I was still new here, new to the U.S. I definitely was struggling with all of the social nuances that are second nature where you grew up but are definitely lacking in a foreign country. Me and a friend from “back home” were a bit tired of staying in the apartment and decided to chill on the parkway (Eastern Parkway) near the train station. The expectation was as we do home, relax in the open as we observe the other people of the neighborhood. We selected benches near one of the entrances of the train station and commenced to have conversation. We soon noticed that there was a uniformed police strolling on the parkway and walking in our direction. Initially we just ignored it. Coming from Barbados, encounters with the police, even in strained situations are mainly casual. It did not take long for me and my friend to come to the conclusion that the officer seemed to taking a special interest in us. He was by the way black. So my friend and I began to debate between ourselves, what he could possibly be thinking. We went form such positive thoughts as, he is thinking those guys look so relax if he was not in uniform he would come over and join us, to the negative, maybe those guys (my friend and I ) are criminals and just sitting, deciding on who should be there next victim of the night. As most of the thoughts were absurd we were having a merry time laughing. To further exacerbate the situation and ignoring his “authority” over us, we two precocious early twenties, black men found ourselves engaged in a virtual stare down, which to us was very humorous.
As fortune would have it, it was not too long before he was joined by his white partner. This seemed to embolden the young, black cop. He looked no more than twenty eight to us. After a brief conversation with his newly arrived partner, a conversation we can only speculate on, he approached our position and not with the body language of relaxation and openness. He in as calm an unstrained voice as he could muster, said good night and proceeded to ask, and I paraphrase, what are we doing here. With mischief still in our minds and having no real fear of police and still fresh from being teenagers we playfully replied, “What do you think we are doing?” This was not met with amusement. I could see his body stiffened, reflected in the change of his gaze. The conversation soon became a mental joust, with him trying to remain calm but obviously being flustered by our answers and our responses. Eventually I grew tired and just told him point blank, “You are black in your own neighbourhood, see two young black men sitting on a bench. Instead of coming over and having a casual conversation you chose to engage in a staring match although you are obviously the authority figure. To make matters worse, you waited until your “white partner” showed up before you confronted us. What are you afraid of? What is that about”. I believe the boldness of our actions and words threw him off guard, he relaxed and somewhat ashamedly asked us to have a good night and not to loiter too long outside the train station.
I came away thinking, it is loitering to relax in your own neighborhood in the view of the general public on a busy thoroughfare! How easily it was for him to reduce us to the binary of black/non-white, and likely criminal. Is this that racist America we had heard rumored and warned about by countless family members and other friends who resided here much longer than us two? Are we even assumed criminals in our own neighborhood by our own kind? Was it not Audrey Lorde in her novel Age, Race, Class and Sex:Women Redefining Difference who chided us about the fallacy of using lazy binaries to categorize individuals!