Who Sits Next to Black Men on Trains

I've been preparing for a class presentation and some of the readings involve perceptions of black men being unsavory, untrustworthy, confrontational, and deviant. Of course I know about these things. My father is a black man who talked about the daily frustrations regularly of these false images projected onto him.

However, sometimes I forget how salient those conversations were with my dad because I am very comfortable around black men. I guess that's why I never really pay attention to who sits next to one on the train or the bus.

Lately, I've been taking mental notes about who sits next to whom when riding the NJ Transit and the PATH rails into New York. Usually there is an empty seat reserved for the nothingness right next to a black man.

Like tonight, as I came from New York, the train was semi-crowded. There was one seat on my right that stood between myself and a brother. No one, and I mean absolutely no one took that seat.

What does this form of psychological racializing and assumptive behavior do to black men themselves and the people who consciously and unconsciously engage in the daily practices of dehumanization? And I am not absolved either.

For one, we miss out on social interactions that are priceless. Like the day I spoke to an older black man on the PATH train. It was a simple hello. This particular day the route we were taking became temporarily out-of-service as we stoo on the platform, so we had to reroute ourselves and go back up to 34th Street (New York's Penn Station) to catch another train into Newark.

The elder turned out to be a WWII Veteran who explained with detail and depth his experiences as a black soldier in Europe. It was better than Spike Lee's movie, Mircale at St. Anna's.

After we hooted and hollered about his experiences and his attempts to get proper Social Security at 80-plus years with a bum knee, he then told me how viciously segregated the New York and New Jersey trains were back in the 40s and 50s.

I wanted to tell him that in many ways, they still are.

As I think back to this older black man, it was a simple gesture that gave me access to historical gems from the lens of someone who is perceived as deviant.

I look back to that day. I now recognize that, that older man was as an extension of my father. Then I think about tonight as I ride the train, looking at the blue-collar, black man sit "alone" on a crowded train.

I ponder how my father or my significant other feels when people make it a point not to sit next to them. For this I cry.

We have created segragationist lines in our psyches and in our social stratum that cannot be erased by laws, but simply justify an inequitable system that bites us all in the ass.