From “All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep: Hope – And Hard Pills to Swallow – About Making Black Lives Matter” By Andre Henry
As I said before, Northern white Americans love to act as if racism is a Southern problem, but my time in New York truly showed me how racism continues to thrive. When I decided to move to Harlem, I spoke to a landlord on the phone who seemed elated and impressed. “I don’t meet many decent people around here,” he whispered. He even said he hoped we might become friends. But as I approached the glass door of the Dunkin’ Donuts where we agreed to meet, his face melted with disappointment. He refused to rent to me, even though the only thing that had changed was that he’d seen me in person.
Racial profiling was a normal experience for me in New York. I remember cab drivers refusing to pick me up. “I’m not going to Brooklyn,” one cabbie yelled at me through the window. Of course, I wasn’t going to Brooklyn.
It was like the whole city believed crime followed Black people. Harlem had police towers with floodlights illuminating major intersections. Patrol cars were stationed every few blocks. Officers in riot gear occupied some of the subway stations. Only two other neighborhoods in Manhattan seemed as heavily occupied while I lived there: Times Square, where there were occasional bomb threats, and Ground Zero, where the Twin Towers once stood. At times, it felt like the police occupied Harlem as though they were containing a threat. New York was different from Stone Mountain in that no one chastised me for making these observations. But if you were a Black person trying to find a home or just go about your daily business, the underlying reality was the same.