Could you admire it from afar, please?

I can deal with a lot of things on the race front. I can deal with my own family's hypersensitive, holy-shit-it's-time-to-prove-we're-down, nervous "We love Black people! Whatever makes you happy! We voted for Obama!" They mean well, even if they're unschooled in issues involving race. They are trying, in their desperate way.

And I can deal with the reservations of his family, with being described as the Jewish law student girl, with being told you're getting your swirl on, the pointed choice of Jungle Fever as an after-dinner movie. They are trying, too, trying to feel me out. To test me. To see what I'm made of. They have a stake. I am happy to roll with that, for now.

What I cannot suffer is this:

we were sitting in a coffeeshop, and a woman came up to him and began fondling his hair.

A total stranger, a middle-aged white woman.

"Um, do I know you?" he asked.

"I'm just admiring your hair," she said.

"Could you admire it from afar, please?" he asked.

She did not move away. She went on to call him unusual-looking and exotic.

He handled it well, I thought; he was far more polite than I would have been about the entire thing.

I was enraged.

"Were you jealous?" my good friend Andy asked me after the fact.

I had wondered that soon after the incident; was I responding out of a sense of displeasure that this man I am interested in is being touched by another woman? Or worse, out of a sense of personal ownership?

I thought on it, long and hard.

It was not that.

I have never been denied bodily autonomy in that way, in public, by a stranger. I have seen it happen to white women who are pregnant -- the indiscriminate belly touch -- horribly offensive, but nonetheless a different thing entirely.

It is fundamentally bad manners to touch a stranger's hair. Right? I mean, this is not socially acceptable. It has never happened to me, and it did not happen to me the other day. It was not my experience. I wasn't entitled to have the reaction I did.

And it was a painful thing to watch. Because it wasn't just hair in his case; because black people have been denied bodily autonomy throughout the course of US history, and this unsolicited touching felt like such a violation of this man's space, and bodily integrity, and personhood. It would bother me to see happen to any person, but as I'm starting to really care for him, the ferocious Italian wingnut loyalty in me flared bigtime, and I wanted to smash this woman in the face with the nearest blunt object.

His hair is not in the public domain! I wanted to scream.

But it was not my sentence to scream. I had to defer to his reaction, to his judgment. Because while I bore witness to this imposition, it was not my space that was violated. It wasn't my hair that was touched.

He, unfortunately, has been dealing with this shit for his entire life. I have been observing it for about five figurative minutes. I need to handle my white girl outrage. And figure out how and where I fit into all of this, honestly.