Racial Violence, White Spaces, and Neighborhood Vulnerability

Abstract

I used to be a faithful supporter of the Policeman Benevolent Association. For just a $25 contribution, the local PBA would issue a decal with a badge-like insignia that you could affix to the driver’s side backdoor window. It signaled that you were a “tax paying citizen,” employed, and on the right side of the law. As a young black man, I suspected at the time that the decal also signaled that I had connections, through family or friends, to law enforcement. Which I did. My father was a parole officer in the South Bronx, and I grew up with respect for the law and the people who enforced it. But that’s not why I made a point of supporting the PBA. Getting a decal served as a talisman, distinguishingme, hopefully, from other blackmen that the police would pull over, providing me with some measure of protection from potential abuse. I mademy first donation to the PBA when Imoved to the suburbs of Yonkers in my late twenties. I continued payments into my thirties, when I joined the faculty at Yale University in New Haven, and then into my forties, when I crossed coasts to join to faculty at the University of California, Davis. Although I’ve been stopped dozens of times over the years, often without any clear reason, I’ve never been roughed up or bullied by the police. Some of my friends have not been so lucky. Back in 1995, the year I defended my doctoral dissertation, Earl G. Graves Jr.—my basketball buddy and the senior vice president for advertising and marketing at Black Enterprise magazine—was shaken down at New York’s Penn Station. Dressed in full business attire, holding an orange juice in his hand, and stepping off a Metro-North train on an early workday morning, Graves somehow aroused the suspicions of the police. The New York Times reported that Graves was accosted and quickly hustled to a nearby wall by two Metro-North police officers as they “...lifted my arms in the air, relieved me of my briefcase and frisked me from top to bottom.” Growing up black in the city, you had to learn to circumvent unwelcoming (and often white) neighborhoods as well as crooked beat cops in your own neighborhood, some of whom who took their “license to kill” personally. Yet as a cocky teenager from Harlem, I used to feel like the entire city was my playground. In my mid-teens, many a time my