Conditioning is important to overcome. When I moved to the “Deep South”, Mississippi from upstate New York, I kept hearing ‘sir’ and ‘mam.’ I was teaching at a university as a graduate student and my students kept saying ‘sir.’ I couldn’t understand it and didn’t like it. It was from both blacks and whites. It felt worse coming from blacks as it was something blacks shouldn’t be saying to a white. I clearly had different conditioning and daily expectations.

In the north, racism is more ‘obviously’ systemic, where blacks are segregated by geography, made by white flight to the suburbs and ‘sundown’ laws where blacks could work in a factory on the second shift but couldn’t live in the blue-collar town where the factory was located on the Niagara river. After their shift, they had to return to the inner city. Language wasn’t a marker of difference as it was in the South, were people lived in a more ‘checkerboard’ type of way.

The system of marking racial ‘subordination’ was done differently, not by absence but was done in a way of presence. In some places, like the ‘upscale’ bar in Mississippi, had no blacks in it I noticed. People up north don’t always ‘see’ the systemic racism because the system they live in has already been visibly separated by geographic boundaries.

I was just watching some speeches by Malcom X and saw his attraction. He cared nothing about any conditioned differences and confronted everyone with equal outspokenness. He wouldn’t give into the white interviewer and explained himself with unrelenting force, whether they accepted his answers or not. He had ‘unconditioned’ himself by entering into a system that was unfamiliar to the whites at the time, Islam.

But he use of the that system wasn’t to become embedded in it, but to use it to learn to be unconditioned and speak truth to power. I had read his autobiography a couple decades ago or so, but it took me a long time to grasp his “unconditioning tactic,” and they he threatened not just the Nation of Islam leaders, but the surrounding white culture by existing outside of both systems as he stood for something greater than both: the ability to stand completely in dignity unbowed as human.

Granted, I still may not grasp the full measure of his impact, but just trying to reflect on the provocation of your article that discusses. In a sense, I think he wouldn’t wait to play the ‘game’ of waiting to be asked to give his membership number but just announced it. If a clerk is just acting in the system, don’t get upset when being passed over for not being asked like the previous whites. Be outside it and give straightaway when putting your books down as you already know the rules. Don’t answer to the security guard in the store or even look as he is giving his expected provocation from being trapped in the system. Not dignifying a response or even acknowledge to a debasing question might be the best response.

Best of luck and thanks for your insights.