“What Dan did was just a version of the basic assessments humans do to other humans to categorize them into friend or foe, safe or dangerous, tribe or stranger. As a white man in America, he’s at the top of the food chain, so his check was for dominance. Mine as a woman is usually for threat level, and I can only guess at yours.” He was silent for a long moment – long enough that all my noisy self-doubt conversations started talking at once, mostly about how I had no business discussing race because I couldn’t understand what his experience had been. “I look for their fear,” he said quietly.
