On Being White in Hyde Park

I left the vet Monday afternoon carrying nearly 20 pounds of cat. Call me weak, but the kitties were too heavy to walk more than a few dozen yards. Clarabelle is pretty subdued in her carrier, but Monte wriggles around, sticking his paws out at passersby and generally making himself difficult to hang on to. I set them down on the sidewalk and called for a cab (the cabbies don't make regular rounds of Hyde Park like they do downtown or in the northern neighborhoods).

A bunch of teenagers sauntered by. I was wary and inched out of their way, moving the cat carriers so that they were directly in front of me and well away from the group of teens. When I worked at McBookstore (right across the street from the vet), teenagers–unaffectionately referred to by McBookstore employees as "the gangs"–used the store as an after school hangout of sorts, sometimes leering and swearing, sometimes sitting on stacks of books, talking and laughing loudly in their tight clusters. Those teenagers at McBookstore, like the ones on the corner, were all African-American. It wasn't about race, we said at McBookstore, it was that they were loud, they were rude, they made the bookstore uncomfortable for paying customers. Paying customers who were, incidentally, mostly black.

These kids on the street corner were as loud and obnoxious as the ones at McBookstore. They took up the entire sidewalk. Anybody in their path was invisible; they moved in a large but tightly knit circle, sauntering with the easy confidence of the streetwise, egging each other on with loud words I could not understand.

An older white man edged around the group, came up to me and said, "And they wonder why some people look down on them!"

* * *

In his essay "Black Skins, White Masks," Frantz Fanon asks, "Where am I to be classified? Or, if you prefer, tucked away? … Where shall I hide?" He turned to others. "The Negro is an animal," he heard. "The Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly." Here on 53rd Street, that is what white people see. Mean and bad and ugly. And loud and obnoxious. Fanon says that "not only must the black man be black, he must be black in relation to the white man." It doesn't matter whether I'm racist or not, whether I'm pale-white or olive-white. It doesn't even matter if I'm judging them only for being loud and for taking up the whole sidewalk. I'm white, they're black. And on that street corner, like it or not, I'm one of the white people. I'm like that elderly white man.

The white man returned from his errand, and unlocked his off-white Toyota. I was still standing on the corner, waiting for my cab. The teenagers were still loud, still sauntering in their large circle. The man turned to me. "You need a ride somewhere in the neighborhood?"

* * *

current book: The New York Times recently reviewed The Places in Between by Rory Stewart. For now, at least, you can read it here. I was excited to read the review because the title is so similar to my thesis–until the reviewer refers to it as "a pipsqueak title." Hmph. The rest of the description was alluring enough to immediately purchase it, and I'll be starting it tonight or tomorrow.
current music: I'm back to listening to Entre Rios' Onda.
current socks: black with white and yellow bumblebees