The recent flap over Mark Cuban's remarks about being scared of a "black kid in a hoodie" have made me think about a subject which was once very immediate to me--when is fear of street crime rational, and when is it racist, and can it be both?
In the early 1970's, my wife and I moved to the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, which according to Jim Croce in "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" was the "baddest part of town." I was beginning graduate studies at the University of Chicago, and we lived in married student housing, located, ironically, about a block and a half from a house which would one day belong to a Black man who would become President of the United States.
It is relevant to this story to note that my wife and I are both White, and although we came from Texas, were both raised in families which condemned racial prejudice. It is also perhaps relevant that while we were taught that racism was wrong, neither of us had had much contact with anyone who wasn't also White and middle class and suburban.
Hyde Park was then pretty much the only integrated neighborhood in Chicago, and was utterly dominated by the U of C. The relationship between the University and the neighborhood was beyond complicated. Back in the 50's, we were told, as what were euphemistically referred to as urban problems multiplied, Stanford University offered the U of C several hundred acres of land in Northern California so that it could relocate. The University declined, citing their commitment to the city and the neighborhood. In many ways this was a noble decision, but the way the school chose to make its stand was controversial. It bought up almost every apartment building and empty lot which became available, and often replaced local (meaning Black) residents with students. Several major streets were either made one way or blocked off entirely, making it harder to get into Hyde Park from the surrounding all Black neighborhoods. And the University hired what was described at the time as the nation's largest private police force, armed and with powers of arrest, to patrol the neighborhood.
When we moved in, we were given all sorts of advice on how to avoid being mugged. And in truth, there was a lot of street crime in Hyde Park. What we read and heard about, of course, were the incidents in which White students, staff, faculty, etc.were robbed/attacked/injured/killed by Black assailants. No doubt there were plenty of Black street crime victims as well, but we never heard about them. We were advised never to walk around without at least some cash, so that if we were mugged we'd have something to offer to satisfy our muggers.
Women were especially at risk. The younger sister of one of our friends was visiting and was assaulted in the lobby of her sister's building by a guy who held a knife to her throat and forced her to fellate him. A fellow English major invited a couple of guys to his apartment to sell him some weed, and while there, they raped his wife and threw him out of the window to his death. One only has to hear a few stories like this to develop a significant amount of fear.
The result of all this was that we were constantly vigilant while walking the streets or riding mass transportation, and we developed what we imagined were "street smarts." As I look back, though, "street smarts" primarily involved knowing which Black people to be afraid of. If the guys approaching you on the street at night were wearing dashikis and African jewelry, they were OK (and probably had a lot more money than you). If they were wearing vinyl hats, which were the 1974 version of hoodies, I suppose, you ducked into a store or changed course and got out of the way.
Looking back, I have very mixed feelings about my mind set. I was obviously stereotyping, and doing so in a way which now makes me feel a little guilty, as if I were some sort of proto-Zimmerman evaluating proto-Trayvon Martins. And no doubt I mentally classified as potential criminals a great many perfectly decent young Black men who were no more a threat to me than anyone else. On the other hand, there was for all practical purposes zero risk that I would be mugged by a White person. In that place, at that time, in America's most segregated city, with a history of horrible oppression and racism, the people who were going to attack me were going to be Black. It is perhaps indicative of the times that a visiting professor from England was approached by a couple of armed Black men one night, who demanded his money. In an impeccable Oxbridge accent, he protested indignantly, upon which one of his muggers said, "sorry, man, we thought you was White." No doubt the muggers were poor and needed money, but they were also making a political statement by fighting back against their oppressors, as they saw it. And visiting Englishmen were not the oppressors (at least since the 19th century, anyway).
So was my fear racist when I took steps to protect myself, as I thought at the time, or was it just realism? And, most challenging, was it a little bit of both?