My wife and I powered through “When They See Us” this past weekend, which was beautifully done by Ava Duvernay, and the entire cast and crew, but also unrelentingly painful and enraging. The title invokes the lack of humanity assigned to mere children, and the lens of adulthood that was assigned to these Black and brown boys in a time when the city was dominated by fear. We had the most trouble with the first episode, which consisted largely of the coerced confessions of these boys by police detectives, in part because of our own familiarity with the experience. It doesn’t get much easier in the later episodes, but at least by then we braced ourselves for it.
A few of the boys were from Schomburg Plaza (as it was known at the time), an affordable housing complex in the Mitchell-Lama Housing Program, mostly recognizable by the two high-rise octagonal towers visible from all of Harlem, on the corner of 110th Street and Fifth Avenue, right where Central Park begins. I grew up a couple of blocks away on 112th Street and Madison Avenue, in the Taft Projects, a public housing complex, which generally meant we were less well off than Schomberg residents. We spent many weekends passing by Schomburg on my way to the Park, usually with my father and older brother, to catch sunnies in the manmade pond with a branch and fishing line, or to climb the rock formations at the south end of the pond. By 1989 we were too old for that.
On April 19, 1989, the day the jogger was raped, I was twelve and my brother turned sixteen a month earlier. It would not have been unusual for either of us to be outside that day, but probably more unusual to go out after dark. It was a Wednesday, which meant school the next day, and although my brother would already go out at night, he was big into skating and spent most of his evenings, and late nights when he broke curfew, downtown.
I remember the news coverage, the media spectacle, following the events of that night. There was word of mouth in the streets about the cops making an example of these boys, hand-wringing about not enough activities for young people to do to avoid trouble, and even learning that I was connected through friends to one of the boys. The jogger, who years later revealed her identity, was taken to Metropolitan Hospital, where my brother and I were born. And yet at the time it all felt like it was happening ‘over there’, even if I could point to ‘over there’ from the terrace of my building, or even walk past it, it wasn’t me.
My wife and I had a hypothetical debate about whether or not it could have been me. I was empathetic will all the boys, most especially Ray Santana, who, like me, was Puerto Rican, and whose father could not stick around the police station because of work. We were raised primarily by my mother, and although my father was around, he did not live with us. Neither of them would ever risk missing a day of work, no matter the gravity of the circumstances. My father did not miss a day of work in 37 years, was never late, and retired with 9 months of unused vacation and sick days. I used to be proud of that, but now I view it as a tribute to how fearful he was of losing employment. Another day I intend to explore the fear immigrants have, and how powerless they are, in the American labor market.
My wife’s assertion was that, because I appear to be white, certainly whiter than the boys on the screen, the cops would not have treated me the same way. In her eyes, it would have been unlikely that I would have been taken to the precinct, let alone be forced to confess to a crime I did not commit. We don’t have any way of knowing what would have happened, but I found myself getting agitated at her suggestion and increasingly defensive. I was not white. My experience at that time, as a nerdy kid in the hood whose resemblance to whiteness was a source of scorn and the occasional beating, did not speak to whiteness, but the commonness of people of color in the Harlem of the 80s, growing up in poverty.
Appearing the way I did, often as the lightest person in any of my groups of friends, meant any number of things, and perhaps my biggest privilege was my inability to see it. Put more simply, I could afford to not think about my skin color, and even reject any privilege it conferred, and my friends could not. That didn’t mean too much on the block, or in most of the hood. Beef wasn’t based on skin color, but on which project you lived in, and whether you drifted onto the wrong block at the wrong time. Even the classic New York advantage, that later in life my childhood friends (many of whom are still my friends today) would benefit from, using me to hail a taxi, was irrelevant to kids who couldn’t afford bus fare. White people were on TV; they were the Dukes of Hazard. They certainly weren’t me.
At least that was my argument to my wife. What she explained to me, and I have been thinking about constantly since, is that many poor white people use the same, or similar, reasoning to absolve themselves of the problems faced by Black people. They then follow it up with arguments about the unfairness of attempts at equanimity, which they dilute to a ‘racial quota’ bogeyman narrative. It is easy, in the misery of one’s own circumstances, to never see the privileges conferred on skin color by most of the world, and certainly in our own society. The accumulation of that experience, even in my childhood environment, where I didn’t feel different (at least not because of my skin color), meant that I was in fact different, and must have contributed to my ability to succeed later in life, free from the aggressions (micro and overt) that my friends, and even my relatives of darker complexion, must have faced.
The reality is that my racial identity is nuanced. In New York, among my friends and people familiar with the culture of the city, it means one thing. In Baltimore, where I live now, it means something completely different. In Ecuador, where I spent my summers as a child, it means something wildly different. Mostly it means that I can be as white as I choose to be, and choose environments that confer the privileges associated with it, with certain limitations (some moments in my time living in Fairfield County, CT come to mind). As I have been told by Black men from time to time in jest, but potentially in all seriousness, ‘it must be nice.’
Her other argument was that we all, regardless of where we were at the time of the jogger case, bore some responsibility for the atrocity of these wrongful convictions. Her notion was that society as a whole must bear the responsibility of existing in silence, or taking the media narrative at face value, and forgetting the poor fate of the boys. I wrestle with this argument, especially in light of my own fear that it could have been me, and acknowledge some survivor’s guilt. The lingering effects of poverty and neglect haunt me. The opportunities to fall into a similar hole as the Central Park 5 were little more than a game of chance. When life every day is matter of pure survival, you negotiate the street on high alert, tense, while also trying to enjoy being a child. In that sense, I have been lucky. I may have grown up fast, but I got a chance to do it outside of prison, and later on, outside of the projects.
I realize that much of what I do on any given day does little to advance anyone but me and, by extension, my family. My small contribution is in my mindset and behavior, and what it conveys. I am truly happy when an injustice is corrected. I celebrate efforts to increase diversity in schools, workplaces, and the corners of life where decisions are being made. I spend no time thinking it is somehow a loss for me, and I posit that if more people of my skin color, regardless of their economic status, could bring themselves to actually be happy for people of color to get something, even if it is something they want and don’t have, that we could reshape the experience in our society for the better. I will think about how I can do more, and although I have come to realize that I have not suffered the way my Black friends have, I will not forget my feeling of being adjacent to the experience, as I pursue the work I will do in the future, and which will come to define me when I’m gone.
