being black in public
Posted: April 26th, 2018 | Tags: Uncategorized | Comments Off on being black in publicjenna wortham recommended this piece in Slate, a transcript of a conversation among four black thinkers after two black men were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks. struck by this:
Gene Demby: I was talking to Phillip Atiba Goff, the co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity and a Philly dude, who said it’s a mistake to partition the public’s racial bias off from the police’s racial bias. The police were called into this situation, as a colleague said, to mediate a misunderstanding, like they were RAs in a dorm and not armed agents of the state with broad discretion to use violence and detain people. And so there’s this way that the reasonableness of white people’s fears about black people is backed up by institutions. Folks call the cops to back them up in disagreements with other members of the public in ostensibly public spaces open to everyone.
and this:
Demby: …If you think of “talking about race” as just getting to understand each other better … that’s, I suppose, well-intentioned? That [Starbucks “Race Together”] campaign, which cratered almost as soon as it was announced, made me think of something I think a theologian at Boston University named Dan Hauge said to me on Twitter once: “I think one issue is, we whites imagine the endgame of anti-racism as harmonious relationships rather than equal power to shape society.”
and this (bolding my own):
Aisha Harris: Everything you all have just said, plus Jamelle’s piece about the concept of white spaces vs. black spaces in light of this incident, has gotten me thinking about how blackness can be rendered both invisible and visible in white spaces, depending upon how it might benefit whiteness or play into white people’s fears of blackness. When a white person feels threatened, like in a Starbucks, or when they see a “suspicious” black person on their block, we are a stark aberration to be dealt with swiftly and handily. Yet in other white spaces, like a restaurant where you are supposed to be served, you might be rendered invisible by your server. I cannot count how many times I’ve dined somewhere that was über-white and felt as though I was being ignored because of my blackness.
(here’s the 
sick goodreads burn