Back in October, my wife and I spent a few days in New York. We booked an AirBnB in Bedford/Stuyvesant which turned out to be a creaky, loaded-with-character Brownstone with high ceilings and steep, lopsided staircases.
Outside there were clear indications of budding gentrification. Inside, there were passive-aggressive notes written to the owner on the margins of his house rules by past clients. And bedbugs.
We did what white folks do when they go to New York: we went sightseeing and we took in some shows, two of which were written by friends of mine, and one of those was performed in the same space at the Public where Lin-Manuel Miranda workshopped Hamilton. We had lunch with a dear friend and spent an evening with several others.
On our second night in Bed/Stuy, as we were walking back the dozen blocks or so from the subway, we encountered a group of Black men. They were hanging out on the sidewalk outside a corner bodega, laughing the way young men do, which is to say that they were in a testosterone-charged, Saturday-night bubble.
They weren’t doing any harm, and in that moment undoubtedly didn’t mean any, but it’s a delicate balance, that footloose masculinity, even before you add the ever present tension necessary for survival among Men of Color and the obviously impending loss of their homes to the inexorable encroachment of White gentrifying consumerism.
As we approached, my wife and I, I sessed a dilemma. Most of the men were seated with their legs sprawled out, owning their immediate space in an easy going challenge: This is MY house. No way around them. My wife and I would have to walk through single-file.
And what if they decided that our passing through made us a symbol of all their woes? One of the clearer lessons of my childhood was that any random stranger can turn out to be a bully, and bullies’ wrath comes from a desperate lack of control over their circumstances. It would be easy, even cliché, for my wife and me to be assaulted there for the simple crime of being Caucasian outsiders in Bedford/Stuyvesant. And knowing this reality going in, whose fault would it be if we got mugged?
I need to acknowledge, right here, that as a White person, I’ve been conditioned to think that Black men can suddenly and inexplicably turn violent. That idea is powerfully reinforced for us through film and television and the media so much that the angry, violent Black man is a trope, and even news stories describing a cop killing someone who might have been innocent use the word ‘suspect’. It isn’t easy to unpack, and it’s even harder to dismiss entirely because, like any effective lie, there is an underlying element of truth to it. You can’t entirely deny any of it and that’s some scary shit.
But then I had a radical thought: These are men, and despite the differences of culture and experience and social status, we at least have that in common. I decided not to lower my head to be unobtrusive and try to slip through unnoticed, guiding my wife ahead of me.
I picked one, the closest to me, to our left, the only one with his back to the street, and when he looked up at us, I looked into his eyes, gave him a small, respectful nod, and said, “Y’alright?” The way I greet my colleagues here in London.
All of them instantly stood up to let us pass. They greeted us with a chorus of have-a-nice-nights, and called out after we passed with genuine well wishes. I responded with something equally pleasant and polite and hoped my relief wasn’t terribly obvious.
Seven months on, I still can’t escape the feeling that if the roles were reversed, if one of them were merely walking through a white neighborhood on a Saturday evening and came across a group of young, local guys, that no amount of respect they could offer would save them.
Go ahead, dismiss that idea, but consider this: Eric Garner was a big man who’d just broken up a fistfight between two of his neighbors. Philando Castile had a broken tail light. Ahmaud Arbery had just stopped for a drink of water at a construction site frequented by other runners. Just the other day, a White police officer in Minneapolis, responding to a “forgery in progress”, knelt on a Black man’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. For five full minutes after he stopped begging to be allowed to breathe. A police officer knelt on a man’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds because he was suspected of a crime you commit with a pen.
There’s that word again: suspect.
Eight.
Minutes.
Forty-six.
Seconds.
That’s more time than you’ve taken to read this essay.
His name was George Floyd.
This time.
[I’ve edited this piece to correct the length of time George Floyd spent with a knee on his neck.]