Getting testy

It's been over two months now, and I don't know if I'm going to get any serious crap about my hair or not.

The challenge is trying to test reactions, without creating them.  For example, I've gotten comments suggesting that my police encounter really wasn't influenced by my hair.  I could have pushed the issue, and escalated it into a confrontation, but I don't think that would have shown anything about the officer's perception being altered by my locks.  My only reason to speculate was independent musings, plus a desire to attribute his rude behavior to some external factor, rather than presume that he treats everybody like that.

It's hard enough to pinpoint cases of racial profiling and other forms of discrimination; you can suspect, but it's not easy to know.  In order to do a solid job testing this hypothesis, I need to understand what has - and has not - worked while studying racism.  There's a professor of African American studies that I might look up to ask about that.

More questions than answers.  That's actually a good thing, even though it's frustrating.