It wasn’t always like this. The east side of Columbus was once a place for young black people to come and flourish. A small-scale Harlem, in some ways: there were nightclubs teeming with jazz players, theaters, block parties, horse races, and a good way for most hard-working folks to make a living. Livingston Avenue and the King-Lincoln Bronzeville district were the city’s cultural hubs up until the early 1950s. Columbus, as most cities do, chose construction and convenience over the lives of its black residents, setting in motion a project to construct the sprawling freeway of Interstate 70, and its sibling, Interstate 670. This demolished much of those communities and pushed the people in them deeper into the southern parts of the city, away from the downtown area, and out of the city’s once-thriving center. The clubs and theaters were replaced with bigger houses to lure in more wealthy, white residents who would find themselves working in the new and expanded downtown, or people moving in to have access to the freeway. The black residents who could stay suffered, losing many of the work opportunities they once had in all of their old haunts, but also too prideful to move homes. This was their neighborhood, after all. That is how Bexley found itself both at the center of two black neighborhoods, but also built to ignore them.
In 2001, Capital University recruited me to play soccer. They were one of a small handful of schools to do so, as I was a very capable high school soccer player who also didn’t have the height to play the position that my skill set most aligned with. Soccer was, admittedly, an interesting choice for me, given my background. Most of the young black kids in my neighborhood played basketball—a sport I also played, though not nearly as well. I stood out on most soccer fields. I was the only black player on my select team, even though the team had a black coach—a detail my father scouted out during the team selection process. I didn’t see myself as choosing soccer to be different from my peers, at least not initially. I had a natural skill set that translated well to the sport: a blend of speed and instincts that allowed for a versatility of position, and the coordination and balance to tie every skill together. At 17, with an offer from a college a few miles from my father’s house, I didn’t consider the idea of existing as black in a place that historically worked to erase all signs of blackness from their communities. Bexley was the suburb down the street. A place where the grass was greener. In the late summer of that year, I stepped on the field as the first American-born player of color in the Capital University soccer program’s history.
When I hear people talk about “the right things to do” to make sure that police don’t kill you, I imagine that I have learned to face police differently than they have. When you are asked to step out of a car that you own, and your body no longer belongs to you, but instead belongs to the lights drowning it, first one and then another, a harsh reality exists. There are two sides of a night that you can end up on: one where you get to see the sunrise again, and one where you do not. You don’t exactly consider this in the moment, which I think is important to point out. When demands and questions are being leveled at you, particularly at a high volume, particularly with skepticism in their tone and a light in your eyes, it is easy to fall into an idea of wanting to prove yourself. To reach for anything that might show that you are a whole person and worthy of staying that way. I recall becoming close with fear, with the instinct to stay alive.
That particular night, police officers, first two, and then three more, responded to a call of suspicious behavior. This is where the story becomes unremarkable to many. I was asked to exit my car before I was asked for ID. When I mentioned that this was my own vehicle, I was silenced, held outside of my vehicle by two officers while others huddled around a squad car. When finally asked to produce ID, I reached in my pocket, remembered that it was in my bookbag that I placed in the trunk, and moved to get it. Upon moving, I was grabbed and forcefully held in the grass. People walked from their homes, and I wondered silently which one of them called the police on me. I thought about my pants, now stained by the grass, and how much they cost me. How much the car cost me. How much it cost me to get here, to this college, out of a neighborhood just five miles away that no one on this block would ever venture to. But I mostly thought about how I perhaps owned nothing. Not even my own hands, pressed behind my back.
I was eventually pulled up after what felt like hours, but must have only been five minutes. My car ransacked, my license and college ID eventually located, as the rest of my bookbag’s contents spread across the pavement. After the officer stared at my face and stared at my ID repeatedly, he mumbled, “Interesting name. Sorry for the trouble.”
After they left, my belongings still scattered in the street, I sat on a curb and watched my hands shake for an hour. No one left their homes to help me or ask if I was okay. No one from the party witnessed the incident. None of the people I wanted to make myself new for witnessed this undoing of pride. It felt, of course, like I didn’t belong. Like I was a trespasser, waiting to find my way back to another home.
I don’t remember what I felt for the police that night being hatred, or at least not what I would define as hatred. Even today, in being critical of the institution of police and systems of policing, I feel no hatred toward the men and women themselves. I have had many interactions with police since 2001, some better, and a few just as bad. In 2008, I was detained in a store for hours, again without a simple ID check, because I “matched the description” of a shoplifter who I looked nothing like. In 2014, I was pulled over in Pennsylvania for not following a law I wasn’t aware of. The officer who pulled me over politely explained the law, bantered warmly with me a bit about Ohio, where I was heading, and let me off without a ticket. Like everyone, my interactions with the police exist on a wide spectrum. Unlike everyone, my expectations for interactions with the police only exist on one part of that spectrum: I expect to fear and be feared. But, I have survived every interaction. The difference now is that when I see the news of another unarmed death, a boy who didn’t react to orders fast enough, or a man who reacted too quickly, I know how this can happen. I have entered that space and come out through the other side unscathed, but with a new layer of anger, a new layer of fear. The fact that I was afforded survival once used to make this type of death remarkable. Over the years, I find it to be less and less. With each body, I wonder how their stories began. If they began something like mine.
Serena Williams And The Policing Of Imagined Arrogance
By almost any measurement, I am a wholly mediocre basketball player. Good enough to never be picked last, but never good enough to win a game on my own. My greatest on-court skill is not turning the ball over, a skill that I imagine I picked up after playing with two older brothers for over a decade and being afraid to let them down. Mostly, every athletic skill I have is rooted in fear. Which doesn’t exactly make me a desirable NBA prospect. None of these facts stopped me last summer in Oakland, after making two jump shots in a pickup game with some fellow writers, from holding my follow through, glaring at my defender, and saying, “I’ll be at this all day. You better get a hand up.”
I missed every shot I took for the rest of the afternoon, but I say that with the knowledge that it doesn’t matter. For those who are well-versed in the language, we know the secret. Trash talking isn’t about an individual’s ability to be consistently great. If you are from any place in this America where you have seen all breeds of struggle grow until they cloak an entire community, and you are fortunate enough to survive, few things become more urgent and necessary than reminding the world when you’re at your best. Because you know how fleeting those moments can be. You’ve seen how quickly they can vanish.
When I talk about Compton here, I need people to understand it as it once was, and not as the re-imagined area it is slowly becoming as crime rates drop to the lowest they’ve been in decades, and the wealthy residents who started to flee in the early ’90s begin to inch back to the edges of the city. The Compton I need to bring to life here is the one that N.W.A. blew the dust off of
. An area that we saw in blockbuster movies which often shared a common theme: the black life who died at the end, usually by the gun, was promising. Or had turned their life around. Or had done “all of the right things” to get out of what we were to understand as an urban killing field.
The Compton that needs to be understood when discussing Serena Williams is the one that America has used so often for entertainment and irony, while simultaneously turning its back on the infrastructural failures that plague so many of the neighborhoods that kids from the suburbs have the luxury to wear on their tongues, and on their bodies, but never in their hearts or minds. The avatar for all things black and dangerous, both a real place and a vague idea. This is the Compton that briefly held the young Williams sisters, and the Compton that claimed Yetunde Price, Serena’s elder half-sister, who was shot and killed after a confrontation in 2003. Though Serena Williams only resided in this Compton for six years, it is perhaps essential in understanding the father who pulled his two daughters from the national junior tennis circuit before they were teenagers, due to white parents talking down to them. It is perhaps essential in understanding the competitive nature of the Williams sisters, though especially Serena. It is ABSOLUTELY essential in understanding how Serena revels in her dominance.
When I talk about crack cocaine in the ’80s here, I need people to understand it for what it did to the individual home. Or the individual block of homes. Or the individual Black child. And not so much as the epidemic that is often discussed now in broad-brushed terms, with no eye toward its very real impact. In places like Compton, and places like many I know and have lived, neighborhoods were already swelling with gang violence by the time the ’80s hit, even before the introduction of crack cocaine. Once-flourishing industries had long left these areas, leaving whole families without one steady income. Many of the people who were pushing crack were just everyday people, trying to silence a child’s cries. Though this didn’t stop wars from being fought over territory, over prices, over who got to feed their family and who did not. These things are what our entire American history is littered with. Who will not make it home alive so that someone else can be fed. Still, when it happens in the Black community, it takes on a different idea; a different tone altogether. Everyday people killing everyday people in the hopes of being able to provide for the everyday people who became addicts, not above robbing and killing in order to rest in the comfort of their addiction. It is almost impossible to ignore the governmental root of this cycle, but, while it certainly bears mentioning here, that is a much larger thing to unpack. It is one thing to sit in a movie theater and watch the fragility of Black life play out on a screen in front of you. It is an entirely different thing to sit in a movie theater, watch the fragility of Black life play out on a screen in front of you, and have no escape from it once you leave. It is an entirely different thing to have its presence hang thick over your home, over your young and talented daughters.
I remember the fear I felt when I realized that I had buried enough friends to think of death almost casually. Something that I expect and know will come for people I grew up with and care about. When I see a childhood friend’s number flash across my caller ID, I exhale and prepare myself for an all-too-familiar routine. There’s a sadness in that, but there’s also an urgency. Witnessing the taking of sacred things is how we learn to covet. It is enough to make a father take his children to a place where he is the only one who can fail them.
As someone who observes culture in all of its forms, if the past three years since the death of Trayvon Martin have taught me anything, it’s that people have found so many new ways to say “silence.” It is what is meant when we look at a peaceful protest and hear people say, “Well, why can’t they just do it more peacefully?” It is perhaps what I mean when I look at a text that I am not too keen on returning and text back: “I’ll get back to you in the next hour.” And it is definitely what is meant when Serena Williams is looked at, careless and immersed in joy, and told, “Be more ‘humble’.”
There really is no measurement for how America wants its Black athletes to be. Oftentimes, they are asked to both know their greatness and know their place at the same time, a landscape that becomes increasingly difficult to navigate depending on the sport they’re in. When Deion Sanders starts high stepping at the 40-yard line, he’s still dancing. America has always been fine with its Black athletes doing the dance on the field of their choosing, as long as they do the dance off of it. When Marshawn Lynch doesn’t speak to the press, that’s when people begin to feel cheated. To be Black and a woman, and a Black woman who is great, and a Black woman who is great at tennis is perhaps the trickiest of all of these landscapes. For many people, the intersection of race and gender is an uncomfortable place, and Serena Williams’ greatness sits firmly in the center of it. So much so that any time she wins, there is no way to have a discussion that does not reduce her to her most Black, or her most woman. It isn’t always explicit, of course. But one could argue that these things rarely are.
Serena Williams is, almost without argument, one of the greatest athletes of our time. If she was not before, she has cemented herself in that place after her 2015 French Open victory, her 20th major. She did it in a traditional manner, battling back and rallying, using her elite athleticism and strength to overpower and out-hustle her opponent, Lucie Safarova. And she did it with all of the volume and intensity that we’ve become accustomed to. Serena yelled, both in joy and agony. She pumped her fists, talking confidently to herself when she was most on. Tennis is like few other sports. In most cases, there is only you and a single opponent on an island, sometimes for hours. The mark of greatness in those times is how you sustain, even if you have to celebrate the smallest victories in an attempt to will yourself to the larger one. When we insist that Serena Williams be more reserved, or less “scary,” or when we insist that she fit into the mold of decorum that we believe tennis should be, we’re really telling her to silence the very things that drive her. We’re asking her to not be great so that we can be comfortable. We’re telling one of the most dominant athletes many of us will ever see to maybe keep it down a bit, as if any kind of dominance is stumbled upon silently.
When I talk about Serena Williams here, I need people to understand her for where she came from, and not where she is now. Rather, I need people to understand her for what she was born into. I need people to understand both the whole and the sum of her parts. I need people to understand the Compton, the crack cocaine, and the champion. The woman who buried a sister with the same hands she uses to bury opponents. If you do not know what she knows, then you know nothing of the ultimate reward of greatness. The way it feels when everything clicks. It is almost unfathomable to tell someone to act like they’ve been somewhere before when they are intensely aware of the fact that they were never supposed to be there in the first place, isn’t it?
And so Serena throws her racket and falls to her knees. And so a little Black girl finds a tennis court on the outskirts of her hood. And so another father finds hope. And so I hit two jump shots in a row in the middle of summer in Oakland. And so I extend my follow through, hold it, and let the breeze blow sweat off of my arm. A reminder of how easily things can be taken from us.
They Will Speak Loudest Of You After You’ve Gone
What I got to experience in moving to the Northeast after living my entire life in the Midwest is the different masks that racism wears. Ohio, in all of its not-quite-South aesthetic, has all of the trappings of bold racism. The obvious type that comes across loud and unapologetic. I was once called a nigger while walking from my high school soccer field. A black family in a nearby suburb had their house vandalized. Confederate flag stickers were pressed onto bumpers that sometimes revved their engines and yelled at black kids walking by. There was an understanding that came with the geography, a geography that came with a history of slaves finding their way to freedom along the Ohio River. When you love a place, coming to terms with its lesser qua
lities and learning to apologize for them is commonplace. My pals who left Ohio for the coasts would come back and talk of how they didn’t feel like such a burden, doing more than just surviving and waiting for the next moment of discomfort to rain down from the sky. They had untethered themselves from the comfort of known racism, of knowing who wanted them dead. It was better, they claimed, to live in a place where everyone seemed to welcome your living presence.
The first time I realized I was invisible in my new Connecticut neighborhood, a woman got out of a car with one of those “COEXIST” bumper stickers on them carrying several bags of groceries while talking on her phone. As she approached the bench I was sitting on, she dropped her bags, two of them on my lap. I waited for a moment, but she was unmoved, talking on her phone about Baltimore, a city that, at the time, was in protest, people taking to the streets in the name of Freddie Gray. It was a shame, the woman said to whoever was on the other line of the phone. A shame that police keep getting away with this. I moved her bags from my lap and placed them on the ground in front of me without her even noticing.
Stepping outside my apartment to go to the gym one morning, a man outside of my door, eyeing my apartment building, asked if I knew how much the building was going for. He was interested in moving into the area, looking for a place to live. The building isn’t for rent, I told him. People live in the building, I explained, telling him that by “people,” I specifically meant “me.” He looked me up and down as if seeing me for the first time, taking in my gym shorts, my worn and faded t-shirt, ripe for the trash heap after years of enduring my sweat. “You sure you live here?” he asked. “I thought this space was vacant.” When I told him politely that I’d lived there for the past several months, he skeptically started to walk away, glancing back every now and then at me in front of my own door to an apartment that I was paying to live inside of in a city where I barely seemed to exist.
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us Page 20