Source: The Atlantic
She and I were on a date in downtown Syracuse about a month ago. We were going to listen to some amateur musicians at the Funk ‘n Waffles. It was a really fun time, and we decided afterwards to take a walk through downtown. After a brief stop at Starbucks, we kept walking around downtown. It was a Sunday. The streets were fairly deserted. We were holding hands, enjoying ourselves.
At some point, three black boys (probably high-schoolers) were walking behind us. We didn’t pay them any mind until we distinctly heard someone say, “Yo, she darker than he is.” My girlfriend and I kind of looked at each other, trying to affirm nonverbally that we’d heard exactly what we thought we’d heard. We kept walking.
Then one of them said, “What color your baby gonna come out?”
We didn’t respond, didn’t even look back; we just kept walking.
“Hey! I said, what color your baby gonna come out?!”
By then, it was perfectly clear they were no longer talking about us but AT us. Now, we’re not strangers to racial harassment. It’s usually some white guy walking down the street in the opposite direction making a quick remark and then vanishing before we can respond. Or it’s some stationary drunk guy with a beer in his hand, leaning against a structure of some sort. Often, we’d just respond with a middle finger and that was that.
This incident, however, was our first experience where our harassers were actually following us.
We whispered to each other about what to do. Keep walking? Turn around and confront them? What if that lead to a fight? What if one of them was carrying a weapon of some kind? We’re not very confrontational people and we hadn’t prepared for this. We both sort of committed to stepping up our pace a little bit but pretend we couldn’t hear them.
The same sentence "What color your baby gonna come out?!" was shouted again and again while these boys followed behind us about thirty feet away for three blocks. At one point, I heard the phrase “black bitch” directed at my girlfriend, to which I definitely felt her tense up on my arm. She clearly wanted to turn around and punch them. Once again, we didn’t know what to do: keep walking or confront them?
When we came to an intersection, we saw a group of people gathered around a building entrance down the street on the right, so we turned and walked in their direction. The trio of youths apparently decided not to keep following us now that there was more than just the two of us, and they kept walking off to another street.
My girlfriend was shaking—from fear, from anger, from anger at herself for not confronting them, even anger at me for not standing up for her. I was also shaking. We had a long conversation about it, and I was angry at myself for not saying something to those boys, particularly when they called her a “black bitch.”
That struck me as so odd. The boys never said anything about me, really. I can count on one hand the number of times in my life I’ve ever been called a “cracker,” which I honestly cannot find offensive. It sounds so silly, like I’m being compared to a dried baked good made by Ritz or Saltine. Most other anti-white “slurs” never offended me either. Honky? Sounds like the noise a car horn makes. Peckerwood? I think it goes without saying why I find that hilarious rather than offensive.
Now, I’m not exactly naive to issues of institutional racism. Recklessness by police in Syracuse has resulted in the deaths of people like Chuniece Patterson and Raul Pinet, Jr., as well as the maiming of an African immigrant named Maparo Ramadhan. About two years ago I witnessed a black student get arrested and thrown to the ground at the downtown bus hub, just for refusing to get off the bus because he was trying to get home on the last day of school and his pass (which worked that morning) was not working that afternoon, for some reason. A black woman even offered two dollars from her own pocket to pay the boy’s fare, to which the officer yelled at her, “Shut the fuck up! Sit down!” Had I a camera at the time, I would’ve recorded the incident.
I suppose the final thing that worried my girlfriend and me most was the implications of those three youths, regarding our having children. If we did have children, how would they be treated by other black folks? How would they be treated by police? How would they be treated by white folks? That’s what has me scared the most. As a white person raised in a 99 percent white environment, I never had to deal with issues of race for at least the first 20 years of my life.
I’ve never had this “Talk” my black acquaintances refer to, so the thought of us having a child together and my restricted ability to help that child scares the crap out of me. It also concerns my girlfriend that, despite her being a black woman, she might not know how to contend with raising a biracial child in this society.
We’ve discussed how to deal with another potential “following harassment” incident. We’ve discussed all the pros and cons of simply walking on or confronting any future harassers. Still, the fear that we're not prepared is there.
THE ANALYSIS
This second text is a public post (reproduced with permission), which was found in an American website called The Atlantic. It was posted, as the first text, on July 13th, 2015 by editors from the Atlantic Monthly Group. It is a group that covers news and analysis on political business, culture, technology, national, international and life of the official site of this magazine. It is publicity accessible for everyone interested in racism.
Focusing on the couple’s identity, the white man and the black woman are really happy when they are together without anyone annoying them. This idea is reflected through words like “enjoying” as a “category bound activity” which shows their feelings of excitement and peaceful environment.
Talking about the “category” of the mockers, the ones that are called “high-schoolers” among with “three youth black boys”, it is expected that they are disrespectful towards the couple because they do not mind how they could feel. At the time that they discriminate the couple, the three black boys repeat the same sentence along the story: “What color your baby gonna come out?”. Therefore, in the phrase it can be seen that the boys are emphasizing the word “color”, which is a category bound predicate because it is referring to the features of the biracial baby.
Since this question, the couple starts thinking about having a child in their future.The “category bound activity” that reflects this action is “wondering”, because it has made feel bad and think the possibility that their child can suffer racism due to their skin colour. The couple’s thought is that this different feature may also be a problem in the future in relation to other people.
To sum up, this type of analysis has been useful to see how the couple express their identity. Firstly, they do not pay attention to the racist comments but when the question about the baby is asked, they start thinking about their future. Therefore, they are categorized as insecure and frightened people after being a victim of racism.
