Black Men and Public Space
Ravyn Granholm
WR121
“Black Men and Public Space” R/R
When I was little, the best way I knew how to describe my grandmother was probably “bad on the inside”. Now that I’m an adult, I realize she probably had some good qualities, but she rarely brought them to the surface. Grandma was what she probably liked to think of as ‘quirky’, whereas I thought of her more as an ‘ignorant racist’.
I know that Grandma was a kid during the depression. “Waste not, want not,” was something that she boldly spouted off several times a day, as she would wash paper towels, or force us to eat aphid-ridden Brussels sprouts.
Grandma was from Upstate New York, as one could find out merely by listening to any 5 minute chunk of monologue that often came rambling out of her mouth. She said a lot of things differently than I had ever heard, and whenever I called her on it, she claimed that that was how EVERYONE talked in Buffalo, New York. “Go warsh your hands” was the one that always got me cringing. She also had a hard time pronouncing words with more than one syllable. Our stereo was not a Mitsubishi, but a Meechi-Beechi. One did not have peripheral vision, but priffrul. And incidentally, every African American was a colored.
As a child, it is easy to believe things that adults tell you. “It’s okay if you don’t want to clean your room. I guess Santa Claus will just have to bring you coal this year.” Oh, how I believed that one. Santa Claus was huge incentive to get stuff done!
However, from a very early age, I knew that a lot of what my grandmother told me was bullshit. I was 10 years old when my parents divorced, and Grandma would often refer to my dad as “That deadbeat”. I knew my dad was the best dad in the world, and therefore Grandma couldn’t be right about everything.
One summer, I had met a neighbor kid. An elderly woman down the road owned a foster home, and the children there were from all over the world. Keisha was from Kenya, and we became fast friends. Surprisingly, Grandma let me play with her. But we had to play outside.
A half a block down the street was the neighborhood pool. Keisha had come over and asked me if I wanted to go swimming with her. When I asked my grandma if I could go, she frighteningly yelled at me “Do you want to get AIDS!?” and slammed the door in little Keisha’s face. After that, Keisha wasn’t allowed to play with me anymore.
Grandma is the first image that popped into my head when I read Brent Staples’ “Black Men and Public Space”. Staples says “The fearsomeness mistakenly attributed to me in public places often has a perilous flavor.” That was Grandma. I have no idea where this fear stemmed from.
Staples also referred to women who have “their purse straps strung across their chests bandolier-style, they forge ahead as though bracing themselves against being tackled.” Also Grandma. She always had her purse that way, she said it was specifically so it would be harder to steal, but I always knew she meant it would be harder for coloreds to steal.
Grandma’s racism knew no bounds. There was nothing too trivial to be scared of. One day, I was watching The Cosby Show when Grandma came in and immediately turned off the TV. “This is how it starts,” she explained calmly. “If you continue to watch this, coloreds will take over the television.” When I asked what was wrong with that, I was sent to my room without supper.
“I was to become thoroughly familiar with the language of fear,” Staples says in his essay. The language of fear. What a beautiful turn of phrase for something so frightening. Grandma spoke the language of fear fluently, but was ignorant to it. I don’t think she understood that her racism stemmed from fear. I figured this out when I was about 11.
Grandma used public transportation because she had glaucoma, and couldn’t see well enough to drive (although she would never admit that was the reason). When the bus would arrive, if the driver was a colored, Grandma would politely say “We’ll take the next one,” and half-heartedly give the impression that we were waiting for someone else. The thing is that Grandma’s vision was so bad, that she’d be halfway on the bus before she could even see the driver, so it was quite evident that she was lying.
“I just don’t trust them,” she’d say, as we’d wait another 45 minutes for the next bus to arrive.
One Sunday we ended up not going anywhere, because after her “We’ll take the next one” ploy, the “next one” ended up having the same exact driver.
Staples seems to be almost in awe of this phenomenon; the language of fear. It’s mind numbingly unreasonable to fear someone based on the color of their skin. Although, I have a friend that is terrified of black dogs. Just black dogs. This stems back to an event that happened while she was pregnant. She was walking down the street, when a black Doberman shimmied out of his leash, ran up to her and bit her on the arm. Protective Mommy Hormones took over and she was able to struggle free. But it always made me wonder. Why black dogs? Why wasn’t she afraid of all dogs? Or all Dobermans?
There must be some underlying event that makes people fear. The fear of spiders, heights, and even clowns are usually stemmed from a traumatic childhood event. Arachnophobia, acrophobia, coulraphobia. They are all fears. Merriam-Webster defines racism as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities”. I think this should be changed to “a fear that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities.”
Staples ends his essay by describing himself whistling Beethoven and Vivaldi, stating that “Virtually everybody seems to sense that a mugger wouldn’t be warbling bright, sunny selections from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.”
Well, I’ve got him there. The first thing that immediately sprang to mind when I read this was Peter Lorre as Germany’s most notorious child murderer innocently whistling Grieg’s “In The Hall of the Mountain King” in Fritz Lang’s film M.
So, the innocent whistling of classical music is something that makes me anxious. Do I have a fear of classical music? No. But were I being trailed by someone whistling classical music, Peter Lorre would come to mind, and I would get very anxious and walk a heck of a lot faster. It’s ridiculous. But then again, so is the language of fear.
WR121
“Black Men and Public Space” R/R
When I was little, the best way I knew how to describe my grandmother was probably “bad on the inside”. Now that I’m an adult, I realize she probably had some good qualities, but she rarely brought them to the surface. Grandma was what she probably liked to think of as ‘quirky’, whereas I thought of her more as an ‘ignorant racist’.
I know that Grandma was a kid during the depression. “Waste not, want not,” was something that she boldly spouted off several times a day, as she would wash paper towels, or force us to eat aphid-ridden Brussels sprouts.
Grandma was from Upstate New York, as one could find out merely by listening to any 5 minute chunk of monologue that often came rambling out of her mouth. She said a lot of things differently than I had ever heard, and whenever I called her on it, she claimed that that was how EVERYONE talked in Buffalo, New York. “Go warsh your hands” was the one that always got me cringing. She also had a hard time pronouncing words with more than one syllable. Our stereo was not a Mitsubishi, but a Meechi-Beechi. One did not have peripheral vision, but priffrul. And incidentally, every African American was a colored.
As a child, it is easy to believe things that adults tell you. “It’s okay if you don’t want to clean your room. I guess Santa Claus will just have to bring you coal this year.” Oh, how I believed that one. Santa Claus was huge incentive to get stuff done!
However, from a very early age, I knew that a lot of what my grandmother told me was bullshit. I was 10 years old when my parents divorced, and Grandma would often refer to my dad as “That deadbeat”. I knew my dad was the best dad in the world, and therefore Grandma couldn’t be right about everything.
One summer, I had met a neighbor kid. An elderly woman down the road owned a foster home, and the children there were from all over the world. Keisha was from Kenya, and we became fast friends. Surprisingly, Grandma let me play with her. But we had to play outside.
A half a block down the street was the neighborhood pool. Keisha had come over and asked me if I wanted to go swimming with her. When I asked my grandma if I could go, she frighteningly yelled at me “Do you want to get AIDS!?” and slammed the door in little Keisha’s face. After that, Keisha wasn’t allowed to play with me anymore.
Grandma is the first image that popped into my head when I read Brent Staples’ “Black Men and Public Space”. Staples says “The fearsomeness mistakenly attributed to me in public places often has a perilous flavor.” That was Grandma. I have no idea where this fear stemmed from.
Staples also referred to women who have “their purse straps strung across their chests bandolier-style, they forge ahead as though bracing themselves against being tackled.” Also Grandma. She always had her purse that way, she said it was specifically so it would be harder to steal, but I always knew she meant it would be harder for coloreds to steal.
Grandma’s racism knew no bounds. There was nothing too trivial to be scared of. One day, I was watching The Cosby Show when Grandma came in and immediately turned off the TV. “This is how it starts,” she explained calmly. “If you continue to watch this, coloreds will take over the television.” When I asked what was wrong with that, I was sent to my room without supper.
“I was to become thoroughly familiar with the language of fear,” Staples says in his essay. The language of fear. What a beautiful turn of phrase for something so frightening. Grandma spoke the language of fear fluently, but was ignorant to it. I don’t think she understood that her racism stemmed from fear. I figured this out when I was about 11.
Grandma used public transportation because she had glaucoma, and couldn’t see well enough to drive (although she would never admit that was the reason). When the bus would arrive, if the driver was a colored, Grandma would politely say “We’ll take the next one,” and half-heartedly give the impression that we were waiting for someone else. The thing is that Grandma’s vision was so bad, that she’d be halfway on the bus before she could even see the driver, so it was quite evident that she was lying.
“I just don’t trust them,” she’d say, as we’d wait another 45 minutes for the next bus to arrive.
One Sunday we ended up not going anywhere, because after her “We’ll take the next one” ploy, the “next one” ended up having the same exact driver.
Staples seems to be almost in awe of this phenomenon; the language of fear. It’s mind numbingly unreasonable to fear someone based on the color of their skin. Although, I have a friend that is terrified of black dogs. Just black dogs. This stems back to an event that happened while she was pregnant. She was walking down the street, when a black Doberman shimmied out of his leash, ran up to her and bit her on the arm. Protective Mommy Hormones took over and she was able to struggle free. But it always made me wonder. Why black dogs? Why wasn’t she afraid of all dogs? Or all Dobermans?
There must be some underlying event that makes people fear. The fear of spiders, heights, and even clowns are usually stemmed from a traumatic childhood event. Arachnophobia, acrophobia, coulraphobia. They are all fears. Merriam-Webster defines racism as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities”. I think this should be changed to “a fear that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities.”
Staples ends his essay by describing himself whistling Beethoven and Vivaldi, stating that “Virtually everybody seems to sense that a mugger wouldn’t be warbling bright, sunny selections from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.”
Well, I’ve got him there. The first thing that immediately sprang to mind when I read this was Peter Lorre as Germany’s most notorious child murderer innocently whistling Grieg’s “In The Hall of the Mountain King” in Fritz Lang’s film M.
So, the innocent whistling of classical music is something that makes me anxious. Do I have a fear of classical music? No. But were I being trailed by someone whistling classical music, Peter Lorre would come to mind, and I would get very anxious and walk a heck of a lot faster. It’s ridiculous. But then again, so is the language of fear.