White Women and Public Space

after Black Men and Public Space, by Brett Staples p. 1986

Trigger warning: includes a brief description of sexual misconduct

I was sixteen and bored and hot. Time was still a thing I needed to kill and the afternoons were endless. I tried to spend the hours between school and family dinner with friends; we would watch back-to-back Law & Order episodes and eat cheese on each other’s couches and that made me very happy, but sometimes their company eluded me and I was left alone at my parents’ house, which was quiet and full of books and, for reasons I no longer recall, my adolescent self found these circumstances intolerable.

On the afternoon in question, I’d escaped and walked a block down to my old middle school to hit tennis balls against the portable buildings. I was alone, but, in Columbia, South Carolina, it wasn’t strange for teenagers or even very small children to move through the world without adult supervision. Like any neighborhood, there were probably bad things going on inside the houses, but the streets were safe. I walked back around six pm, running my fingers along the chain-link that surrounded the schoolyard. There was a guy on the other side of the fence. He was black, maybe a couple years older than I was, and he also seemed to have too little to do. He looked at me and asked Do you play tennis?

I was holding a racket. It was dumb question I guess, but it was more an invitation into a desultory conversation, which I accepted. Yes, I play tennis.

For your school?

Yeah. For my school.

Were you practicing?

Yeah.

That’s good.

Yeah.

Then I said bye because I was hot and I didn’t want to be late. I only remember the precise contents of this unremarkable conversation because of what happened afterwards. I found my mother waiting for me at home in a state of agitation. It took me a maximum of three minutes to make it from the schoolyard to my front door and, by the time I got there, my mother knew I’d been talking to a stranger. Someone from the neighborhood had seen me chatting with the guy and had called my mother to tell her “a man who did not look like he needed to be talking to me” had been talking to me. In my mother’s defense, the caller didn’t tell her the guy was black, so that didn’t explain her alarm, but I am quite sure the race of the other bored teenager is explains why someone deemed him both “a man” and “a man who did not need to be talking to me.”

I was mystified. The conversation had been so innocuous, so forgettable, so safe. It was still light out. He was about my same age. There was an actual fence between us.

I told this story for the first time in college, in a class called Social Stratification of the Deep South. My voice shook, which surprised me, and, after, my professor said, somewhat indulgently, these are the stories that make us who we are. But I don’t think that event made me into anything; I think showed me what I already was, what I always had been. In public spaces, part what I am is dangerous.

And I should have realized that long before sixteen, because I’ve been the same kind of dangerous all my life. At eleven, I met a little boy at day camp and we entered a light flirtation. He was some type of brown, I’m not exactly sure; he was handsy with me and I was into it. Then one day he mouthed I want you across the room during snack-time. I wasn’t sure what he meant and I wasn’t great at reading lips, so he had to keep doing it and then the councilor caught him and removed him and he never came back to camp. This was certainly an inappropriate thing for one eleven year-old to be mouthing to another, but the response was disproportionate to the crime and there was also an assumption that I, lily-white, was in no way complicit. The little boy and I had been looking right at each other. I don’t think the councilor could have missed who he was talking to, but they banished him and they didn’t even talk to me about it.

Around the same time my neighbors were protecting me from broad-day-light- through-a-fence assault, I first read the essay Black Men in Public Space by Brett Staples, which was originally published in 1986. It was still relevant in 2006 and it’s painfully relevant in 2016. Staples writes about how, at night, people, especially women, find him fearful because he’s black, crossing to the other side of the street to avoid him, locking car doors, even breaking into a run. And beyond the women, presumably mostly white women, reacting with fear, he also contends with those who feel honor-bound to protect us: the police. Staples describes how he takes pains to be calm and extremely congenial with officers of the law, because, if he’s not, they’ll take him to be the night-monster they half-assume he is already.

And not explicitly mentioned by Staples is the additional threat of vigilante-ism. The neighborhood watch guys, like George Zimmerman, who are similarly obsessed with protecting white women from the black men (children), who they believe present an imminent threat to our safety (chastity). This is an old, old story. In 1946, three grown men murdered Emmett Till, a fourteen year-old boy, because he possibly, maybe, flirted with a white woman. In 2001, a prepubescent brown boy got summarily ejected from camp for flirting with me. In 2016, The domestic-terrorist who committed a mass hate crime in Charleston said, as he gunned down black men, women, and children in a church: they are stealing our country, they are raping our women.

So. We can acknowledge rape culture when it justifies the murder and general oppression of people of color. How convenient. White women and girls, like all women and girls, are vulnerable to sexual assault. No one was wrong to try to protect me from that growing up, but they were operating with a faulty premise. When men sexually assault women it isn’t about race; it’s a combination of patriarchy and depravity. And when I was a teenager, someone did violate my body. I was super drunk at a party and lying on the couch half-passed-out and he lay next to me and shoved his hands into my jeans and burrowed his fingers under the waistband of my underwear and got off on touching me while he thought I was unconscious, which I nearly was (I’d doubt the incident except another friend saw and apologized later for not stopping it).

But the guy who did that was a white guy, who I’d known all my life. And the same was true for all the other white girls I knew growing up; when we got unwelcome sexual attention, when we were molested, when we were raped, it was almost always a white guy who did it. This isn’t because white guys are necessarily more violent; it’s because they were the ones with access to us. They were the ones our parents trusted; the ones nobody warned our moms about; the ones nobody taught us to fear. Instead of conditioning white men to protect their women, we need to focus more on teaching them women aren’t theirs.

Crooked cops, racist vigilantes, the larger criminal justice system, the prison-industrial complex, the economic marginalization of people of color, nepotism and good ol’ boy favors at the top — all these forces serve me better than they serve most other people, but they don’t serve my highest good. As a woman and a dyke, these systems reinforce and sustain systems that also oppress me, so I’d like to tell the racist patriarchy to kindly keep its favors, thank-you.

But I can’t. Privilege is irrevocable. And so what do I do with the knowledge that I’m dangerous? That in public space, in the world we live in now, my mere white lady presence can be a threat to people of color, particularly black and brown men? In Black Men and Public Space, Staples says I learned to smother the rage I felt so often at being taken for a criminal…I now take precautions to make myself less threatening. He gives pedestrians their space; he whistles classical music. If he must take precautions to neutralize the imaginary threat he presents to me, then surely I am obligated to make an effort to offset the real threat I present to him.

But, the details of precisely how to do this confound me. I do think the first step is acknowledging and understanding my specific social position. And with this knowledge, taking particular care not to be overly hasty to involve law enforcement or broadcast fear in situations that involve me and a male person of color. Saying this is tricky, because ‘overly-hasty’ is hard to define and women in social justice movements have historically become victims of sexual assault at the hands of their male counter-parts, putting them in the impossible position of having to choose between their own bodies and the cause. I am not advocating for silence or acquiescence on the part women inside social movements. Our bodies vs. the cause is a false dichotomy. Bodies are always the ultimate cause and no man, white or not, is allowed to transgress our body-sovereignty. But I’m not talking about caution in the context of social justice work; I’m talking about me, on the street, living my everyday life, while keeping in mind that there are forces beyond my control at work all the time. Though we are fighting for a world in which those forces are less powerful, we have not achieved that reality yet and, as such, I am going to do my best not be anyone’s excuse to kill.

And thinking about this is a burden, I suppose, but worrying about being someone’s excuse to kill far less of a burdensome then worrying about being dead.

At night, when walking home in my relatively safe and well-lit neighborhood, I take extra care to smile at black men when we pass each other. It’s about being friendly but it’s also a performance for any whack job that might be waiting on a porch with a loaded rifle, ready to protect my alabaster womb. It’s my way of communicating to whoever might be watching hey, look, we’re are fine, please don’t get crazy. I don’t know if this would actually make any difference, and sometimes I wonder if it might make it worse.

I suppose I could claim to be dangerous only in the way a gun is dangerous. Guns rights activists claim: guns don’t kill people; people kill people! So perhaps I should shout: white women don’t kill people, racism and the patriarchy kill people!

But that would be disingenuous. I am not an inanimate object. I am human being. And as such, I have absorbed my culture and it’s poisons. If you are a white person who claims to have internalized none of our great nation’s racism, I’m laughing at you because that is tantamount to claiming you are a Martian or a cyborg.

Human beings have one primary adaptation and it’s culture. That’s why, despite our weak, small, hairless, vulnerable bodies, we are able to build giant cities and live in Arctic and in the Sahara and go to the moon and we aren’t actually born with culture, we’re born with an enormous capacity to learn. It gets in us and it’s inevitable and if it’s racist then we’re racist too, at a conscious or unconscious level. This works differently for the majority than it does for minorities because minority cultures have counter-narratives that serve to combat the dominant, oppressive narrative and individuals who are members of a minority have direct access to their own subjectivities; when the dominant culture tells them they are less-than, they can check-in inside themselves and reaffirm this as a falsehood. Members of the majority have less access to counter narratives and no direct access to minority subjectivity, so we get the dominant narrative without an antidote.

Therefore, in addition to being aware of what I am in public space, I also need to watch my own heart, closely and soberly, with the assumption that some darkness lies there. It’s ugly to think about, but we don’t have time to spare ourselves the discomfort. We need to remain vigilant, seeking our own unconscious bias all the time, so we don’t act out of it in a high-stress situation.

This naval-gazing is the absolute bare minimum response to the genocide happening in this country. As white people, we must do much more, but we also can’t forget to monitor ourselves. And as a white woman, I must remain aware of my conditioning, aware of the way it might impact my interpretation of a situation. I must remind myself constantly that statistics and my own life experience have proven that the kind of man I was taught to fear most is not the kind most likely to do me harm.

We are working for a world in which one mistaken assumption on behalf of a white person doesn’t set-off a series of other assumptions leading to the incarceration or execution of person of color. But in the meantime, it won’t be my mistake.

Still, I know there’s nothing I could ever do to render me completely neutral. As the vague concept of me (our women) has justified atrocity after atrocity, the real me may have played a material role in any number of unfortunate scenes. What if my neighbor hadn’t called my mother that day, but instead called the police? What if the police showed up and the other teenager hadn’t yet learned to be calm and extremely congenial. What if he had learned, but he didn’t feel like it because he knew he hadn’t done anything wrong? What if he got mouthy and pissed off an officer? What if he was polite and cooperative, but the officer was in a bad mood? What if, for one moment, the officer couldn’t see his hands?

So much might have transpired and I never would have known. And for this, I grieve. I am so very sorry.