It could have been the day I died.
It was a fall morning in 2000 and I was on the New York City subway, heading from the Lower East Side to my not very glamorous stock-brokering job in the Financial District. It was casual Friday and I took that theme to heart, wearing sweats and a leather jacket. In my car was a large white youth with a backpack who was making it his business to pace the car banging on the doors and windows. The conductor had apparently called ahead for the police, and a group of officers met the train and approached my car from the platform when we pulled in. I just wanted to get to work, so I stood at the door ready to leave this scene, but the police swarmed my position. Being a good citizen, I went to move to another door so that they could apprehend the culprit.
Instead, I was met by an officer yelling with the kind of authority that surely got him an A at the academy, “Don’t you move!” They also trained his comrades such that each and every officer put his hand on his gun, ready to riddle my body with justice. The now infamous Amy Cooper has given white women a bad name recently, but that day it was a white woman’s panicked plea that saved me: “No! No! Over there!” she yelled, pointing to our rambunctious fellow rider. I went to work, alive but also a little dead inside.
As the nation is being rocked by black, brown and white rage over police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many other black Americans, I think of that day frequently. The rage is flaring now because it has become entirely too normal for a white man with power to casually, so very casually, apply enough pressure to a vulnerable black neck and cause the soul to vacate in an untimely fashion. America’s propensity to dispense with black life is a sickness, a pathology that authorizes public murder for the sake of white supremacy.
Three major medical associations recently declared racism and police brutality public health crises. But I had long ago begun thinking of racism as a kind of social disease. I even gave it a name — Racial Diminishment Syndrome. This disease, like the coronavirus, is hard to detect, highly contagious and often deadly. Many of the infected exhibit no symptoms, but may be “spreaders.” When R.D.S. is active in public spaces (almost always), social distancing will decrease the likelihood of extreme illness or untimely death.
Consider recent cases like Ahmaud Arbery and Atatiana Jefferson: Cause of death — R.D.S. by way of jogging near white people and standing in a window where the police could see you, respectively. George Floyd’s alleged offense was passing a fake $20 bill at a convenience store. Corporate barons rob the American people daily to the tune of millions, but it was Floyd who got a knee to the neck.
However, R.D.S. need not resolve morbidly. For instance, I am still alive. The syndrome more commonly results in discomfort, inconvenience and the sort of pains that eventually go away but the memories of which do not. Here we are talking about being pulled over for driving while black; a hotel patron assuming I am staff while walking the hall to my own room; professional colleagues failing to consider my point of view; and on and on. Social distancing can help prevent this kind of exposure, but it goes only so far.
In 2007, my wife and I moved to Charlottesville, Va. Before arriving I had been heartened by its electoral map — bright blue surrounded by socially menacing red. Once there, I soon learned that a blue town is in some ways worse than a red one because everyone is possessed of the conviction of their own racial virtues, and they’re almost all very wrong. My first three years in Charlottesville were spent coldly coming to terms with its radical segregation and the absence of a black middle class. I observed as the police harassed homeless black men on the beloved Downtown Mall while the white frat boys got to shamelessly litter the streets surrounding the University of Virginia with beer kegs. Dionysus surely considered these misfits his chosen ones.
By 2010, nine years after the day I could have died, I was hardly leaving the house. When I did venture out, I kept to myself, avoided small talk, went straight home after doing what I needed to do, grateful when I finally made it back to the safe comfort of my own home. Nothing in particular was happening in the world other than America just being America.
With middle age looming on the horizon, my tolerance for being a social other and possibly in danger just by walking out my front door was atrophying. The equation was becoming clearer in my mind: Me + white spaces = precarity. At the University of Virginia, where I was an assistant professor, I received lessons from senior colleagues who had the power to make or break my career on the need for humility in work I sought to publish. Then there was the time that a colleague, upon learning my wife and I had accepted positions at Yale, saw fit to walk into my office and quip, “If I were angry at you, I would tell you to go [expletive] … but I’m not!” He was angry, and he did effectively just tell me that. Social distance was needed; this man was a vector of R.D.S.
When the Black Lives Matter movement took hold in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, it was almost as if an incantation had been whispered into the ether, because for the next five years America turned into what looked like a sizzle reel for a black snuff film, as images of shot black body after choked black body after broken black body after dragged on the sidewalk black body after violently removed from the public pool black body made their way to our computers and phones. But this was just the most grotesque presentation of R.D.S. My own experiences on the ground were more mundane, but terrifying in ways one can’t quite put into words.
The northwestern edge of Yale’s campus is rimmed with expensive shops. The highlight of these is an Apple store. One especially sunny and optimistic-feeling day, as I was walking back to my office from grabbing lunch I witnessed a scene that triggered my subway memory. About 10 police officers and six vehicles, some of them vans big enough for several suspects, had converged on the body of a lone weeping young black male, about 20 years old by my guess. The police had him sitting in full display on the curb instead of in a car or wagon, thus a large white audience of Yale students were learning just how dangerous the New Haven natives were.
As I passed, I heard this young man sob: “What you expect me to do? I’m tired, I’m tired!” Maybe his onlookers were confused about his fatigue but I wasn’t. He was tired of a mega-rich institution that thrived despite the black poverty that circled the institution like a Trumpian wall. He was tired of things like Yale building two new residential colleges at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, yet to look at the construction crews at the building site right next to one of the blackest areas of New Haven, you’d swear someone had said, “Hire anyone except those black people over there.”
I didn’t care about whatever property he allegedly lifted from the Apple store because I know what had been lifted from him and others on the social edges — a sense of being full and fully respected members of the richest nation on earth. As I walked by this young man I could only wish he had kept his social distance. R.D.S. will get you.
By the time I reached my present job at Johns Hopkins University, I had essentially given up. When the small number of my black colleagues decided to challenge the university’s wish to establish an armed police force on campus, one likely to be staffed by former officers from the Baltimore Police Department — one of the deadliest in the nation — I never bothered to join them. Valiant as their attempt was, I know this: When fearful whites and co-opted blacks decide the scariest people on earth are poor blacks, absolutely nothing can stop them from putting the police between them and the black folks they help to keep scary.
The resolution went forward despite opposition and passed, but last week the administration decided to delay the arrival of the armed force by two years. In the face of entire cities defunding or disbanding the police, this can’t help but strike me as a hedge for a return of the status quo, rotten as it is. If these black people won’t stay in their designated spaces, the police will help remind them. It will be a great surprise if I am not driven to my keyboard within the next few years writing about our campus’s very own George Floyd moment. In the meantime, I keep my distance — I don’t want to be a candidate for such a moment.
It is not only instances that can result in physical harm I avoid. I almost never attend casual faculty functions. I don’t go out for drinks. I don’t entertain for dinner parties and I don’t seek to ingratiate myself into the lives of my white colleagues. I have a great deal of respect for the many white academics I have worked with. But some of them remain vectors of R.D.S. nonetheless. I know so much about many of these people because I know what it is white America needs me to be for it to allow me inside. What they need is a version of myself that acquiesces and conforms, that is never displeased or contrary — or angry.
I won’t do it. I’ll social distance. It’s already hard enough to breathe in America. Every day you feel like you’re living with a knee on your neck. It’s a sickness. And I am not immune.
Chris Lebron is an associate professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins and the author of “The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea.”
Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.
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