Unexpected risks, obstacles
Some venues block doors; some players express fear,
Omari Akil says he couldn’t wait to play Pokémon Go — until he went outside for 20 minutes.
Akil, a writer and business systems analyst from Chapel Hill, N.C., spent five minutes enjoying the game, including one minute “trying to look as pleasant and non-threatening as possible as I walked by a somewhat visibly disturbed white woman on her way to the bus stop.
“I spent the other 14 minutes being distracted from the game by thoughts of the countless Black Men who have had the police called on them because they looked ‘suspicious’ or wondering what a second amendment exercising individual might do if I walked past their window a third or fourth time in search of a Jigglypuff,” Akil wrote in a piece he published on Medium.
“When my brain started combining the complexity of being Black in America with the real world proposal of wandering and exploration that is designed into the game play of Pokémon Go, there was only one conclusion. I might die if I keep playing.”
For the most part, Pokémon Go is all fun and games. Yet for many African Americans, especially men, their enjoyment is undercut by fears they might arouse suspicion with potentially lethal consequences. The smartphone game sends people out in the world to capture monsters from the Japanese cartoon franchise. It landed as the nation was reeling from the police shooting deaths of two African Americans and the deaths of five police officers gunned down in Dallas.
Wrote Akil: “Let’s just go ahead and add Pokémon Go to the extremely long list of things white people can do without fear of being killed, while Black people have to realistically be wary.”
Malik Bennett, 18, a rising college freshman from West Columbia, S.C., says he has been playing Pokémon since he was in diapers. “There has not been a two-week span that I haven’t touched a Pokémon game,” he says.
Since Pokémon Go was released, “I have been playing the game a lot,” he says. But, at the urging of his older brother and parents, Bennett, who is black, makes sure he’s always aware of his surroundings. With an ear bud in one ear and his phone in his right hand or pocket, he waits for notifications to pop up before turning his attention to his phone screen.
Anthony Battey says he knows other Pokémon Go players wander the San Francisco streets at all hours hunting for Pokémon. But he’s not one of them.
“I was out the other night, and I saw a lot of cops and I thought, ‘You know what? Let me go’ ” home, Battey, 25 and black, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
A Tumblr post offers tips on how to play Pokémon while black, such as: Walk a dog (on a cloth leash, not a chain), wear glasses, avoid white neighborhoods and bring a non-black friend.
“Sharing because there is a double standard. Black people shouldn’t have to take precautions to play a game, especially when we’ve already got stories of white people running into traffic and disrupting businesses to catch their Pokémon,” the Tumblr post reads.
In the U.S., black people are stopped, searched, arrested and imprisoned at rates higher than people of other races. Research by USA TODAY, which tracked arrests reported to the federal government in 2011 and 2012, found that in at least 70 police departments from Connecticut to California, black people were arrested at a rate 10 times higher than those of other races.
Ronnie Dunn, associate professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University, says he understands the apprehension. “There is the potential for blacks, males in particular, to be racially profiled,” Dunn says.
Says Bennett, who cautiously approached a police officer after discovering he was also playing Pokémon: “I can see the game helping out because it’s simple and people have the same goals.”
The officer later fist-bumped Bennett and pointed out some rare Pokémon lurking in the area.
“Let’s just go ahead and add Pokémon Go to the extremely long list of things white people can do without fear of being killed.” Omari Akil, in a post on Medium