Who’s Safe? Who’s Welcome? On Being Black, Brown, Queer, and Other and Not Calling (or Coming Out to) the Police.
Last weekend I left New York City with my blended family of five, consisting of my partner, my son and my two stepsons. Our family: we are two cis-gendered women, lesbians raising three boys, two of whom are Afro-Latino-American, one of whom is transgendered. My biological son and I are white, Americans by birth. My partner is Latina, an immigrant and a newly minted U.S. citizen. We celebrate our differences and our identities. We recognize our privileges and our vulnerabilities. We see the ways that what oppresses us also makes us stronger, smarter, more compassionate; every day we walk through the world in all of the ways that those parts of who we are mark us and give us strength. But I am never more acutely aware of our multiple identities than when we travel outside of the city.
Last week our family traveled to New Hampshire with a friend and her three sons where we stayed in the house of another friend who was out of town, staying at our place in Brooklyn. It was a perfectly calm and lovely weekend. The boys had the chance to spread out in a big house with their brothers and friends. There was a hot tub and a big back yard and a park nearby where they could run and play freely. Or so we thought.
On Saturday afternoon we drove to the park near the house where we were staying. It was sunny. It was late afternoon. The park was big and sprawling, a campground where in the summer people presumably pitch tents. There were baseball fields, horseshoe pits, some woods, some hiking and bike trails. We drove two cars there between the two families. We got out and started to explore. The boys ran ahead of us — the three moms — myself, my partner, and my partner’s best friend, A. The boys (ages 8, 9, 10, and 12) found a building that had a slanted roof which came down about 6 feet off of the ground. They climbed up easily and began to walk around. We let them stay up there there for maybe 10 minutes and then we all decided to move on and keep exploring. We went about as far as we could go in that part of the park, then turned around to start back the other direction. Again, the boys ran ahead. The moms all followed but were quite far behind. We noticed the kids had climbed up on the roof again, but we had walked to the edge of the woods where there was a spot of sunshine and a giant rock and we sat down to absorb some much needed warmth and revel in the hope that winter was finally almost behind us.
I noticed the red SUV parked in front of us but I did not notice at first that there were people in it. The windows were rolled up. It was parked at the edge the parking lot and the woods where our children were playing.
We sat there on that rock feeling the sun beat down. After a few minutes our friend, A, stood up to walk towards the children and remind one of them to put his jacket on. As she walked back from where the kids were, a man in the red SUV rolled down his window and spoke to her. I heard him ask if the kids belonged to her. “Yes,” she said. “And to them,” she added, motioning towards me and my partner, Francisca. The man got angry — seemingly out of nowhere. I could see that in the car with him was a woman around his age — both of them probably in their late 60s or early 70s, both of them white. “Get those kids down off of that roof! They can’t be climbing up there! They are going to destroy it!” He was shouting to A who was looking back at us. “I’ve already called the police! I’ve got pictures and video!”
The instant I heard that phrase, “I’ve called the police,” I think I panicked. Maybe it was the vitriol, the intensity in the man’s voice, the cell phone in his hand. . . the way he was staring at A so angrily. Maybe it was the way his wife sat quiet in the car just looking straight ahead only slightly shaking her head. Was she shaking it at him? At us? At the kids? It was unclear.
Perhaps it was the fact that just the day before I had read an article about how when white people call the police, it does not turn out so well for people of color. I don’t know exactly why, but I know that that I felt pretty instantly afraid.
“They are destroying property. There’s expensive equipment in there. They need to get down!” The man continued shouting about all of this from inside his car. It came out in a rush of anger and I think we were all stunned. A said, politely, “OK, I’ll tell them to get down,” as she turned to walk over to where Francisca and I were sitting so we could discuss. But the man got angrier. He was hostile. “You’re going the wrong way!” He shouted. “You’d better get those kids down now! That’s it! I’m calling the police again!”
I stood up and immediately started walking toward the kids. So did my partner and our friend. We were on our way to tell the boys to come off the roof.
Francisca and A walked a bit faster, ahead of me. The man continued to yell. I walked closer to his car. I told him, “you need to calm down! We are getting the kids. Just relax.” He replied with some bizarre, age-inappropriate line that I cannot quite remember now but something about how I was ugly and my face was getting uglier by the minute. I remember feeling shocked to have a stranger speak to me this way, so suddenly and aggressively. My mouth must have dropped open in surprise. But I moved past his car towards the kids. We called them and they all jumped off the roof right away and we walked out of the wooded area into the parking lot.
I’m not sure now why we felt we had to leave the park completely and not just simply get the kids off the roof. The man sat there waiting in his car. He continued to yell at us, at the kids. But we had to walk in the direction of his car to get to ours, to leave the park. As we started walking, he began moving his car. He was driving slowly in our direction. Following us, attempting to intimidate us, I suppose. Most of the kids hurried off to the side — so they were out of his path, but my partner and I were in front of his car. She remembers that she was concerned he was driving right towards the children, and that she was trying to get them out of the way. It’s all a bit of a blur now, but at some point I obviously turned on my camera. I must have been trying to get a picture of his license plate.
You can see from my shadow in this photo here that I am facing the car and taking the picture. And you can see that one of our sons was still sort of behind me — the other kids had already gone ahead of us and were off to the side. This photo shows that F and I are directly in front of the car as it heads towards us. I remember that we rushed our 10 year old off to the other side to be with A and the other kids but that F and I then both stopped and started to yell back at the man. We were telling him that he was overreacting, that there was no need to chase us out, that the kids were off the roof and he needed to calm down. He kept coming toward us and eventually started motioning us to move out of the way — even though there was plenty of room for him to drive around us.
Francisca, my partner, is one of the least cynical people I know. She truly believes that humans are good at their core, that if someone is exhibiting bad behavior it’s because they have been hurt themselves. She sees the good in people. And she is always trying to lovingly reason with them or calm them or listen to them or explain to them why their behavior is hurtful. It is one of the the things I love most about her. On more than one occasion I have seen her quiet and comfort complete strangers who were clearly disturbed and acting out. I have seen her approach people whom most would write off or avoid completely and wrap her arms around them in a loving embrace. And I have watched those complete strangers be calmed and fold themselves into her arms. I have seen her be clear eyed, clear thinking, and reasonable as she tries to explain to a person who is behaving badly (like the time one of our neighbors followed us, yelling homophobic comments) that what they are doing is not OK. I think that’s what she was trying to do in that moment with the older man in the SUV who was heading straight for us.
In that moment, I jumped out of the way. The man continued forward with his car. Francisca kept talking. She was walking backwards still trying to talk to him, asking him to stop and listen. He would not. He kept moving forward, slowly but steadily. He kept telling her to move out of the way but at that point she could not move out of the way. His car was moving too fast and she was afraid to stop walking backwards because she thought she might fall if she lost the momentum.
You can see in this photo that she is on her tipped-toes, actually being pushed by the car as she walks backwards.
We were all screaming for him to stop so that she could move. But he would not.
Suddenly I had this flash: “he can’t run us all over, right?” And without another thought I jumped back in front of the car. Perhaps in the moment I believed that my privileges would protect me, that surely this man would not run me, a white American woman over with his car. For a split second I almost asked the kids to get in front of the car too, thinking that surely he would not run over the children, surely he would stop. Luckily I did not yell for the children to jump in front of the car. Luckily I stopped myself from saying that.
Luckily, because when I did step back in front of the car, the man kept moving. He was not about to stop or divert his SUV no matter who was in his way. So there we were, Francisca and I both asking this man to stop his car long enough to let us get out of the way. The kids were screaming, walking at a quick pace alongside the car while Francisca and I, walking backwards, were still in front of the man who was steadily moving his car ahead into our bodies. Apparently, I had at some point turned on the video on my phone but only managed to shoot literally two seconds; in that small clip you can hear the kids yelling. “Mommy! Mommy!” We were all terrified.
Finally, Francisca and I looked at each other: “We’re going to have to jump out of the way,” one of us said. I can’t remember who. I had the thought to pull her towards me but before I could she pushed me and consequently pushed herself off of me. The car kept going.
And then he stopped. He drove maybe another 50 feet and got out of his car, still yelling about how the police were on their way. He was giving us and our kids the middle finger. Our car and our friend’s car were the only two cars in the parking lot besides his. The man began taking pictures of our cars, and all of us continued walking that direction, I guess, so that we could get in our cars and leave.
My memory is fuzzy in parts. My partner and I have the timeline of the events pretty clear between us. We agree on the way that things went down during the incident. But what’s less clear is what exactly we were both feeling and why. I was scared, for sure. I was scared for my Black sons, and the Latinx friends who were with us. I was scared for us all. But what was I afraid of? A 70 year old man in an SUV? The police? Was I being irrational?
As I write this I imagine white friends and family reading it. I imagine them telling me that yes I was being irrational, that we should have stayed in the park with the kids, ignored the man in the SUV, maybe even called the police to come. I imagine them telling me that we should have stood our ground, claimed our right to be there, that the police surely would have come to our rescue. Some part of me believes that too. And for the life of me I cannot sort it out. I know that I am prone to anxiety, that I have a vivid imagination, always jumping to worst case scenarios in my head. It is a demon I have wrestled with a long time. It is part of me that I normally try to squelch. Reacting out of fear has usually not served me well in my life. I try to untangle the knots, suss out the situation. Am I safe? Is my family safe? Is it only having lived a life of white privilege that allows me to even ask these questions?
Just days before our trip to New Hampshire a Black man in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a neighborhood not far from my own, was shot and killed by police. At least a couple of articles I read about the shooting focused on how this man, Saheed Vassell, was well known in the community and had lived there for many years. His neighbors had known him a long time and understood that although he had some mental problems, he was not a danger. The day he was shot by police, Vassell was wandering the streets carrying a shower head in his hand. But someone had reported that a man with a gun was wandering around. More than one article I read suggested that what had gone wrong in Crown Heights had everything to do with gentrification, that white people who do not get to know their neighbors, who do not ever look up from their cell phones long enough to see — really see — the people they are living near — the people they are displacing- these white people have their own warped ways of seeing the world. These white gentrifiers may be confused. They may be letting their fears and their (racist) imaginations get the best of them. They may feel like they are in danger when, in fact, they are not. They may even call the cops. And we all know what too often happens when the cops show up. Shoot first, think later seems to be common practice.
Earlier this month the story of Stephon Clark dominated headlines: the man who was standing in his own backyard of a home he shared with his grandmother, his partner, and their two young children, was shot in the back multiple times because a white neighbor had reported someone who matched his description, breaking car windows. That white neighbor, by the way, regrets having called the cops now. And that is precisely because when white people call the cops, people of color often end up dead.
But the next thing I knew my partner was dialing 911 on her phone. The man in the park was harassing us and had been aggressive towards us, with his car. I understood why my partner was calling the police. I understand that when something feels dangerous calling the police is the thing most of us, especially most white Americans, are taught to do. But the thought of the police showing up in that moment somehow felt terrifying to me. My partner explained later that she was calling, not to ask the police for protection but because she was also afraid that if the man had called the police he would have a different version of what happened and she wanted our side of the story counted as well.
My partner is not a white American. She is an American, only recently. She has olive skin and dark hair. She speaks with a Colombian accent. She is marked as other. Especially outside of NYC, especially in a place like New Hampshire; and so is our friend, A, who has even darker skin and had been the first of us to speak to the white man in the red SUV.
Was this the reason that this man was targeting us? Was it our Black and brown boys on the rooftop? Would he have had the same reaction had it been 6 white boys up there? It’s impossible to know, I guess. Maybe he was crazy. Maybe he was racist or xenophobic. Maybe he had even seen F and I holding hands and was homophobic. Maybe it was all of the above or something else completely. I suppose we’ll never know.
What we do know is that marginalized people — especially Black people and other people of color — live with these questions on a daily basis. We cannot assume that the world is safe for us the way that straight, white, especially middle class Americans can and do.
My biological son and I walk through the world with white skin privilege. We always have and we always will. I have tried from the time he was very young to teach him about this. More recently, I have tried to teach him that he needs to be doubly thoughtful when he is with his step brothers. People often do not give Black and brown kids the benefit of the doubt the way they do white kids. We already know that there is a phenomenon in our racist culture that tends to see Black boys as older than they are, tends to see Black boys and men as dangerous by default. Many people have written about this phenomenon especially in trying to understand the murders of children, Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice.
And yet again there is another story in my newsfeed today that proves exactly this point.
In the very short time I have been stepmama to these kids, I have already seen this play out a couple of times with strangers on the street who have assumed my step sons to be guilty of some minor infraction, have gotten in their faces to correct their behavior and tell them to get in line. It is painful to see this happen to people you love. I can only imagine the pain of feeling the world pressing on my own body, my own skin, my own flesh and blood this way. And for centuries.
I will never know what that is truly like.
I grew up in a small, rural town where racism was overt and unashamed. I grew up in a place where people love their guns. I know how prevalent guns are in certain parts of the U.S. I know how passionate many gun owners are about their guns, especially now. Especially in the age of MAGA and the Trump administration. In the parking lot of that park in New Hampshire the other day while my lesbian partner who happens to be Latina was calling 911 to report a white man who had been harassing us and our kids, it suddenly occurred to me that the man, who was now out of his car and standing in front of us, possibly had a gun on him. It occurred to me that he could pull that gun out and start shooting. It occurred to me that if he happened to shoot one of us, certain ones of us especially, a jury may not find him guilty. And it happened to occur to me that this very thought may also simultaneously be occurring to him.
Apparently we had gotten loud. We were all — the old man, the three moms, the six young boys — yelling and causing a commotion. People from different parts of the park heard us and began to appear on the edges of the parking lot to see what was the matter. Two people wearing camouflage and holding paint ball guns appeared in my line of sight. This happened at the exact same time I started to worry that the old man in the SUV had a gun, at the exact time that my partner had gotten 911 on the phone. I wasn’t registering the fact that the paintballers were children themselves (I was only told this later) and I wasn’t even registering that that the guns were toy guns. I was terrified. I screamed at the kids to get in the cars and I screamed at my partner to get off the phone with the cops and to let’s get the F*** out of there, now! As though we had done something wrong.
We get into the car and my partner begins to drive. She throws the phone in my lap and tells me to talk. The 911 operator is on the other end asking for details. The 911 operator is asking for details and I’m trying to explain the story. I’m trying to decide if I should refer to my partner as my partner or my friend. Is that going to make things worse? I’m trying to decide. Is this person on the other end of the 911 call homophobic? Are the police homophobic? Are they going to think we are just some crazy lesbians asking for trouble? Have the operator and the police in this small New Hampshire town already, in fact, heard from the man in the red SUV who called to report some kids who were causing trouble? The operator is on the phone and he is asking me if they should send over a police officer and it seems so ridiculous. No, you should not send someone. It’s just a dumb old man harassing us, making us leave a park that we have every right to enjoy with our kids. A dumb old man who maybe saw some Black and brown kids playing where he thought they shouldn’t have played, a dumb old man who spoke rudely to a woman with brown skin and a foreign accent, a dumb old man who may have seen two middle aged women kissing or holding hands in the woods, a dumb old man who thought he had the right to call the cops on us or at least threaten us by saying that he already had, a dumb old man who, for whatever reasons, thought that we didn’t belong and thought that he could force us out of a public park by using his vehicle and our fears against us; and I hate that he was not wrong about that.