Black and White

Shawn, a 20ish black kid with a trendy cell-phone earpiece attached to his right ear, was telling a friend about a fight he got into on the subway.

By his account, rendered in animated fashion at Union Square in New York around midnight, he and his girlfriend got onto the train and had to stand because all the seats were taken. Suddenly, a big white dude bumped into him -- even though Shawn hadn't "stopped short," which apparently would have negated the guy's bump. 

So Shawn turned around and -- as I remember the story -- made some annoyed-but-non-threatening remark to the guy, who replied, "Fuck you."

Oops.

Shawn, wearing a suit and accompanied on the train by his white Czech Republic girlfriend, said he immediately went into "hood" mode." Out went the proper English. In came the ghetto talk. Which, as Shawn told the story, essentially terrorized the white dude, who -- fearing a faceful of fist -- began bear-hugging Shawn, lifting the lean, 5-11ish kid off the floor. 

Obviously, Shawn had a choice: blow off the guy or start whaling on him. Out of the corner of his eye, he said, he spied what appeared to be a security officer approaching -- making the decision easy.

"He was white, I was black. And black guys always get the blame," he said.

So ... BOOM! Shawn's fists were flying.

When the security guy broke things up, Shawn said an old white woman -- as is their wont, he noted -- blamed it all on the black kid.

"You know she wanted to say 'nigger,'" Shawn said.

Shawn's white girlfriend, though, stuck up for him, and -- as I remember -- all ended well.

The story was one of many Shawn told in an hour-and-a-half monologue to his friends, first to a pretty white girl with a European accent, then to a studious-but-strong-looking black guy (whose reaction to the subway tale was, "Shawn, that was a long story.")

A sampling of his subjects: 1) how mainstream American culture sucked because white Americans were basically "watered-down Europeans," 2) how people in Union Square would look at a big electronic readout with rapidly changing mega-digits and speculate that it was the national debt or the number of people Bush had killed, when in fact it was a clock to the nth degree (which he said he figured out after about a week of studying it), 3) how kids in the hood used to make fun of the way he dressed, calling it "homo" (he was wearing a gray T-shirt tucked into tight blue jeans; a snug, untucked checkered button-down shirt; a silver-chain loop on his belt; and red-and-white sneakers untied), 4) how his style of dress is now catching on in the hood, where baggy is out; and how some white dudes just can't pull off the look (noting guys he'd seen in bars with their balls clearly outlined and their "hairy asses" showing when they leaned over), and 5) how everyone his age still raves about "KIDS," a 1995 flick about New York City teens' addiction to drugs and sex (he thought the lifestyle it chronicled was lame).

The guy was obviously bright and culturally and politically aware. At first, I thought he was gay, because he mentioned gay things and said he hung out in Chelsea, but by the end, I wasn't sure. In fact, how much of his monologue was real and how much was shtick is anybody's guess. He was, however, way better than a comedy club on a weekday night. And, once in a while, he drew me into the conversation. When he and his friends left the steps of Union Square at around 12:30 a.m., he reached over, shook my hand and said, "My name's Shawn. It's been good talking to you." Cool, I thought. Even cooler would be seeing him again. Fat chance, right?

Wrong.

About an hour later, I saw Shawn standing outside a brightly lit cafe at the corner of 23rd and 8th in Chelsea, lecturing a bleeding white kid. Soon, an NYPD car flashed to the scene, along with the rescue squad. Uh-oh, I thought, there goes Shawn. But the black-white thing, in this case, didn't hold. I have no idea why the white kid -- whom I first saw literally stumbling past the open-air Venus diner a couple feet in front of my grilled cheese and french fries at about 1:15 a.m. -- was bleeding, but he was the only one taken away by the cops or medics.

I thought about race -- and Shawn -- again Thursday in lower Harlem. I had wandered up 114th Street, a narrow road with teenagers playing basketball on the hot pavement and other black guys hanging out on the stoops of the skinny sidewalk. In a scene out of an NYC cops flick, about 20 police cars -- mostly cruisers, but also a handful of unmarked detective cars (along with one three-wheeled meter-maidish vehicle) -- screeched onto 114th, lights flashing, sirens squealing. Cops sprayed out like shot-gun pellets. Two panting officers raced to the scene on foot. Speculation on the street was that they were looking for someone connected with the shooting of two policemen earlier in the week. It took only five minutes or so for the cops to determine it was a false alarm, and away they went just as quickly as they had arrived.

What was notable, though, was how many of the black guys scattered when the police approached. Many of the cops -- the vast majority, maybe -- were black or Latino, but that didn't matter. Inner-city blacks and big-city cops don't mix. 

That's no surprise, considering the stunning number of young black men behind bars in America.

Using information from the U.S. Justice Department's annual report on inmates, the World Socialist Web Site presented stark statistics on life for black men in America:

"More than a quarter of U.S. inmates in mid-2002—a total of 596,400—were black males between the ages of 20 and 39. This means 12 percent of black men in their 20s and early 30s—more than one in ten—are in jail or prison. The report calculates that over the course of a lifetime, 28 percent of all black men will have spent some time behind bars."

The numbers haven't changed much, according to more recent federal studies. In 2005, the Justice Department reported, 12 percent of black men in their late 20s were in prison or jail -- compared to only 3.9 percent of Hispanics and 1.7 percent of whites.

It's even worse for the poorly educated -- and one study estimates that New York City has a 61 percent high school dropout rate.

Reported the New York Times: "In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison."

I have no idea how many black guys are wrongly convicted of crimes. Most, I assume, deserve to be in jail. Most, I also assume, grew up in environments that helped seal their fates -- meaning no father at home, lousy schools, gangs on the streets, a numbness to ever-present violence, an acceptance of drugs. Listen to rap songs. Those guys are like reporters from the ghetto. Life isn't easy. 

Race itself, however, plays zero role in why somebody commits a crime. Put white or brown kids in the same circumstances and they'd turn out the same way. That doesn't mean racial profiling doesn't lead to more blacks being jailed. It just means that race isn't the root cause. 

Profiling, of course, demeans and marginalizes people. It doesn't make a kid think, "Wow. Isn't that policeman nice, mom?" And it takes places everywhere. Here in Harrisonburg, a college town in the Shenandoah Valley, the city's star high school athlete -- and later a Division I-AA football All-American -- once told me that when he walked to the 7-Eleven, cops would stop and ask what he was doing. That would never happen to a white kid here.

Police, no doubt, would cast a wary eye on Shawn -- or is it Sean (and do I use "Shawn" because it sounds blacker?) -- before they would on a white guy. It's not fair, but Shawn clearly has accepted it -- meaning the system has beaten down even this exceptionally bright, articulate and knowledgeable kid from the hood.

No wonder he decided to pound that white dude on the train.