Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Typhoid Marvin: Blacks, Whites,
and Public Transit
Rush hour on board a bus or a train. A blur of
bodies. each one moving faster than thought.
The flood of oncoming passengers begins to
solidify. Skins jam ever closer with each stop. I am
sitting next to a window, my eyes half-closed in the
lurching zone between departure and arrival. Dressed
conservatively in a tweed jacket and tastefully bold
tie, I am an unremarkable man on an unremembered
train, as unnoticed as any other commuter. Except for
one thing: amid the growing crush, the seat beside
me remains empty. At stop after stop, as people come
on board, glance around, and seat themselves, a succession
of seemingly random individual decisions
coalesces into a glaring pattern of unoccupied spaces
next to black males -- including me. Soon the seats
beside us are the only ones left. Other passengers remain
standing, leaving these seemingly quarantined
seats to those desperate souls who board once the car
is choked past capacity.
Though I have seen many white people plunk
themselves down without even a glance, I have also
seen, over time, a broad pattern of avoidance of black
men far too pronounced for measly coincidence. Do
you doubt me? Ask any black man. Better yet, begin
watching.
This skirt-the-contagion dance is not a purely
white set of moves. I've seen everyone do it: Asians,
Hispanics, Jews, other blacks. It can run both ways.
On a packed bus in a poor African-American neighborhood,
a black teenager makes a grand show of
avoiding the seat next to a white woman with red
hair. He stops, he glares, he sits elsewhere. The woman
is a friend of mine. She is regularly shunned, sneered
at, and called names by black strangers when she
rides buses. Some black passengers, forced to sit beside
her, turn their backs on her entirely, sitting with
their feet in the aisle and their bodies hunched away
from her in an exaggerated pantomime of revulsion.
And so there you are in your vinyl seat: a white
person treated like snow-covered carrion by perfect
strangers who have dark skin. And there I am: a personable
black man avoided like a jaguar by people
who know nothing about me. And the question
echoes between us: What in the world are we doing?
In the case of passengers avoiding black males, here is
what they are doing: letting a grim fairy tale wreak
havoc with what they have come to see and believe.
Where does the tale come from? From the nightly
news, for a start. From eerily identical television news
broadcasts, each a grainy video account of poor and
uneducated black men netted, like angry Discovery
Channel wildebeests, by the police -- another in a
numbing procession of street crimes. From photographs
in the local news section of sullen-looking
black youths in handcuffs. From politicians who rail
against a scripted cast of enemies to middle-class security:
predatory criminals, savage drug addicts, hedonistic
single parents who bear free-roaming young.
From a dark flood of villains portrayed as disproportionately
urban and black. From the lack of coverage
hinting at the larger, less action-packed world in
which black children do homework in tenement bedrooms
and black parents marry and work long
hours -- and in which some white suburbanites commit
felonies within stucco walls.
What Americans get from this single-themed
show is a message of fear reinforced at twenty-four-hour
intervals: Black inner-city people are out of control,
and their kids are killers. No wonder, then, that
this fear and avoidance of blacks, this tendency to
give all African Americans a wide berth, has come to
be second nature for so many whites.
Youth brings a nonracial component to the equation.
We expect recklessness, a blind lack of restraint,
from the young. And with males committing the vast
majority of crimes on earth, young males, of all of
our potential seatmates on buses and trains, seem
most likely to be trouble.
But the young black male is special. He is our
darling of perceived deviance, our poster child of ill
will and bad blood. For him, we reserve special apprehension,
even in the face of the facts. Consider the
statistics: the vast majority of both violent and nonviolent
crimes in the United States are committed by
white men. While it is true that black men commit
crimes at a rate greater than their percentage of the
population (and we could debate the social reasons),
the fact remains that on any given day any American
is far more likely to suffer at the hands of a white
male criminal than a black criminal. Yet somehow we
manage to resist a blanket fear of white males. The
double standard is stark and ugly. Many Americans,
regardless of race, harbor a fear of African-American
males that is wildly, even hysterically, out of proportion
with reality.
And sometimes the fear can boil down to an
empty seat. I know how it feels to be targeted. I have
had so many seats remain empty next to me on jampacked
buses and trains that at a certain point, like
many in my position, I have gone numb to the
experience. I have learned to override the impulse to be
maddened by the daily insult because I simply can no
longer stand to care. I can no longer endure seething
through innumerable bus and train rides, striving in
vain to make angry eye contact with people for whom
avoiding black men has become routine. I can no
longer stand the prickles of paranoia, the perception
of even coincidental gestures as tiny racial slights, the
feeling that my ego is as accessible as public transportation.
When we hear young black urban men speak
reverently of "respect," what they mean is that they
are starving for the kind of casual, ordinary recognition
that whites take for granted. They want what is
freely given to most white strangers encountered in
public: the benefits of being presumed intelligent unless
proven stupid, of being presumed civilized unless
shown to be otherwise, of being presumed decent unless
demonstrably repellent. When this most basic of
courtesies is consistently denied, the result, among legions
of young black men, is an outright obsession
with respect that seizes the only power available
-- aggression -- and uses it as a weapon of self-esteem.
Can't you see it on the street? The cocky walk, the expansive
flinging of arms as if to claim the world, the
(corporate-abetted) worship of competitive physical
prowess, the idea of a gun, or of the threat of one, as
hair-trigger personal veto power. "I compel, therefore
I am. Now try to squelch my existence, punk." All in
pursuit of mere acknowledgment. Such an obsession
with everyday acceptance can just as easily grip a
black commuter sheathed in a suit and tie -- except
that in his case the violence coils inward. Whether by
bus or by train, it makes for a mean, and sometimes
brutally short, earthly journey.
As I've suggested with the example of my friend,
racial rejection happens to white people on buses and
trains, too. And it hurts. But there is a difference.
Most white people do not shoulder their way through
a lifetime of being singled out for hostile caricature.
And in the absence of societywide bashing of the
white self-image, they can more easily recover from
being snubbed on a bus. Black Americans are not
subject to a media barrage of images of white citizens
jacking up helpless yo boys (the dominant media messages,
in fact, depict whiteness as a colorless, pleasantly
inert state of normalcy). The "home turf"
nastiness some black passengers may show a white
commuter can best be understood as a sort of revenge.
From the standpoint of many blacks, whites
have done all but beg to be disliked. To those African
Americans inclined to seek easy enemies, embracing a
raft of malignant white stereotypes (they are dirty,
they are ice-hearted, they have poor home training)
can deliver the sweet rush of vindication. Black
people who have fallen victim to this influence will
seize the opportunity to make ruthlessly public their
personal distaste for white people.
Such treatment may come as a shock to some
whites. For many black Americans, however, the need
for defense against micro-assaults has long since been
ingrained into our consciousness. Years of being
treated as lepers in close quarters have pushed many
blacks, particularly young black males, into razorwire
zones of psychic self-protection -- especially in
the crowded confines of a bus or train.
And so there you are: a black person or a white
person avoided on public transportation. What are
you supposed to do?
If you are black and angry, your first move ought
to be to take a long step back from all of this ugliness.
Look at the situation from a distance. Be aware that
you are witnessing, in today's cultic fear of the color
of your skin, a form of public insanity. When twenty-third-century
historians write of the period in which
we now live -- in much the same way that historians
now view, say, the ordeals of free blacks during the
era of legalized slavery in America -- they will judge
such behavior with sadness and some measure of disbelief.
Take the clinical view for a moment. The whites
who avoid sitting next to you know squat about you
as a person, and worse, they don't know that they
know squat. Like many nonblack Americans who
have little experience with black people, they believe
the media distortions about who you are alleged to
be. And if they have had even one bad personal experience
with an African American, they are prone to
embrace the resulting image for life. Psychiatrists tag
substituting exaggerated fears for reality as classically
delusional. Should you be offended if a procession of
diagnosed paranoid schizophrenics refuses to sit beside
you on a bus? People who entertain sensational
preconceptions of you fall into an analogous category
of lunacy, if only for a few moments at a time. So
treat them as lunatics. Sit back, read your newspaper,
or look out of the window, and marvel at a world
that regularly offers you extra seating room.
Still not satisfied? Want to fight back? You might
consider some preemptive moves of your own. For
example, place your jacket or satchel on the empty
seat next to you, forcing anyone who wants the seat
to request it. Sit on the aisle side, effectively blocking
the empty window seat until someone asks whether
they can slide in. Or make it a habit to sit only beside
other people. Such gyrations of self-protection,
though, might seem weak and hollow. To what extent,
after all, are you really willing to allow other
people's behavior to govern your own?
If, on the other hand, you are a black person
who singles out white passengers for isolation or
abuse, you can claim the dubious distinction of having
assisted in your own dehumanization. Your collaboration
in fanning racial ill will among perfect
strangers helps to lower black political consciousness
to its shallowest possible level -- that is, to the same
level of blind ethnic belligerence as white supremacism.
With your continued assistance, this state of
racial barbarism will continue indefinitely.
To many whites, the mere fact of their seatmate
preferences on buses and trains may come as jarring
news. How are they supposed to notice patterns so
universal as to seem invisible? Freedom from such
awareness, after all, comes with being white. American
Caucasians can spend their entire lives dancing
away from young black males and never even realize
it. If you are white, chances are fairly good that you
have already done so. Nobody would call you a bad
person for doing something of which you are unaware.
But if you don't want to know, that's another
story. So now you've been told. When you take public
transit, pay attention. What you see may surprise
you.
When and if you find yourself disinclined to sit
beside a young black male on a bus or a train, ask
yourself this: if he were of a different race (with the
identical manner, clothing, expression, etc.) would
you sit down beside him without hesitating? If your
answer is no, then avoid him guilt-free. But if the answer
is yes, you have a problem. There are plenty of
perfectly good reasons for not wanting to sit beside
someone: ripe body odor; a rancorous, twisted smile;
an open bottle; the demeanor of a just-opened vein.
But a person's age, race, and gender simply do not cut
it as warning signs. Every time your unthinking prejudice
makes me or anyone else an involuntary representative
of scariness, you hurt the feelings -- and raise
the blood pressure -- of a human being who deserves
better. You become, in effect, an unwitting apostle
for some of the more boorish beliefs burdening
our planet. This is antisocial behavior at its worst.
Change it.
If you're white and find yourself persona non
grata on a largely black bus or train route, with passengers
emitting potently noxious signals for your
benefit, you should try, like young black males caught
in similar social ambushes, to treat this as you would
any other bizarre compulsion. You can defend yourself,
if you choose, by guarding the empty seat beside
you. But such petty relief is strictly stopgap. Are you
really willing to play cat and mouse on buses and
trains forever? Would it not be better to understand
what looms behind the rage: a siege mentality to
which many African Americans have succumbed, one
in which they judge all whites as broadly and as
harshly as they themselves feel judged? As a white
person, you can escape abuse by getting off the bus.
For black Americans, it is not so easy.
