by Hilton Als
Aside from the name, I have little in common with the comedian Steve Harvey. I was blond when I was young though I am bald now and most of what is left of my hair has turned gray. I live in the North Georgia mountains and for many years taught at Young Harris College, the only source of racial diversity at all in our area at the bottom tip of the Appalachian range, a part of the country long ago settled by Scotch-Irish immigrants after the removal of the Cherokees in the 1830s on the Trail of Tears. When I look at my hands while typing I see that—despite the faded freckles—they are a kind of wheatish white. Not fish-belly white as Mark Twain liked to say, but plenty white, and no one who sees me mistakes me for the Steve Harvey.
The Other Trayvon Martin
After George Zimmerman, a white neighborhood-watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida, shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a black high school student, President Barack Obama responded to a question about the shooting. “If I had a son,” he said at a White House press conference, “he would look like Trayvon.” After the acquittal of Zimmerman more than a year later, the president, in an attempt to put the events in context, reiterated the idea more forcibly. “Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago,” he explained, and at the phrase “thirty-five years ago” he shrugged slightly and a wistful smile briefly crossed his lips, the smile of recognition at a simple truth that had rocked him.
The president said that “there’s a lot of pain around what happened here,” speaking softly and deliberately though his voice came down hard on the word “pain.” Holding it for an extra beat, the word sounded like two syllables, and he extended his cupped hands before him, palms upward, as if they held a great weight before letting them drop down to the lectern again.
“The African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away,” he explained, pausing, bowing his head and closing his eyes briefly, and, as he gave his examples, I—the other Steve Harvey—began to register some simple truths myself, truths I have known intellectually all of my adult life but had somehow failed to take in as felt experience until I heard the president put them into words.
“There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store,” the president said, looking down at the audience. “That includes me,” he added. “There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator.” And as he gave this example he lifted his hand to make the clicking motion with his thumb, and I immediately registered that small gesture as a blow. Yes, I have seen that, I thought leaning in toward the computer screen mesmerized by the president’s hands and words. I have done that. “There are very few African Americans,” the president said finally, “who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator” to find “a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.” At the phrase “clutching her purse” the president pulled his hand close to his body reenacting the frightened woman’s gesture, becoming her briefly as he remained by reason of his skin color the object of her fear.
That includes me.
That happens to me.
That happens often.
Yes it does, I admit resignedly, implicated in these scenarios. Steve Harvey and the other Steve Harvey face off across a passenger window, a moustache between them, and I click the lock.
“Where do we take this?” President Obama asked, opening both of his hands outward toward the future, toward all of us, toward me.
He suggested a reexamination of racial-profiling practices by police, a review of “stand your ground” laws, and the development of long-term projects to “bolster and reinforce” African American boys, but he also called for “some soul-searching.”
He did not look directly into the camera at this moment—he was focused on the reporters sitting in front of him—but he was talking to me, the other Steve Harvey. He asked that Americans be “a little bit more honest” about race and that they at least ask themselves this question: “Am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can?”
As he said those words he moved his hand three times in a semicircular motion as if twisting a washcloth.
The Other Barack Obama
The facts in the Trayvon Martin shooting are important and in dispute, but, for the purpose of wringing as much bias out of myself as I can, what other people do does not matter. I don’t know why Zimmerman was suspicious of an African American teenager walking through his neighborhood wearing a hoodie. I don’t know if the words from a dispatcher saying “We do not need you to do that” when he was following Martin in his car was a direct order to stand down. I don’t know if Martin broke Zimmerman’s nose though it seems pretty amazing to me that we cannot figure that one out. I don’t know if racial slurs were exchanged that night.
Did Trayvon Martin say “You are going to die tonight” moments before the shooting as Zimmerman’s father said? Or did Zimmerman say that? Like Martin’s father I’m pretty suspicious of the detective’s claim that Trayvon said “What’s your problem, homie?” because they also claim he said “You got me!” when he was shot, which sounds like some terrible line from the script of Gunsmoke. Was Zimmerman on top of Martin during the scuffle as one witness claimed, pinning him down with his knees or was Martin on top grinding Zimmerman’s face into the concrete as another witness said? Or did positions shift during the struggle? And those cries heard in the background of one of the 911 calls—is that Zimmerman screaming or Martin pleading for his life?
I don’t know, and I suspect that we will never know for sure, important facts about what happened that evening, but for my purposes here they don’t matter. I don’t even care what Zimmerman saw when he pulled up in his car beside Trayvon Martin and looked at the young man’s face.
What I do care about is what I see. What would catch my eye on a winter evening in Sanford, Florida, during rounds of my neighborhood watch when I pull up beside a lone figure and look at the face under a hoodie staring back at me through the passenger window?
And what matters most is what I see first.
The Other?
Even before I lift the hood up over my head, the hoodie feels cozy. When I zip it up, the soft lining wraps around me tighter than a sweater and the pockets go deep in front pulling my shoulders down. In order to drape the hood over me I bow my head a little, and the suggestion of fetal isolation is complete. The mother’s other. The only other. The world goes away, and I am ready to wander its empty streets alone.
Well, sort of.
My wife bought the hoodie for me as a Christmas present when I retired from teaching, and my children urged me to wear it, going against type. I was always a sweater guy, my favorite an old blue cotton cardigan with knitted ribbing and tattered cuffs that hangs from a hook in my study. In fact, I knew it was time to retire when I noticed at faculty meetings that I was the only man in the room who wore a cardigan. I would never trade one in for a sweatshirt.
But the minute I wrapped myself up in the soft warmth of a hoodie I was a convert. “What was I thinking!” I announced when I lifted the hood over my head and dug my hands into the pockets. “I love this!”
Trayvon Martin loved his hoodie too. “It could be a hundred degrees outside and he always had his hoodie on,” his aunt told USA Today. The iconic—and controversial—photograph of him that appeared on newscasts and in newspaper reports shows Trayvon in his gray hoodie looking directly at us with soulful eyes and smooth and youthful skin. The photo is undated, leading some to believe that it misrepresents Trayvon as an innocent-looking boy, though his defense attorney claims it was taken within a year of the shooting.
Was Martin shot because he was a young black man in a hoodie? Many think so. One of the largest rallies after his death was the
Million Hoodie March at Union Square in Manhattan to protest the racial profiling of nonwhite youth wearing hoodies. In a photo of the march a crowd gathered to hear Trayvon’s father and mother speak, many of them expressing their solidarity with Trayvon as a victim of profiling by draping their hoodies over their heads.
George Zimmerman did not see a person but a hood when he decided to follow Martin in his car—that is the sentiment behind the protest. When he rolled down the window and spoke to Trayvon, he spoke to a dark and hooded face. And when he fired his pistol, he did not shoot Trayvon Martin, a high school student carrying a bag of Skittles. He shot a hoodie with blackness in it. He shot the other.
The hoodie invites otherness. The hood isolates. It hides the wearer from the world. Surely this is why young people wear them as expressions of adolescent rebellion. To be one among a million hoodies—well, more like several thousand—gathered in Union Square, is not to be lost in a crowd, but to be lost to the crowd. The isolation, not the community, gives the wearer a feeling of protection. You can’t touch this, the hood says, but the protection is false. Just look at the bloodstains and the stippling of powder burns around the bullet holes in Trayvon’s hoodie, entered in evidence at the trial.
But there is more to this story of otherness than the hood. Something deeper and intractable. I lift my hoodie from its hanger and put it on, draping the cloth over my head, and walk into the living room to stand before a full-length mirror. Shoving my fists into my pockets I peer into the glass, looking hard at that shaded, freckled face, wondering if I can see the other there.
I can’t, of course, but it is not because it is my own face in the mirror.
It is because of what I don’t see first. The Steve Harvey in my hoodie could be the other, but the other Steve Harvey that I am can’t. Anyone who shot me would be aiming at me, not at my hood.
The Mother
Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon, met with New York Times journalist Charles Blow twice to talk about her son’s death. In the first interview, conducted at a restaurant near her home five weeks after the shooting, she was accompanied by her mother. “She grows distant when she talks about her loss,” Blow wrote, “occasionally, seemingly involuntarily wrapping her hands gently around her mother’s arm and resting her head on her mother’s shoulder like a young girl in need of comfort. The sorrow seems to come in waves.” A year later, in their second interview, she is alone and stronger—her sorrow replaced with a “reservoir of resolve”—but her magical thinking reveals that she is still in mourning. Unable to go to Trayvon’s grave, she had begun to collect the gifts given to her in Trayvon’s room. “I miss him hugging me,” she laments, yearning for no other than her son, and she is puzzled by his death. “I don’t know if it’s real or not.”
The Other Mother
When a racist Valentine card fell out of the envelope of a letter that my mother wrote more than fifty years ago, I was surprised. These cards, popular in the 1950s, show black children with stereotypical bulging eyes and big, red lips, as well as a sexualization of body parts that is particularly offensive. I no longer have the postcard, but it looked like one I call up on my computer showing the caricatures of two black children with exaggerated features and coy expressions on their faces standing back-to-back and holding hands. In their free hands the boy clutches a heart and the girl a fan, and in the fingers of their clasped hands there is a note that says “All About Necking.” They look to be about three years old.
My mother died when I was eleven, so I cannot ask her about the Valentine, but I was surprised when it tumbled into my lap because I don’t remember overtly racist language or symbols from my childhood when she was alive. I never heard the N-word spoken in my house. My parents used the word “colored” instead, which was common in the 1950s, and did so out of politeness or as a refinement preferable to alternatives, I think, unaware that they were labeling another race in a way that could be offensive. My parents were moderate Republicans, the party of Lincoln, which was, at that time, associated with progressive views on race.
But I suspect, under the surface, an unconscious but pervasive racism was built into my youth, a suspicion that the Valentine card makes manifest. When my parents shopped for a house in the North Shore area near Chicago, they talked openly to each other about housing values and race. They chose Deerfield, which Harry and David Rosen called “the Little Rock of the North” in their book But Not Next Door, the town becoming notorious in 1959 when a developer attempted unsuccessfully to build integrated housing units there. In a letter my mother, aware of the controversy, was relieved that the residents of Deerfield blocked the project by voting “to build several park areas” in disputed neighborhoods of the town. “Deerfield is truly a town of nice, wholesome people,” she wrote, the word “wholesome” covering over a host of unspoken sins.
I think if my mother were alive today and in an elevator when the Steve Harvey walked in she would clutch her purse nervously and hold her breath until she had a chance to get off.
The Other Father
In his speech, President Obama said that “things are getting better.” “Each successive generation,” he explained, chopping the air above the podium into segments with his hand, “seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race.” Gesturing toward the family residence in the East Wing, he mentioned his daughters as examples: “When I talk to Malia and Sasha, and I listen to their friends and I see them interact”—here the president paused, composing his thoughts—“they’re better than we are—they’re better than we were—on these issues.” He admitted that America was not “postracial” and that racism had not been “eliminated,” and that we needed to work on these challenges. He said that leaders needed to “encourage the better angels of our nature” rather than use episodes like the shooting of Trayvon Martin “to heighten divisions,” and he paused after the word “divisions” for a full four seconds, looking off into the middle distance, before returning to the optimism his children represent to him. “But we should also have confidence that kids these days, I think, have more sense than we did back then, and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did; and that along this long, difficult journey, we’re becoming a more perfect union—not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.”
The Other
When I pull off at the Tenth Street exit in downtown Atlanta and a handful of black men rush at the car armed with Windex bottles and washcloths as a scam to get money, I click the lock on my door. When I drive through the inner city to visit my daughter, I click the lock on my door. When I walk into downtown neighborhoods, I move my wallet to my front pocket. When I go to a Braves’ game at Turner Field, I walk behind my family to keep an eye on them. I don’t say the N-word or tell racist jokes, and at a party when someone does, I don’t laugh or acknowledge the ugly word, but I do remain silent.
And as I make these admissions to myself and vow after the president’s speech to do better, I picture in my mind a hand turning slowly as if wringing a washcloth.
Then suddenly it stops.
Many years ago I was at the house of a friend in the mountains where I live, admiring a framed photograph he had taken of black children at a playground. The kids were scrambling to get into the shot, their faces alive with mischievous delight, especially one of the girls in a white dress who clearly had elbowed her way to get her big smile in front of the camera.
“Racism will be with us,” my friend said, nodding toward the picture, “as long as the first thing you notice about these children is that they are black.”
I turned and looked hard at the picture again. When I had looked at it before I had registered delight, playfulness, mischievousness, and spunkiness, but the first thing I saw was that their faces were black.
I think my friend is right.
It is prejudice, this first thing I see, a judgment based on race before any other facts are known. President Obama asked us—asked me—to be a “bit more honest.
” Well, if I met Barack Obama on the street, a man I voted for twice to be president, I’m pretty sure the first thing I would in all honesty see is that he is black.
Another Trayvon
So what do I see when I look at the face of Trayvon Martin under his hoodie? In reverse order, I see the smoothness of his skin. I keep coming back to that. He really is just so damned young under that gray hoodie, a kid and nothing more.
And he really could be Barack Obama thirty-five years ago. I see that in the wounded innocence of his seventeen-year-old face, the hint of mischief in his smile, and a dreaminess about the eyes.
I could see menace here, too, a twisting of these features in anger that could be a threat, but in repose it is a face that a mother, a girlfriend, or a father would love.
I see his black hair forming a kind of crown around the face, framing it, containing it.
The pupils of his eyes, highlighted with flecks of light, are otherwise black and penetrating. They float dolefully from the upper eyelids in the eggshell white of his eyes. And the eyebrows rise up, almost elfin.
His nose has a small hump in the middle and a hint of a moustache appears above his upper lip.
His skin is buttery brown and there is something feminine about its smoothness, inviting the touch.
But the first thing I see when I look at the face of Trayvon Martin as I imagine him bending down to speak to me through the window of my car on a cool winter night in Sanford, Florida, is not the buttery brown skin, the suggestion of a moustache, or the doleful eyes under the hoodie.
The first thing I see is that he is black.
And what I see first is what I think first.
The Other Steve Harvey
