Every weekday morning, I hopped on a bus and traveled twenty blocks west. Within a couple of stops the white people disappeared. The polished cafes and bars that lined the streets around UPenn’s campus fell away. As I left the bus and walked toward the corner building that housed my internship, I passed through a parking lot where cabbies vied for the attention of women wrestling with the weight of their grocery bags.
This was an area of Philadelphia that Jake, who lived on the floor below me, had never seen. He was a UPenn student who had stayed near campus that summer to finish some pre-med requirements. Late one night, we stood on the balcony outside his room, covered in Grateful Dead posters, sharing a spliff.
Jake looked out over the city, letting his gaze rest on a couple tall buildings a mile or so away.
I still can’t believe we’re so close to the projects, he said.
I nodded, looked out over the city, and thought that what Jake had just said was exactly what was wrong with white people. I knew what he meant. He believed there to be a great distance between himself and the world of the projects. The world of the projects, he imagined, was Black and poor and violent—a world in opposition to that from which he came. That he could now see those buildings was an abrupt collapsing of space, a confrontation with the unseen, the fearful, the chaotic. I knew what he meant because my own views were not far removed. In fact, I couldn’t recall too many times that I’d heard a white person talk about the projects in a way that wasn’t meant to invoke laughter, or fear, or both. The projects were a fictional space, not something that existed within normal life.
The sorority in the house next door threw a party one evening that spilled onto our shared lawn. The street filled with undergraduates drinking from solo cups and doing keg stands and getting in fights and throwing bottles on the sidewalk, and the police calmly waited for the students to clear a space in the road to let them pass.
Hey Black kid! someone yelled from behind me.
A skinny white dude in a Sixers jersey stood on the porch, calling into the crowd on the lawn. From the grass, the only Black person at the party, a student wearing jeans and a baseball cap, looked up at the porch and gave a nod and a little salute.
Hey, you okay with that? I asked, motioning to the porch. In service to my guilt, in an attempt at distinguishing myself from the rest of the party. To say, I’m not like the others.
Okay with that? He eyed me. Hell no, but they think it’s funny. What are you going to do?
For the white UPenn students I lived near that summer, for my co-workers, for all of us, Blackness was both a joke and a misfortune. It was alluring and attractive and repulsive and criminal. It was separate yet incredibly close. Blackness was a fiction. For us, it always had been—capable of transmuting to fit our fears or assuage them.
Inside the sorority house, a pale hoard of partiers in tube dresses and polos yelled the lyrics to the Ying Yang Twins’ Get Low. A mile west, the same song blared from a sedan parked with its doors open. A small crowd gathered on a nearby porch. An entire world, marked by violent phantasms, lay between.
Photo by Rames Quinerie on Unsplash
