Photo courtesy of Sophie Elbaz/Sygma/Corbis.

To this day, I have a distinct memory of my mother locking the car doors when we pulled up to a specific corner in the downtown section of Michigan’s second largest city. It’s an intersection I’ve gone through many times in life – one of two necessary to get downtown. Also to this day, it has not been an intersection I’ve ever experienced any problems at. The only other noticeable attribute of this intersection and its surrounding neighborhood was that the people present walking in and out of nearby stores are almost exclusively Black. Not once did anyone ever try to open the car door or knock on the windows, so there wasn’t any plausible reason to think that someone might actually attempt something. Nonetheless, the unspoken corollary was, “There are lots of Black people downtown, and therefore when you are downtown, the doors must be locked.”

This kind of social stigma has only ever been reinforced by clues from popular culture that regularly place people of color in roles of thieves, violent criminals, and drug dealers. This pattern of racial criminalization and its consequences were summarized in a New York Times op-ed by Khalil Gibran Muhammad – Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture – as,

…stigmatizing black people as dangerous, legitimizing or excusing white-on-black violence, conflating crime and poverty with blackness, and perpetuating punitive notions of “justice” — vigilante violence, stop-and-frisk racial profiling and mass incarceration — as the only legitimate responses.

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