When we last spoke, dear reader, I’d just been punched in the face, for no good reason, by a black guy on the streets of downtown Wilmington. I mention his race because it was obviously a factor in what happened, though it’s impossible to know exactly how much of a factor it was unless we can secure my assailant’s participation in this online symposium (which seems unlikely).
Here’s my guess, though: I think he and his friends were out “looking for trouble” (as the old folks say). What that means, I think, is that they were bored and restive like teenagers everywhere (except in Scandanavia, where they’re just having sex all the time). They didn’t have anything to do with themselves, and they had energy and hostility to burn, so they just walked around and looked for some excitement to puncture the boredom. On a different night, that could have meant finding someone to buy them beer, getting drunk and passing out. It could have meant finding some girls to hook up with. It could have meant walking around for hours and then going home and jerking off to Grand Theft Auto. It could have meant harassing a woman who was out, alone, late at night. Or it could have meant, and did mean, roughing up an affluent-seeming white guy. I doubt, however, that it would have meant roughing up a black guy (unless he seemed kind of gay).
It’s like one part teenage ennui + one part racial hostility + general antisocial attitude + one part fucking asshole bullshit (just so you don’t think that my feelings about the incident are entirely sociological). They didn’t set out that night to beat on a white guy, and they didn’t really seem like sociopaths – honestly, I think all three of them were sort of freaked out by what happened – but I presented myself as a vulnerable target, and as an opportunity to relieve the boredom, that they chose not to resist.
Another factor in all this, I suspect, is that Wilmington has some pretty bad race relations. My wife and I felt it from the moment we got there. The black people we passed on the street didn’t look us in the eye, didn’t smile. The affluent white people seemed bunkered inside their big stone buildings. There was no street life. It was just a different vibe than in Austin, where we live, and different that what I knew growing up Springfield.
It felt more like Hartford, actually, where I was once told by a bouncer that even though I’d been told, by a friend, to meet him inside that club, that my friend would be at the club across the street, "where the white people drink." And damned if the bouncer wasn’t right.
Anyway, I don’t know much about Wilmington, but like Hartford it’s a place that has an enormous amount of money coming into it—in Hartford it’s insurance money, and in Wilmington it’s the credit card industry, along with various other big companies drawn to Deleware’s corporate-friendly financial (non-)regulations—along with a lot of poverty, most of which is experienced by its black residents. That kind of inequality tends to breed resentment and suspicion, and we could feel it in the air in Wilmington. It’s a place where the white people have the money, and the black people have the jobs serving them, or no jobs at all. It also has one of the highest HIV infection rates in the country, and just basically sounds like a shitty place to be. Consider this run-down, from its Wikipedia entry:
Given Wilmington’s central location between Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York City, the city saw a massive rise in drug sales in the early 1990s. Dealers found that Wilmington’s poorly patrolled streets and underfunded police force (at one time only eight police cars monitored the city at night) made the city a relatively easy location in which to operate.
Drugs and gangs gained a greater profile in the city throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s. Coupled with this increased presence were increases in violent crimes (murder, assault, armed robbery), which put Wilmington among the most dangerous cities for its size nationally. Many long-time local residents living in Wilmington’s West Side and Hilltop neighborhoods petitioned the city government to address these matters, but often gave up and moved out. Vacant homes became a haven for dealers, users, squatters and vagrants.
? To counter this crime wave, Wilmington became the first city in the U.S. to have its entire downtown area under surveillance: some $800,000 worth of video cameras (some bought with public money, some by downtown businesses) have the exteriors of all buildings in view, and the technicians who monitor them dispatch the city’s police to the scene of any crime or suspicious activity they see, while it is still happening. Recently, the City has expanded the surveillance program into some of the more crime-ridden neighborhoods.
Among the residential streets, the Wilmington Police Department started a program known as jump-outs, in which unmarked police vans would cruise crime-prone neighborhoods late at night, "jump-out" at corners where residents were loitering and detain them temporarily. Using loitering as probable cause, the police would then photograph, search, and fingerprint everyone present. This would improve the police’s records in case fingerprints or eye-witnesses were available at future crimes, along with catching anyone with drugs or weapons on them. Controversy spread from the observation that such a practice was a violation of civil rights, and possibly racial-profiling.
Doesn’t sound like a place where you want to be hanging out, alone, late at night, ay? Lesson learned.
When I woke up the next morning after the attack, my jaw ached a bit, and there was a faint red splotch on my right cheek. It was visible if you knew what to look for, but otherwise just looked like I was having a mildly splotchy day. The punch hadn’t landed as hard as it might have. Dickhead (as I’ll call him from now on) was running at me when he threw it, so his feet weren’t planted enough to generate real force. And he threw it overhand, and connected with the palm-side of his fist, rather than the really nasty front of it. I got lucky, in a sense. My beautiful face was pretty much undamaged.
Who knows what dark shit is going on right now in my subconscious, but it doesn’t seem as if I’ve been all that traumatized. The attack didn’t take place in my own town, near my own house, so I don’t feel violated in that way. And it was just a punch—and a lame one at that—rather than a beating. Dickhead didn’t even ask for my money.
Most importantly, from a psychological perspective, I handled myself okay. I didn’t run away. I didn’t panic. I even yelled at Dickhead, which is a kind of bold thing to do (though admittedly it was a plaintive kind of yell). Maybe I didn’t turn around and beat the crap out of the guy (Dickhead), like a real badass would have done, but there were three of them, and one of me, so that’s excusable.
I dealt with it, in other words, like a man, and although I know that that’s a stupid, sexist, immature way to look at it, I also know that if I hadn’t handled it like the culture tells us a man is supposed to—with some physical courage, some anger, and some stoicism—I’d be feeling much, much worse than I do right now.
UPDATE: I consulted a friend of mine who’s an historian of race and race relations in America, and he pointed me toward Richard Kluger’s book Simple Justice, which has a chapter on the history of race relations in Delaware. It’s an interesting chapter, and it fleshes out, and vindicates, my basic intuitions about what a crappy state it is. Kluger writes:
Delaware displayed a kind of defiant schizophrenia: having stayed in the Union throughout the war, it now spat upon the Great Civil War amendments that corroborated the higher purposes of the terrible conflict. It refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which stripped the state of its slaves. It refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, and its legislature declared its “uncompromising opposition” to all “measures intended or calculated to equalize or amalgamate the Negro race with the white race, politically or socially.” … so hostile to the educational advancement of the Negro did the balance of the state’s citizens remain that by 1950 there was no four-year high school for Negroes anywhere in the state south of Wilmington.”
… An unspoken quid pro quo arrangement had evolved between the sophisticated Wilmington plutocracy and the downstate conservative farmers who still had the votes that passed the laws that ran the state. If Wilmington saw to it that statewide taxes were kept low and did not foist a lot of costly social-welfare programs on the southern counties—particularly anything that would materially benefit the black man—the legislature would rubber-stamp the fondest wishes of the high-powered corporation types, most of them linked by employment or family to the du Pont squirearchy.
..such social questions as urban planning, public transit, education, tax policy, and welfare benefits were viewed with pinchpenny stringency by state and municipal policy-makers who kept Delaware a relatively backward, unsightly, and poorly serviced state. Thanks to the distinctly limp social concern that prevailed in the state, even the most liberal community in Delaware—Wilmington—remained a Jim Crow town in 1950, very much like Topeka, Kansas, but a bit worse.
Worse than Topeka. That sounds about right. Bullshit state. Bullshit city. Bullshit punkass racists (and by that I mean both the ignorant idiots who attacked me for being white and the white people in the state who’ve created an unpleasant little de facto white supremacist plutocracy).
