JUSTIN PHILLIPS Being outside while Black gets harder
My preferred outfit when I go on afternoon walks or runs in North Oakland these days is a black Nike jacket with a hood, a black face mask to match and a baseball cap.
It’s comfortable exercise attire I never think about when I’m actually wearing it, that is until I’m in an affluent neighborhood and a police car passes by me, only to circle the block and pass me again a few minutes later, which is what happened last week.
I’m no stranger to the law enforcement double take as a Black man, but lately these incidents are weighing on me in a different way. The glances, the feeling I have to quickly make myself somehow look less like a suspect, they’re serving as reminders of yet another thing the pandemic has taken from Black and brown people in the Bay Area: public outdoor spaces where we feel safe and welcome.
Sure, the pandemic has put constraints on the Bay Area populace equally when it comes to going to parks in groups, or spending lazy afternoons at the beach with friends. But Black people in cities like Oakland and San Francisco, at least on a social level, had been aware of their limited access to these spaces long before the country found itself in the midst of a racial awakening.
The social unrest of today focuses on an American law enforcement system that unfairly targets, and often kills, Black people, but this modern situation has been fueled over the past few years by countless microaggressions against young Black people in public spaces. We’ve read stories about cops unnecessarily being called on Black teens shopping for prom clothes, others that were touring a college campus, on Black women golfing at a leisurely pace, and on Black men sitting in a Starbucks while awaiting friends.
This country has long held an irrational fear about Black people, especially young folks, gathered in groups. The pandemic is only going to exacerbate the issue. Think about it: COVID19 is forcing us all into smaller social bubbles, which means the people who would have called the cops on Black groups before March are seeing even less of them these days.
Couple that absence with how the only images many people are seeing of Black people gathered in the same place lately are from volatile Black Lives Matter protests, and there’s a high chance the fear of Black groups will have grown by the time the pandemic ends.
The narrative of Black youths in a group equating to danger is something we’ve been trying to combat for years. Significant local progress was made from 2016 to 2019, when there was a proliferation in the number of Blackonly jogging, hiking and exercising groups in the Bay Area. All the efforts seemed to reach a peak in 2018 with events like BBQ’n While Black and Lakefest, where thousands of Black and brown people would come party near
Oakland’s Lake Merritt. It was a quiet movement over the years, but one that illustrated how Black people, especially in our local communities, knew there was safety in numbers, and our existing in a public space shouldn’t be treated as a crime.
In having this conversation about the sanctity of Black spaces, I’m acknowledging very subtle progress being made in this country around the issues of racial equality. At the same time, I’m still worried that the importance of Black spaces will get lost in society’s rush to be a racismfree utopia. Every Black politician elected to higher offices, every sports team that aligns with the BLM movement, every antiracism campaign launched by a company can be seen as window dressing if at the end of the day, young Black people can’t hang in a park without having the cops called on them.
What’s interesting about the glances I get lately, especially if I’m running in a neighborhood, is how the clothes I’m wearing are similar to the ones I wore two years ago to Oakland’s first BBQ’n While Black at Lake Merritt. The antiracism event was, in part, a response to a white woman, who would later be known as BBQ Becky, who called the police on two Black men barbecuing by the lake only a few days before. The event was canceled this year as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. The same thing happened to Lakefest, a free event in Oakland’s Lake Merritt neighborhood, which also celebrated Black culture.
It’s hard to imagine when these events will be able to happen again without being in flagrant violation of social distancing rules. What made these events special, along with the Black outdoor groups, was how they didn’t cost anything to join. This benefited a demographic with high poverty rates in the Bay Area that was also seeing less of itself represented in a gentrifying region.
At one point during the early days of the BLM protests this year, I felt people might have mistaken protests for being a form of celebratory Black gatherings, ones that were akin to Lakefest and BBQ’n While Black. They weren’t. If anything, the protests were work for Black people, who not only showed up to spread antiracism messages but also had to constantly talk with white counterparts about the purpose of the movement.
The idea of existing in an outdoor space without having to think about your skin color and how it can attract negative attention is something with which Black people in the Bay Area were only recently becoming familiar. I’m hopeful that when the world returns to some sense of normalcy, the progress Black people made in this regard won’t have been erased.