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Learning & Action from Grace's Racial Equity Team - November 24

“Walking While Black” is an intimate look into what it’s like for a man to walk through different neighborhoods in Black skin.

The author shares how he was able to walk through notoriously dangerous areas of Kingston, Jamaica while he was growing up. Coming to New Orleans for college and living as a professional in New York City brought entirely new and scary experiences because of how fellow, white pedestrians and the police view him. One paragraph:

Walking while black restricts the experience of walking, renders inaccessible the classic Romantic experience of walking alone. It forces me to be in constant relationship with others, unable to join the New York flâneurs I had read about and hoped to join. Instead of meandering aimlessly in the footsteps of Whitman, Melville, Kazin, and Vivian Gornick, more often I felt that I was tiptoeing in Baldwin’s—the Baldwin who wrote, way back in 1960, “Rare, indeed, is the Harlem citizen, from the most circumspect church member to the most shiftless adolescent, who does not have a long tale to tell of police incompetence, injustice, or brutality. I myself have witnessed and endured it more than once.”

Read "Walking While Black"

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