The temptation to push would be overwhelming. After all, the gain is so tangible and so immediate, so easy to conjure, and the harm so abstract. Someone, somewhere in the world is going to be hurt. Someone you’ll never meet and never know.
Now imagine the same button, but rather than dispensing money, pushing it gives you an all-encompassing feeling of security, the warm sense of being rooted and safe. And somewhere, someone you don’t know, will experience the opposite, a brief stab of anxiety, the wave of panic and fear.
Again, we know it’s wrong, but what if this button is on your smartphone, always there lurking? You could press it whenever you needed that feeling, knowing full well someone else would pay the price. It’s tempting to want to feel safe and rooted. It’s tempting to want order and comfort, especially if it is delivered free or the cost is paid out of view. But you would never press that button if it made your kids shriek in panic, or if it sent a friend or loved one into a paralyzing spiral of fear. You wouldn’t press it if you had to see the results.
The voters who’ve endorsed the Colony’s construction were selecting from a menu of options. And that menu was put together by shrewd politicians who offered up options that they felt would benefit them and/or neatly play to the white fear that is one of the most singularly explosive forces (if not the most explosive force) in American politics.
Our politics has constructed a series of rationales for us to press the button, telling us it’s okay to want to press it. Press the button. Elect me, and you can press it all you want. Elect me, and you’ll feel safe.
If we are going to change this, if our subjects are to truly and finally become our fellow citizens, then we have to stop pressing it.
ON A LOVELY SPRING day about a year ago, as I was beginning to conceive of this book, I was walking alone through Prospect Park. New York City is “diverse,” of course, but it’s also segregated as hell. The density of the city just means that all the lines are more finely drawn. Block by block, building by building, intersecting and overlapping pockets and niches of Nation and Colony fit together like dovetail joints on a finely crafted piece of wooden furniture.
But Prospect Park is enjoyed by people from both the Colony and the Nation, a borderland between the affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods on the west side (where I live), and the working-and middle-class, predominantly black neighborhoods on the east side.
It is a piece of urban paradise, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert B. Vaux, who believed it to be their masterpiece, even greater than Central Park. It has trees, brooks, waterfalls, ponds, long lovely lawns, a lagoon, and endless spaces for residents of the city to grill and play catch and bang drums. On a nice day, the park feels like one of the most exuberant places on earth.
Walking through the park, I saw four black boys on bikes laughing loudly, wildly. I recognized their bearing from my own youth. They were on the edge of puberty, surging with testosterone and mischief, away from any adult supervision, goading each other on. They yelled and menaced passersby. One pretended he was going to run over a man pushing a stroller, then swerved around. When the man said something, he stopped and dismounted his bike. “What’d you say?” he said, his chest out.
The man, there with his infant child, a preschooler, and his wife, shrank away.
Emboldened, the boys pedaled off, swerving and yelling and drawing increasingly concerned and panicked stares from the people (mostly white) walking past. I kept walking, shaking my head, half remembering my own youthful hijinks and half concerned.
A few minutes later I saw them again. They were now even more energized, manic in the way only teenage boys can be. They were shouting at passersby, cussing, stopping to flex and menace.
The one who seemed to be the ringleader then biked up past a white man who was holding his phone, snatched it out of his hands, and biked off. The man yelled and chased after him and was joined by a few others also yelling. “He took that guy’s phone!”
The boys had crossed over from disorderliness to unlawfulness, I thought to myself. Acting the fool was one thing, but taking someone’s phone was quite another. Who knew what they would get up to next? I reached for my own phone.
This was the spring of 2015, less than a year since Michael Brown’s death and shortly after the unrest in Baltimore. I’d spent months talking to people about police and policing and harassment. I’d watched video after video of police shooting and killing black men and boys. Oftentimes they had been summoned to the scene only because they answered a 911 call about some disturbance—for instance, twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland city park with a pellet gun. I’m sure whoever made that call to the Cleveland police thought they were doing the responsible thing. They thought they were protecting people in that park from harm. But that person pushed a domino that ended that boy’s life.
The people in the park continued to shout and chase. The boys on their bikes were pedaling with all their might across a long green lawn.
I took my phone out, held it in my hand, and considered whether to press the button.
* I hasten to add that he did win Wisconsin that year, 2004.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, I want to thank the many people who took the time to talk to me for this book in cities around the country. Fifteen years into a career as a reporter, I’m still awestruck at the sheer patience and grace people are willing to extend when you ask them to share their experiences.