Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

Feeling Safe

The Trump administration voices a concern about antisemitism on college campuses. In light of that, I found a recent news report interesting. It stated that according to a survey conducted among Harvard students last year,15% of Jewish students said they did not feel physically safe on campus.

Was this a high number? I wanted more context. What percentage of students overall felt physically unsafe? The report did not say.

Interestingly, the survey reported that 47% of Muslim respondents said they do not feel safe. In another aspect of the survey, 61% of Jewish students reported fearing academic or professional repercussions for expressing their political views. However, 92% of Muslim students felt the same. These data would suggest that we should be talking about more than antisemitism, but I am not expecting this broader discussion from our president.

Of course, the survey numbers by themselves could not tell me about the validity of the responses. Perhaps many who felt safe were naïve and more should have felt threatened on campus. On the other hand, some of those who felt apprehensive might not be in any real danger. (Paradoxically, people sometimes feel an increased threat from crime when the data show that crime is falling.)

Who is not in favor of people feeling safe? But the issue is more complex than the knee-jerk response indicates. Making some people feel safe often means circumscribing the actions of others. The feeling-safe-on-campus refrain today is not about guns or disease or child abuse or domestic violence. Instead, it is a reference to college protests by those who criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.

For much of my half century in New York City, I lived in what authorities described as a high-crime neighborhood. That designation may have come from actual statistics, but it could have been merely a shorthand for saying whites are in the minority, which was true where I lived.

I had reasons to agree with the high-crime label. Our cars had been broken into many times. Our cars, as well as garbage cans and bikes, had been stolen. Our house had been broken into. I was mugged at knifepoint. I was frequently apprehensive and wary on the streets near my house. In other words, I was often fearful. This reached its peak around 1980, when crime was reportedly high in New York City. Some of the time I was working the equivalent of the night shift and arriving at my home subway station at eleven at night. It was only two short blocks to my house, but I was always fearful for those two blocks. Usually I was the only one getting off the train at that stop, but if a young Black man also stepped onto the platform or if I saw young Black men walking towards me on the sidewalk, I became much more apprehensive and wary. I felt unsafe.

If we reflexively agree that I should feel safe, we need to think about what actions would be necessary to make me feel safe. The answer would have been to prohibit young Black men from being on my block at night. Thus, to reduce my apprehension, we would have to substantially curb the activities (not to mention the rights) of others. The reality is that a miniscule number of young Black men constitute a threat to me. While I have been robbed twice at knifepoint by young Black men, I have passed many many many young Black men at night. Tens of thousands. Maybe much more. What are the odds that any single person might cause me harm? The answer is vanishingly small. My odds are better with the lottery.

Similarly, to make some college students feel safer, the suggestion has been to restrain the activities (and the rights) of others. Often the activities sought to be restrained are not those of physical violence or even physical activity. Instead, many want to restrict speech that makes someone feel unsafe even if that speech does not pose a reasonable risk of physical violence.

There are several issues here. First concerns the complicated subject of when and if speech should be curtailed. Volumes, of course, have been written on this topic, but it boils down to context. Some speech is incendiary, but some speech is not. Crowds screaming antisemitic epithets as Jewish students go to their dorm should be prohibited. A speaker at a peaceful rally in an auditorium who suggests that Israel is a colonial power that never should have been created…well, that should not. Restraining speech is about context, but a consideration of context requires a nuanced approach, which too many are unwilling to do.

Making me feel safe by constraining the rights of others is a tricky and a dangerous notion.

Posted on by rjonakait

Running with Crime (continued)

In over fifty years of urban living, I have until recently, when my present Brooklyn neighborhood got some trend, lived in what are described as high crime areas, and it is not surprising that I had a heightened concern about crime near home. On the other hand, I ran in many other places in New York and its environs, and crime was often an issue in these neighborhoods, too.

The urban concern about crime a generation ago had a strong racial component. Why was mine considered to be a high crime neighborhood? Perhaps statistics did show more crimes there, but the label generally was applied to any place where whites were the minority of residents, and that was true of my neighborhoods. But a broader dynamic was at work. High crime areas were usually black. This easily led to the thought that black neighborhoods in general were dangerous. If blacks reside or congregate in a place, the feeling then went, watch out for crime. And this led to a most insidious feeling that blacks are dangerous.

I was not immune to these racial concerns. For example, I felt it at night on one side of Prospect Park, Brooklyn’s “Central Park.” The park is a little over a mile from my house, and the run to and from the park and around its perimeter sidewalk made a decent-length afterwork run of about six miles, and I did it regularly.

The five-sided park had different kinds of neighborhoods abutting it. My run generally started on the western edge, the Park Slope side, a largely “gentrified” neighborhood—a code for “white.” I seldom felt fear on this mile of the run or when I made a left turn bringing Windsor Park, a white neighborhood, across the street. My senses, however, got heightened with the next left turn. At first ball fields were across the street, and then apartment buildings about which I knew little. Then another turn. I knew this was black West Indian territory, and I had a white reaction to it. Black equaled increased danger, and here my senses became heightened. I tried to look in front, left, right, and behind simultaneously. My pace may picked up a bit. My behavior was being driven by a fear of crime even though nothing ever happened to me or anyone else I saw there.

I did not have the same concerns about the Prospect Park run during the day. Then there were many others about, and this brought a feeling of safety that did not depend on the racial composition of those I saw and passed. Of course, there are generally fewer people out at night, but fear of crime reduced that number even further a generation ago. I saw the irony in this. If there was no one else there, surely there was no danger, but the senses never trusted what they registered. Was there really no one else there? And if I saw at night only one person on the walkway or sidewalk, the apprehension increased. And if I saw two or three young black males in front of me, my concern increased even further.

I had similar reactions on many runs after dark, but I had heightened concerns even during the day in some places. At one point, I worked in White Plains, a suburb north of New York City, and I took long runs between my office and the Bronx or Manhattan. I often traversed neighborhoods, like the South Bronx, where few whites ventured. While I saw a few minorities in the road races I ran, the ghettoized neighborhoods had few runners, so I was doubly noticeable–white and a runner. This brought stares and comments, generally from young males who I pegged at twelve to fourteen testing out their wiseassness and testosterone. Mostly it was good-natured, but some of the sarcasm had the undertone of a threat. I learned to diffuse the tension in two ways. Through hand gestures or perhaps an oral challenge, I would encourage a young boy from the group making comments to run with me or more often to race me to the corner. His jeers would usually stop as would those from others on the street as they watched the contest. I invariably lost.

If I could not get the impromptu race, I looked for a young woman with a stroller, who could almost always be spotted. Then I would stare at the baby and smile as broadly as I could at the mother. This was nearly guaranteed to bring a look of pleasure from her that seemed to diffuse any hostile intent from others on the street.

These human contacts worked in almost all neighborhoods where I was uncomfortable, but Harlem was different. The comments there often came from older males, who were not about to be cajoled into a smile by racing me. Elsewhere the remarks often made fun of me because I was jogging, but in Harlem many were racially tinged with a more explicit underlying threat. Soon Harlem was one of the places I avoided.

(concluded May 17)