud as hell on my iPod. And I make sure not to make eye contact with anyone in my aisle.  And for those who are not scared off by that, I simply pretend to be sleep whenever it looks like they’re about to start talking to me.

They may seem like extreme measures to take but doing so brings me peace and tranquility.

The only thing is, the Angry Black Man strategy doesn’t work when you’re on a plane full of black folks. They don’t fall for that shit. Without a defense, I fell prey to all types of mind-numbing conversation. But none worse than the one I had with someone I know.

During our layover in DC, standing behind me in line at the airport McDonalds was the dean of my undergrad. We made eye contact at the same time. If it happened any other way, I think both of us would have pretended we didn’t see each other. But we decided to be polite and chat.

Backstory: During my senior year in college a lot of racist shit went down on campus. He was the new dean and completely unprepared to deal with any racial issues. Mine was a conservative, business school so when he took the helm he probably figured that he’d have to deal with small, petty issues of academic dishonesty.

But as one of the students leading the charge against racism on our campus, I was constantly barging in his office demanding action. Yet even then, I kinda felt bad for him. It wasn’t that he was a bad person, but it was clear that he wasn’t comfortable talking about race, let alone responding to the outrage that erupted after a white student walked around campus in blackface and posted on Facebook, “All niggers need to go back to Africa and die of AIDS.”  So the dean responded in the most tepid, unhelpful way imaginable. He made the racist student to go an afternoon session of diversity training, to the outrage of all the black students on campus.

Cut to back to the airport.

After an awkward moment, he smiled and approached me, “You’re wearing the wrong colors, son” (referring to my red Harvard sweatshirt). I responded in kind and searched for a way to be pleasant and yet cut the conversation short. So I asked about how things were on campus and after a few minutes I said, “Well, it was good to see you. But my flight is taking off soon so I should head back to the gate.” We shook hands and then started walking back to our gates. After walking along side each of other for a few minutes, I reached out to shake his hand and said “Well, this is my gate. It was great seeing you.” He responded, “Yeah, this is my gate too. Where are you going?”

“Kigali, Rwanda.”

“Oh, me too!”

Apparently, my undergrad is building a new entrepreneurship education center in Rwanda and he’s coming to oversee it.

After making small talk with this man off and on for the last 24 hours, I long for simpler times. Times when I got seated next to funky ass passengers with stank ass breath who speak broken ass English for hours on end.

But the good news is I finally made it to Rwanda!  And the bad news is dean is staying at my hotel—right across the hall.

Again, why do bad things happen to good people?