On Passing Black Men in the Street

DURING The Speech, Barack Obama talked about the shades of racism he saw in his beloved white grandma when she admitted sometimes fearing black men who passed her on the street. He also described this in Dreams from My Father; it was a troubling moment for young Obama. Revisiting the matter in a radio interview last week, Obama gaffically referred to his grandmother as a "typical white person." (But I'm sure we're gonna let that go, seeing as Obama is himself white, if atypically. No? We're offended? Okay. Wow, and we act like black people are touchy.)

I've been pondering this issue, as a white woman avec bootay. Maybe white women sans bootay have a different relationship to black men on the street, maybe they don't; unless I get a sudden case of Amy Winehouse, I'll never know.

I've remarked previously on the abundance of street harassment my bootay has garnered, almost always from black men, and on the racial disquiet I've felt as a result. After Obama's comments, I've been full of shame. Because, have I feared black men on the street?


BACK IN Brooklyn, I lived in a neighborhood called Boerum Hill, which is now "cool" but was then awkward. The projects were two blocks one way, becoming-bougie Smith Street was two blocks another way. (My community garden was in a third direction, so I mostly walked there.) In retrospect, racial tensions were quietly boiling. New York is like that.

It was never a case of looking good and getting hit on. In fact, I tried to remedy the situation by looking bad. But the more busted and miserable I looked, the rattier my sweatpants, the more I seemed to get it. These guys weren't talking to me. They were talking about me, often amongst themselves, like I was an involuntary stripper on an invisible stage. The things they said were caustic and obscene, and I started to respond in kind.

Which was why I became a racial profiler: I tried to know when harassers were on the approach so I'd be steeled to "snap back and have the last laugh." (Would that it were as fun as it sounds.) On one occasion, three twentysomething black guys, all with gold fronts, started saying shit to me while I was walking home on Dean Street, my street. They kept staring as I walked by, and I tossed off a "fuck you." Which made them very unhappy. I suddenly realized that I was on a deserted street and had just pissed off three of the most thugged-out dudes I'd ever seen. I was scared.


OBAMA actually recounts a similar story in Dreams:

That night, well past midnight, a car pulls up in front of my apartment building carrying a troop of teenage boys and a set of stereo speakers so loud that the floor of my apartment begins to shake. [Normally, he'd let it go, easygoing guy that he is, but, thinking of his sleepover guest (?!) and his neighbors' newborn, he goes out and asks the guys to move along.]

The wind wipes away my drowsiness and I feel suddenly exposed...I can't see the faces inside the car; it's too dark to know how old they are, whether they're sober or drunk, good boys or bad...I start picturing myself through the eyes of these boys, a figure of random authority, and know the calculations they might now be making, that if one of them can't take me out, the four of them certainly can."

[Finally,] the engine starts, and the car screeches away. I turn back toward my apartment, knowing that I've been both stupid and lucky, knowing that I am afraid after all.

I mention this not to suggest that my own fears or prejudices are mitigated by Obama's, but because the story--especially his complete telling of it (pp. 269-271)--shows how complex and vexing these questions are.


MY harassment experiences seriously affected my quality of life in New York. They cast me in a uncomfortable relationship with my body, and with black men as well. It was a sad state of affairs. What with the ugly, old stereotype of black man as sexual threat to white womanhood, nothing could have made me feel more racist than my harassment-anticipation game. And I can't help but wonder whether some of those guys sensed my anticipatory dread, felt angry that I seemed afraid of them, and on some subconscious level chose to make my apparent fear self-fulfilling.

At least I can say I don't play that anymore. I now live in Oakland, where there's a little more, you know, integration. I do get harassed sometimes, but it occurs to me that something else often happens instead: compliments. I get flirted on rather than accosted with obscenities. Several gentlemen of African American descent have specifically liked my boots with the fur. Thank you kindly, sirs.

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