“I heard there are a lot of black people in Chicago. Will you be safe there?”

“I heard there are a lot of black people in Chicago. Will you be safe there?” 
That’s the question my family asked me, repeatedly, when I told them I was going to University of Chicago to pursue my PhD in physics.

My family is not white, nor American. I was born and raised on a university campus, in a medium-sized city in southeastern China. Through most of the first decade of my life, I had no concept of African American. I had never met a dark-skinned person. There were a fair number of visiting scholars on campus with their families, but they were all white. “Blonde with sapphire eyes”, that’s the phrase I learned in elementary school, the default description associated with “foreigners”.

My first personal encounters with black people in America occurred when I was nine-years-old. My dad got a position as a visiting scientist to UCSD, so my mom and I joined him in the sunny Southern California city for a stretch of nine months. That’s the first time I learned firsthand that Americans, “foreigners” per se, are not all “blonde with sapphire eyes”: their hair could be dark and finely curled, sometimes tied into a thousand tiny braids. I had very short, straight hair at the time; I was so jealous of some of my classmates, who wore what were in my eyes living works of art crowning their heads. 
I barely knew any English then, so my ability to make friends at school was very limited. One of the kids who befriended me was a girl named Kayla. She was black, beautiful, vivacious. One day after school she told me to follow her to the parking lot because I was to meet her dad, who “has the strongest arms”. There in the front seat of a bright red car sat a large black man, beaming as his young daughter told him to roll up his sleeves and flex his muscles to show her new Asian friend. 
I was impressed. In the eyes of a child, her father’s size and physical strength was a source of pride and protection: how is it in large swaths of society, the size and strength of a black man would be seen as a threat, a danger so imminent that has to be countered with lethal force? 
I was not asking myself that question then, nor was Kayla I assume, or the black boys in my class. We were nine years old. We were children. 
Though now come to think of it, Tamir Rice was not much older.

After some months in San Diego my family moved back to China. I started middle school. I learned about slavery in America in my history classes, but that was taught in quick sketches twisted in Communist propaganda, slavery, fascism, all those evils that exist and exist only in corrupt capitalist Western societies. 
Fast forward another decade, as a 19-year-old college graduate I was going to embark on my own American dream. I had heard about the violence on the southside of Chicago among predominantly African American communities, so did my folks and hence the question that persisted after I’d already made my journey across the Pacific. 
“There are many black people in Chicago. Are you safe there?” 
All that questioning I brushed off. I even displayed some self-righteous fury, “you do not know any black people! The question is racist! Should I be equally concerned in Chinatown when the population is also, predominantly, COLORED?” 
I could recite long paragraphs from Dr.King since high school. I read. I so worldly. I so enlightened.

“If you see a black man walking on the same side of the street as you are, cross the street.” 
That’s among the first pieces of advice I received when I arrived at University of Chicago, from my fellow Chinese students who helped pick me up from the airport and settle into my new apartment. It was fall 2009, when the country just elected its first African American president, whose campaign I followed from an ocean away in awe and mad respect. 
“The PRESIDENT is also black, and I’m also colored”, I would respond. I so worldly. I so enlightened. I so not racist. 
One night not long after I started my new life in Chicago, I was coming back to Hyde Park after an evening downtown. A block away from my apartment, I was approached by a young black man. He asked me a question that I did not quite catch, but something simple and innocent like directions. 
I flinched. I wanted to pretend I did not speak English and just get away as quickly as I could. 
He sensed my reaction and he said, “I’m not a bum. I’m a student.” 
That moment was seared into my memory like a scarlet letter. 
I so worldly. I so enlightened. I so clueless.

Some of the most hateful comments I’ve encountered towards the African American community, I read them on the Chinese version of Facebook, “renren”. This is not some white supremacist chatroom. These were posts and reposts from Chinese people I know, most of them still living in China, all of them well-educated with advanced degrees, none of their ancestors owned slaves. 
If you would like irrefutable proof of how institutional racism is deeply embedded in American culture, perpetuated by whites, read how Chinese college graduates who are mere consumers of exports from such culture comment on Serena Williams or Michelle Obama; my folks in China who still have never met a black person in their lives, ask me if I would be safe in Chicago living in close vicinity, to “so many black people”.

When I was pursuing my degree at University of Chicago, sometimes I would work late and miss the university’s evening shuttle. Campus police offers an “umbrella service”, where an officer in a squad car would follow you close behind as you walk to your destination; and at least with my experience, when the weather is bad which is often in Chicago, they would offer you a ride inside the squad car. 
Over my six years in Chicago I took a good number of such rides. The doors of the vehicles painted with “To serve and protect”, sitting inside I would feel safe and protected. On a personal level, I am forever grateful for the service and protection the University of Chicago police offered me during my time as a student there. I’m also painfully aware how I could have felt very different had my skin been of a different hue, regardless of my status as a student. And the university police, despite its own shortcomings, has a considerably better reputation in the race department compared with city police.

When the protector becomes your biggest source of fear, the world is a very dark, unsafe place.

I thought I should have some understanding. I have personal experience of how the people who are supposed to protect me are actually the ones who hurt me. Not to make light of that but my experience was within the tiny nexus of my family: I was young and powerless through those early years, but I could see beyond that nexus of a greater world and a brighter future, that with time I would be free, and eventually heal. 
I would never be able to fully understand what it’s like, when the “greater world” outside that nexus is structured against you for who you are, and becomes increasingly hostile and dangerous as one grows up, not a childhood nightmare, but an adult reality. 
When the machineries of society trusted with powers of life and freedom, the police force, the courts, are structured against you for who you are, could use any reason or no reason at all to take away your freedom or your life, what kind of living is that? 
One analogy I might think of is being a political dissident in an authoritarian regime, like that of my home country. 
But being a political dissident in Communist China is a personal choice, and an act of courage and defiance. 
Living as a black person in America is not a choice, and should not be an act of courage or defiance on its own. 
It should just be living.

I graduated from University of Chicago last December, and now work as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. This afternoon in an utter sense of helplessness, I took a walk to the Johnson Museum of Art on campus, to sit under the Cosmos installation, a large LED display inspired by the movement of stars and formations of galaxies as an homage to Dr.Carl Sagan. Its majestic beauty is humbling, and always a source of solace and inspiration. 
I’m a particle physicist by profession. I study the most fundamental structures and interactions of our universe. Growing up through my own troubled childhood and nowadays when something deeply disturbing happens in our world, which is so very too often these days, science has been a refuge. In the laws of physics everyone is equal. 
I’ve often thought about how I could help the African American community in my capacity as a physicist; when I was in grad school in Chicago I wrote passionately to then Illinois Lt.Gov.Sheila Simon after meeting her and some discussions at an event, that if the kids from underprivileged neighborhoods “could be introduced to science and be fascinated looking at the stars, maybe it’s less likely they’d be looking for trouble down the street corner.” 
I thought science, or education in general, could save them, as it did save me. 
The argument itself is not without merit. But it is really not that simple, is it? 
Living in constant fear for one’s life and in systematic oppression is tiring. It drains one’s energy and one’s imaginations. It’s not inspiring. It’s not nurturing. More often times than not it becomes its own self-fulfilling dark prophecy. I should have some understanding of that.
When these kids look up at the nightly sky, do they see stars, or just the constant dark cloud of injustice? Do they even have the luxury of leisure to look up at the skies, when they need to be looking out for their lives?

I did recite long paragraphs from Dr.King growing up. One line that I would often go back to in my own most difficult years, was “unearned suffering is redemptive”. 
Outside of a religious context, in this life, what is there to redeem for a life lost? 
Who is suffering? Who needs redemption? 
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”, Ta-Nehisi Coates says he does not agree because for each destruction of the black body, that is the end of one’s arc. 
Who is suffering? Who needs redemption? 
There are many black people in Chicago. 
There are many black people in America. 
Are they safe here?