The Harassment Chronicles

I WAS driving past Lake Merritt and heard a nearby carful of guys shouting. I followed their gazes to the prey: a woman of hearty build (like myself) walking around the lake in workout clothes.

GUY: Woo! Woo!
GUY: Nice booty! [Etc.]

We pull up to a red light and I shake my head at them in emphatic disgust.


GUY, to me: Did you see her? Right there!

More shouting from them. More attempted shaming from me. The light changes, we move along. But just before we pull up at the next light, one guy spits out the window. Just to eliminate any doubts about his cretinity.

GUY: Sorry.

For the loogie or the harassment is not clear.

ME: You guys are assholes.

GUY: We were talking to that girl...

ME: I hate when that happens to me.

GUYS, protesting: Wah? No! That's the best! We just made her day!

ME: Why don't you fuckin ask her if she felt that way.

GUY behind wheel: Okay, I'll go turn around...
Inches car forward like he's gonna turn around, to hilarious effect.

GUY, amid much pissed-off muttering: Mind your own business.


AND WERE I quicker witted, I'd have snapped back that they should mind theirs.

The silver lining? They were white! (You may have guessed from the, "Woo! Woo!" and "Nice booty!" Black guy harassment generally opens with, "DAmn girl.") I've never been harassed by a white guy. Novel idea! No weird racial component.

Those kinds of confrontations do shake me up. It ain't fun. But it seemed right. Another woman did that for me once ("Leave her alone!") and I appreciated it. So, points for sisterhood?

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On Passing Black Men in the Street

DURING The Speech, Barack Obama talked about the shades of racism he saw in his beloved white grandma when she admitted sometimes fearing black men who passed her on the street. He also described this in Dreams from My Father; it was a troubling moment for young Obama. Revisiting the matter in a radio interview last week, Obama gaffically referred to his grandmother as a "typical white person." (But I'm sure we're gonna let that go, seeing as Obama is himself white, if atypically. No? We're offended? Okay. Wow, and we act like black people are touchy.)

I've been pondering this issue, as a white woman avec bootay. Maybe white women sans bootay have a different relationship to black men on the street, maybe they don't; unless I get a sudden case of Amy Winehouse, I'll never know.

I've remarked previously on the abundance of street harassment my bootay has garnered, almost always from black men, and on the racial disquiet I've felt as a result. After Obama's comments, I've been full of shame. Because, have I feared black men on the street?


BACK IN Brooklyn, I lived in a neighborhood called Boerum Hill, which is now "cool" but was then awkward. The projects were two blocks one way, becoming-bougie Smith Street was two blocks another way. (My community garden was in a third direction, so I mostly walked there.) In retrospect, racial tensions were quietly boiling. New York is like that.

It was never a case of looking good and getting hit on. In fact, I tried to remedy the situation by looking bad. But the more busted and miserable I looked, the rattier my sweatpants, the more I seemed to get it. These guys weren't talking to me. They were talking about me, often amongst themselves, like I was an involuntary stripper on an invisible stage. The things they said were caustic and obscene, and I started to respond in kind.

Which was why I became a racial profiler: I tried to know when harassers were on the approach so I'd be steeled to "snap back and have the last laugh." (Would that it were as fun as it sounds.) On one occasion, three twentysomething black guys, all with gold fronts, started saying shit to me while I was walking home on Dean Street, my street. They kept staring as I walked by, and I tossed off a "fuck you." Which made them very unhappy. I suddenly realized that I was on a deserted street and had just pissed off three of the most thugged-out dudes I'd ever seen. I was scared.


OBAMA actually recounts a similar story in Dreams:

That night, well past midnight, a car pulls up in front of my apartment building carrying a troop of teenage boys and a set of stereo speakers so loud that the floor of my apartment begins to shake. [Normally, he'd let it go, easygoing guy that he is, but, thinking of his sleepover guest (?!) and his neighbors' newborn, he goes out and asks the guys to move along.]

The wind wipes away my drowsiness and I feel suddenly exposed...I can't see the faces inside the car; it's too dark to know how old they are, whether they're sober or drunk, good boys or bad...I start picturing myself through the eyes of these boys, a figure of random authority, and know the calculations they might now be making, that if one of them can't take me out, the four of them certainly can."

[Finally,] the engine starts, and the car screeches away. I turn back toward my apartment, knowing that I've been both stupid and lucky, knowing that I am afraid after all.

I mention this not to suggest that my own fears or prejudices are mitigated by Obama's, but because the story--especially his complete telling of it (pp. 269-271)--shows how complex and vexing these questions are.


MY harassment experiences seriously affected my quality of life in New York. They cast me in a uncomfortable relationship with my body, and with black men as well. It was a sad state of affairs. What with the ugly, old stereotype of black man as sexual threat to white womanhood, nothing could have made me feel more racist than my harassment-anticipation game. And I can't help but wonder whether some of those guys sensed my anticipatory dread, felt angry that I seemed afraid of them, and on some subconscious level chose to make my apparent fear self-fulfilling.

At least I can say I don't play that anymore. I now live in Oakland, where there's a little more, you know, integration. I do get harassed sometimes, but it occurs to me that something else often happens instead: compliments. I get flirted on rather than accosted with obscenities. Several gentlemen of African American descent have specifically liked my boots with the fur. Thank you kindly, sirs.

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You Can Do Sidebends or Situps

“You might be in danger of losing your butt.”

Whoa. I’ve been on a bit of a buff-bridesmaid fitness kick lately, but the possibility Brian now proposes had never crossed my mind.

Buttie and I go back a long way. She burst onto the scene at John W. North High School in ’94, provoking giggles from the guys in my French class when I was called to the blackboard. (Confused about what was so fucking funny, I frantically erased and rewrote my French verbs several times.) Later the same semester, Buttie was grabbed on the stairs en route to the same French class. The perpetrator was a cute senior, a football player and—it merits mention, because butts are racial—black. I was a white freshman aspiring to coolness and, though taken aback, supposed it was a compliment.

Buttie snagged me a man in college. Oh sure, Brian’s probably stuck it out the greater part of a decade thanks to my good character, but it was Buttie that caught his eye in the dining hall of Berkeley’s Clark Kerr dormitory.

So it's worrisome to hear him now, saying, "I just don't want you to be on the J. Lo track." Apparently J. Lo has lost her butt. I hadn't noticed. But then, maybe she was ready to pass that butt torch to Jessica Biel. I can sympathize.

It was when I moved to New York after college that Buttie really started to seem like a liability. I could barely turn a corner in Brooklyn without hearing, "DAMN, where'd you get all that ass from?" One day I was harassed ten times just walking the few blocks to and from my apartment and the Hoyt/Schermerhorn A stop.

Not only did I become terribly self-conscious, I turned into a racial profiler. (I'm not going to dance around the truth here: almost all the guys who harassed me were black. No less an authority than Mixalot himself notes that "the average black man" will surely take an interest if you "pack much back".) I realized how bad the situation had become when I registered a youngish black guy approaching from a side street, and then felt great relief when I noticed he was carrying a coffee--placing him solidly outside the hindquarter harasser demographic.

These days, it's not so bad. I hear it now and then in the Bay. When we were at Hip Hop in the Park last month, I was too busy admiring a ten foot cardoon plant to notice a rapper freestyling for a camera nearby. Brian had to break it to me that Buttie had entered the guy's flow, calling up all the old ambivalences.

I don't think Brian has any reason to worry. Buttie is tenacious, and I'm really not the athletic type. Anyway, I suspect I could be a Nicole Richie stick figure and still have a badonkadonk. I checked in the mirror this morning and she there she was, undiminished.

Even if I could, would I banish Buttie?

Nah. She is me.

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