RS article: Where Can We Be Black?
African Americans are often made to feel as though we are uninvited guests in our own country. We are excluded from environments great and small, at times by force and often because of irrational fears and unconscious biases. This being the United States, those individual bigotries have support from an enabling culture and policies that codify them. This exclusion is the very root of racial discrimination, and of the social penalties that whiteness exacts upon blackness.
Thus, the somewhat academic question of "spaces" emerges time and again: not merely about which ones are safe, in a physical and emotional sense, but also which ones are fully open to us. The civil rights movement made its mark first through nonviolent black presence in arenas deemed off limits to us. The front seats of public buses. Lunch counters and water fountains. Schools. This past week has been a reminder of how fraught and varied that struggle is (in one's own neighborhood, in a Starbucks) and why it matters that we push forward – whether or not we end up on a Coachella stage, or before the Pulitzer committee.
After missing his bus last Thursday, Brennan Walker, a 14-year-old student in Rochester Hills, Michigan, tried to walk to school. His mother had taken his phone away, and soon, Walker was lost. He ended up doing what most Americans would think is safe to do: knock on a neighbor's door and ask for help and directions. But that same act cost Renisha McBride and Jonathan Ferrell their lives – and it almost cost Walker his. He told local reporters that after a white woman in the house behaved as if she thought Walker was trying to break in, a white man, Jeffrey Ziegler, came downstairs with a gun. Walker took off running. He only heard the gunshot that meant to take his life before escaping, later hiding and crying.
The other episode was less harrowing, but no less infuriating. It took place the same day, at a Starbucks in the ritzy, very white Rittenhouse Square neighborhood in Philadelphia's Center City. Many years ago, I briefly rented an apartment a few blocks west of the cafe's 18th and Spruce location. I don't recall ever going inside. Perhaps I may have used its restroom, logged onto its free wifi, or done what two black men arrested there last Thursday did: arrange to meet a friend or business associate there.
By now, many of us have seen the viral video shot by customer Melissa DePino, showing the Philadelphia police officers confronting and arresting the two black men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, who had been waiting peacefully. Local real estate developer Andrew Yaffe, who arrived to meet with Nelson and Robinson as they were being arrested without resistance, was outraged – as were, it sounds like, many other white patrons audible on the DePino video. The white folks in the café seemed to grasp that their skin color allowed them enough leeway to give the officers hell and not risk legal or physical danger. There was no reason to charge the men with anything but "waiting while black," so district attorney Larry Krasner later let them go.
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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/beyonce-coachella-kendrick-pulitzer-w519213?utm_source=rsnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=042218_10
