Well, it happens. And in today's competitive victim society, it is sometimes very difficult to determine which victim has superior inferior superior inferior status.

A month or so ago after an incident in a store, I was all primed to write about shopping cart etiquette in the context of who gets there first (the one who sees a spot or the one who's closest?), but it didn't seem all that important, considering the elections and culture wars and stuff, so I forgot all about it. But I was left with the distinct feeling that notwithstanding "equality," we are not all equal. Some people are better at getting spaces, while others are better at seeing them first even though they don't get there first. And "ladies first" be damned.

Or is that ladies be damned first, damn it?

I don't know the answer, but when black men and lesbian women collide, prepare for a victim competition contest:

Liz Spikol says she witnessed a racial incident at a local pet store. As one of the women involved in that incident--which was an attack on two lesbians, not a racial incident--it's hard for me to imagine how Spikol could have gotten it so wrong.

I'm one of four women who run a cat rescue shelter in Germantown. On that evening my friend and I had two carts of cat food and litter, so the manager had a cashier open up a register for our very large purchase, so as to not slow down the customers at the other register. The cashier had just started to ring up our purchases when "Goldfish Man" walked up with a small bag of goldfish and asked if he could go ahead of us. We politely explained that the cashier was already ringing us up, so no, he couldn't.

He continued to press the point, becoming verbally abusive. Both my friend and I asked him to stop talking to us. Instead he walked up right next to my friend and continued his tirade. That was the point at which she told him to back off.

He did indeed step back a foot, and continued his verbal abuse, which culminated in his shoving the back cart against the front cart while my friend's hand was between the carts. This caused a large cut and drastic bleeding.

What I find interesting was that Spikol felt this was all about race, simply because the man, who was African-American, said the words, "It's because I'm black, isn't it?"

This wasn't a racist incident; it was a homophobic, antiwoman incident. I'm shocked that as a woman, she walked away without noticing that the two women involved in the incident were feeling highly threatened.

Liz Spikol says she was, though, and her original column here paints a completely different version of the story, with no mention of violence or bleeding. I'm kind of glad I wasn't there, as I tend to get just as outraged over things I see as anyone else would. Yet I don't necessarily see them the way others might. A lot of these interpretations seem to depends on whose mental "video replay" is the strongest. Do you see an automatic replay of Bull Connor's bigoted police in Birmingham hosing demonstrators and siccing the dogs on them? Or do you think of women being abused, or Matthew Shepard beaten and tied to a fence?

Are we not all capable of being victims depending on how you look at it?

Actually, there is one category of people who do not deserve victim status -- no matter what. I refer to those indefensible people known as "bigots" -- who Liz Spikol's PW colleague Steven Wells thinks deserve to be beaten:

In light of all the cheeseparing piffle written about the Jena Six by liberal journalists apparently attempting to equate resistance to racism with the racism itself, I have to ask: Is it ever morally wrong to hit a racist?

If Jackie Robinson, during his first game with the Dodgers, had reacted to racist abuse by taking his bat and smacking some bigoted scumbag in the face, would that have made him the moral equivalent of the racist? Would it hell.

The legendary music journalist Lester Bangs once wrote about the casual racism of the mid-'70s New York punk scene. You guys have every right to go around spewing racism, he concluded, but no right to whine when some black guy walks up and smacks you in the mouth.

Why, the callow and immature me is tempted to insouciantly say "Thou shalt not suffer a bigot to live!"

But this is a serious game, and there are serious, um, rules. In the event of a dispute or altercation, according to the prevailing theories of identity politics, there are two primary considerations:

1. Who has superior (victim) status?

2. Who has a greater chance of earning a place in the bigot category?

In the instant case, if you scroll down and read the other letters complaining about Liz Spikol's column, they not only support the lesbian allegedly struck by the black man, but go out of their way to make sure that homophobic sexism is the narrative and not racism.

You'd almost think they were trying to avoid getting on the wrong side of Cotton Mather.

UPDATE: My thanks to Sean Kinsell for linking this post in a discussion of the former first lady.

Hmmm...

(Maybe I should have said "first ladies first" above.)

MORE: Racist p0rn -- another collision?