A Survival Strategy for Black Men in the South

I haven’t spent a lot of time in the South, but a few years ago Jennifer and I spent a week visiting Charleston, SC, and Savannah, GA. (Our primary reason for going was to tour Auldbrass, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed plantation in Beaufort County, SC, which is open to the public only once every two years.)

While I was walking through downtown Charleston, I passed a black man coming the other way. He caught my eye, smiled, and said something like “Hello, there.” It was almost as if he thought we knew each other. It was nice to be greeted so warmly, but I didn’t think much of it until the next black man I passed did the same thing. And then another.

Needless to say, no stranger in New Jersey has acknowledged me on the sidewalk that way, and even in Charleston, no white people greeted me that way, only black men.

That’s when it occurred to me that this had to be a survival skill for black men in the South:  when you pass a white man on the sidewalk, show him that you’re friendly and deferential; simply ignoring him might be taken as a sign of disrespect, and that could lead to a world of trouble.

I’ve heard about “the talk” that black parents have with their sons to prepare boys for encounters with the police, which the parents know can go horribly wrong. But it never occurred to me until that visit to Charleston that black men in the South, and perhaps elsewhere, might feel the need to employ survival strategies for their encounters with all white men, not just police officers.

There are those who would have us believe that we live in a “post-racial world.” The killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many others before them, and now the shooting of Jacob Blake, have emphatically belied that premise, but it’s important to recognize that systemic racism in this country does not begin and end with the disproportionate use of violence by the police against people of color. It is deeply woven into the fabric of American life.