The problem with the scary Black man Example

Publishing this blog has led to a lot of amazing, mind blowing conversations in my life over the past few weeks. I’ve been pleased and surprised how much people in my life want to talk about what I’m writing here. Thanks to all of you for the encouragement, the engagement and the excitement.

The conversations that really stick out for me are the ones where my friends, family and readers here have challenged, questioned or contributed to the conversation.

I’d love Sunset Racism to be a conversation, so I’m going to try and make it a practice to write back to you guys about your comments, thoughts and questions, starting now!

So, the minute I hit publish on my last post Racism as our default, (https://www.sunsetracism.com/blog/functions-of-racism-consensus-categorization-part-two) I almost immediately had second thoughts about using the example of encountering a Black man on the street as the building block for understanding how the technology racism runs in everybody’s minds as we move through the world.

Don’t get me wrong, the example has some strengths: it’s simple and doesn’t require much explanation, and as such we can’t get it too twisted.

My thesis, is that technology of racism/whiteness will powerfully compel white people to come up with justifications for why we experience anti-Black feelings and thoughts, and in my experience, the less story we feed to the machine, (What’s he wearing? What does his hair look like? Does he look angry?) the more we can take responsibility for our reactions.

But, my concern when I first hit publish, was that the example is just TIRED. I’ve encountered it for at least the last twenty years of my activist life, and I feel like we might have been talking about it when I was at college thirty years ago.
“Oh, well,” I thought, “Maybe nobody will notice. I’ll just let it slide and try and do better next time.”

I don’t know why I thought I could get away with that.

I must have forgot that I invited my fierce, courageous, compassionate and no-bullshit old friend Glynda to read the post!

Anyways if you didn’t see it, here was part of Glynda’s take:

So, I’ve this example of “encountering - Black man in the night” so many times and it has never happened to me. Not even once.

You know why? Because I’m a woman and we don’t have the freedom to go walking around by ourselves at night. When I go out at night, it is with friends. Women go to great lengths to not be all by ourselves at night. We’ll figure out whose car is the closest, then walk there, then both drive together to the other car, wait there until our friend is in the driver seat and has actually started the car, before we drive home. We take taxis from the train station or get picked up. We stay in well-lit areas.

We don’t want to encounter any strange man on the street after dark.

Okay, so now I’m really regretting hitting publish, because now I can see that the example is not only TIRED but it’s also sexist, and exclusionary, and spoken from a position of centering white male privilege.

You can see that, right? Are you surprised?

I’m not. Sadly, this is a blind spot I drive into all the time. I maybe should have trusted my thoughts when hit publish, because like I said, I knew there was something off about it.

A friend of mine said to me this morning: “Thinking is hard. Racism (and by extension: sexism, and xenophobia, and homophobia, and classism, and ableism, and transphobia) are easy”

Anyway, remember when I said we screw up all the time in this work? A lot of my most frequent screw-ups are likely going to be forgetting to be intersectional, which makes it impossible to be antiracist, which means I don’t get to be who I say I am.

So, please always call me on it if you see it, okay?

It’s a huge gift, if you’re willing to give it, like Glynda was. Hopefully, together we can turn our screw-ups into teachable moments.

Anyway, Glynda and are are in an antiracist book club together on facebook, so we had a conversation there about it with some other friends and acquaintances, and somebody suggested we look for other, less tired, and less misogynistic examples.

Here was what I came up with.

I was a hiring manager, frequently, in the DC government in the technology office of the city, where my boss, and my team and I ran a (pretty successful) campaign hire more Black folks and other people of color into the Office of the Chief Technology Officer. This shouldn’t have been a hard sell. When I was at DC.gov more than 70% of the residents we served were Black, and many other agencies in the DC government were majority Black.

Technology in general, however, has a racism/white supremacy problem, and our agency in particular had a reputation in the city for being racist in our hiring and our attitudes.

Okay, so, digging here this is another example of where I found I found myself worried that Black people were dangerous. Back then EVERY TIME I got ready to make an offer to a Black candidate I had a moment where I was struck by fear that I was doing something dangerous.

(By the way, like the “Scary Black Man” example, this fear has largely disappeared from my life today. I no longer experience extra fear when hiring Black people or passing them on the street.  Practice, as they say, makes perfect.)

But back then I did, and not only that, but there was institutional AGREEMENT that hiring Black people was risky, or scary, or naive. The (white) HR Director always did the Black person double-check with me before the offer got made. (Was I sure I knew what I was doing? Is this person really qualified? Were they angry? Were they litigious? Did I understand that I could never fire them? Were they a “good” Black person? Was I sure? Weren’t there better candidates out there? Was I ready to be accused of being a racist?). Some of this was stated; some of it was unstated. She found my attitude towards the whole thing to be pretty suspicious.

As they say on twitter: “Watch whiteness work.”

Anyway, as you can imagine, I learned a lot about the system and technology of racism during my time at the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, and I’m sure I’ll be writing a lot more about that as we go along, but back to the topic at hand….

In the end, it’s possible that trying to find one universal example of how the technology of racism runs in our minds (like the scary Black man example) is a counterproductive, quixotic, fool’s errand that will only flatten and erase other people’s experiences. Maybe we should be trying to assemble a catalog of different ways different people experience the technology of anti-Black racism, instead of asking everybody to fit one mold

If you’re willing to look at yourself in the mirror I invite you to share something about your own experience in the comments:

Does the scary Black man example resonate for you? Is there some other experience that sets off your automated fear of Blackness?

Maybe it’s not fear? Maybe you have some other automated story that’s running you?

It doesn’t have to be negative.  Do you automatically think Black people are soulful, or magical, or wise? I’ve done plenty of damage with that shit too.

What is your always-on, always at the ready filter for Black folks, or white folks, or Asian folks?

Put it in the comments if you dare, or if you’d rather respond anonymously you can write me at jw_harvey at yahoo dot com.

Thanks for your feedback everybody.

Coming soon, by popular demand, a short primer on what white folks can do in their daily lives to dismantle racism and white supremacy.