By C. Nicole Mason

We have all done it. You’re with a friend in a crowded store with too few cashiers and too many shoppers. To get out faster, you agree to stand in one line while she stands in another. If her line moves faster, you switch lanes and check out with her. If your line moves, she checks out with you.

To the people waiting behind you, it is a little annoying, but for the most part it is overlooked as one of the unspoken rules of shopping. Fellow shoppers and cashiers may mumble under their breath, but no one ever gets arrested. That is —unless you’re Heather Ellis, an African-American schoolteacher who hopped lanes three years ago in a local Wal-Mart store and suddenly found herself charged with a felony assault.

There are conflicting stories about what led to Ellis’ arrest that evening in Kennett Missouri, but one thing is for certain, the case has ignited simmering racial tensions in the small town with both the local NAACP and Ku Klux Klan weighing in on either side.

Is it about race?

It is becoming harder and harder to prove racial bias, discrimination, or motivation. These days, when a racist incident occurs everyone including the media and political pundits seem to be looking for an alternative explanation. Explanations tend to range from provocation, as was the case in the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. arrest to artistic interpretation ala the New York Post cartoon caricature of President Barack Obama as a Monkey.

The problem with this is that the individuals on the receiving end of the discrimination have very little recourse or seem irrational when they react. In Ellis’ case, she and her supporters have been accused of race baiting and detracting attention from the crimes she allegedly committed.

While the police, the prosecutors, and others of Kennett Missouri may be reluctant to admit that race could have played a role in the incident at Wal-Mart, the subsequent arrest and prosecution of Ellis’, Blacks know different. We know what it feels like to walk into a store and get treated differently, like a suspect, or as if we don’t belong. We know what it feels like to be put in “our place” by Whites or others who believe we have stepped out of line. This is not paranoia or about playing the race card, but about reality and what we have come to know over more than four centuries of unequal treatment.

Why is race still so hard to talk about?

Racism seems so passé. To invoke race or the possibility of racism in a discussion seems almost like a tragic throwback to a time we’d like to forget. The thinking is that the playing field is leveled. Affirmative Action worked—Barack Obama was elected. Racism or racist behavior is reserved for the fringes of society—the fellow waving a confederate flag and toting a riffle at a health care town hall meeting. So, to talk about race or racial discrimination in any real way means that we have not had made as much progress as we would like to think.

Accountability

Facing a possible 15-year jail sentence and a felony conviction, last week Heather Ellis accepted a plea deal, which includes a 4-day jail sentence, one year of unsupervised probation, and anger management classes. When asked why she accepted the plea deal although she was innocent, she stated that she did not want to take the chance that she would be convicted by the near all white jury.

On any given day, cutting in line at a store is no big deal and certainly no cause for arrest. If so, I would have a rap sheet as long as my arm and so would many of us.

Observers and commentators of the case have rightfully noted that race played a critical role in the incident at the store, the arrest, and prosecution of Heather Ellis. At some point it became less a commentary about shopping and checkout etiquette and more about the racial tensions that still exist and lie just beneath the surface of our makeshift, newly formed post-race society.

As much as we would like to believe that racism is a thing of the past, there are numerous incidents that remind us almost daily that it is indeed alive and well and that we still have a long way to go.

Dr. C. Nicole Mason is the Executive Director of the Women of Color Policy Network at the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University.