'Running While Black'

Many white people, myself included, don't think about how something as simple as exercising has a racial component. This column originally ran on May 30, 2020.

A former restaurant on West State Street has seen some recent activity, with lights on and new plywood across the doors, fueling speculation that will reopen as an outlet shoe store or another restaurant.

In the last week or so, that plywood has either come loose or been moved to the side, leaving the building open with no cars or construction vehicles in the parking lot.

I often jog in the area, and it’s tempting to detour a few steps and poke my head inside. A looky-loo, that’s me.

I haven’t done it yet. It would be my luck to fall into some unseen hole, twist my ankle or maybe end up on security footage and be embarrassed.

The fear of being shot has never entered into my calculations. That’s an example of white privilege, writ large.

Ask a person who is brown or black why they might not peek into a vacant building and you may receive another reason — fear of interactions with other citizens and/or law enforcement that could escalate to the point of arrest or even death.

It happened to Ahmaud Arbery in February. The Georgia man had gone inside a house under construction along his regular jogging route. Later he was shot to death after three men confronted him and attempted to make a citizen’s arrest, which Arbery resisted.

And if you’re saying, well, he shouldn’t have resisted, ask yourself what you would do if three strangers attempted to take you into “custody” when you were out for a jog or a walk. Under what authority do they have that right? Where are they taking you? Who will know you are gone?

What these three fine, upstanding paragons of justice and virtue could have done, if they felt they had to do anything at all because they were convinced Arbery was a nefarious thief, was to follow him from a safe distance, note his address, and phone the police with their suspicions.

Instead, they were so assured their cause was righteous and so secure in their white privilege that they filmed their interaction and almost got away with a “resisting arrest’ narrative before national and international outrage over the footage, released months later by one of the assailants, forced or shamed authorities into taking another look.

The New York Times did a follow up examining the phenomenon of “running while black,” talking with runners of color who contend with the reality of misunderstandings and suspicion every time they lace up their shoes.

Me, I just stretch a little and run. Again, white privilege.

We see the excruciating reality of racial disparities again and again, but often only when it is being recorded by a private citizen. Take the incident in New York City’s Central Park, where a person of color asked Amy Cooper, who is white, to leash her dog. She threatened to call the police and say, “There’s an African-American man threatening my life.” (Many commentators appeared more concerned that she was choking her pet during the exchange, recorded by the man, than that she was conniving to use race to get authorities to come running.)

Or, far more tragically, the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis earlier this week after an officer kneeled on his throat while three others stood watching. Floyd said “I can’t breathe” twelve times. All four officers were fired, but a man lost his life, all over an allegedly counterfeit $20 bill.

Zeba Blay, writing about the Amy Cooper incident for the Huffington Post, notes there is “a level of self-examination and self-awareness that white people are not doing that they must do. There’s something that white people, even the ones who believe that they hold no biases, that they wield no power, must admit to themselves and begin to unpack. They are complicit — and even participatory — in the system of white supremacy. Individual white people may not believe they are, but their ability to tap into that system is always within reach.”

Conclusions like these are hard for Euro-Americans to swallow, similar to how hard it is to accept being labeled “Euro-American” and live with a hyphenated existence that acknowledges whiteness is not the default setting in this nation.

If that hyphen rankles, maybe that’s a starting point: a realization that every day one can spend without considering race is a luxury that more than a quarter of this nation does not have.

This reality affects everything — from important considerations about where people live and work and how they interact with neighbors, to more mundane things, like satisfying their curiosity with a quick peek at a building under construction.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter