NewYorker | Elijah Anderson, a professor of sociology and African-American
studies at Yale, has spent much of his career exploring the dynamics of
African-American life in mostly black urban environments. Three years
ago, however, he published a paper, titled “The White Space,” which
looked at the racial complexities of mostly white urban environments.
“The city’s public spaces, workplaces and neighborhoods may now be
conceptualized as a mosaic of white spaces, black spaces and
cosmopolitan spaces,” Anderson wrote. The white spaces are an
environment in which blacks are “typically absent, not expected, or
marginalized.”
Academics are commonly dogged by questions of how
their research applies to the real world. Anderson has faced the
opposite: a scroll of headlines and social-media posts that, like a mad
data set liberated from its spreadsheet, seem intent on confirming the
validity of his argument. The most notable recent case in point occurred
on April 12th, when a white employee of a Starbucks in Philadelphia
called the police on two young black men, Rashon Nelson and Donte
Robinson, who asked to use the rest room before they had ordered
anything. They were arrested on suspicion of trespassing; it turned out
that they had been waiting for a business associate to join them.
The
incident was both disturbing and disturbingly common. A few days later,
an employee at a New Jersey gym called the police, on the suspicion
that two black men using the facility had not paid; they had. A couple
of weeks after that, a woman in California called the police on three
black women whom she thought were behaving suspiciously. They were
actually carrying bags out of a house they had rented on Airbnb. Earlier
this month, a white student at Yale called the police on a black
graduate student for exhibiting behavior that struck her as suspicious:
napping in a common area. Thousands of social-media users have since
shared their experiences as persons of color in a “white space.”
Starbucks
didn’t press charges against the men, but protests followed, along with
the requisite hashtag directive, in this case, #boycottStarbucks. The
men, though, settled with the city for a dollar apiece and a promise to
invest in a program to assist young entrepreneurs.
