The bus seems like such a constant site of tension. When I think about it, so many of my entries here have been about bus journeys...
I was happily sitting on the bus when at a particualr stop a man started shouting, you're racist, in and African accent. He got louder and louder while the bus waited. The man never said why the conductor was racist but I filled the gaps in my imagination. I assumed the conductor was throwing him off, that the conductor had allowed a certain number of people onto the bus and because there is a quota, some people had to be excluded. I am guessing that he was the only person to be excluded and because he is black he understood the exclusion in terms of race. The bus conductor came upstairs and woefully said to his audience, us, that he was just trying to do his job, clearly perturbed at being called racist.
And yet I believe the African guy. I see all the time how inadvertently white people side with, sit with, include white people - not consciously, but maybe just because they feel 'safer' in their comfort zone of "people who look like me". That journey I had already noticed how white people avoided sitting next to the very dark skin, well dressed black guy in front of me until his was the last seat and they had no choice.