Why don't we say anything?
This afternoon in the subway station, I had one of those moments of staunch reality.
Coming down the stairs, I saw the 3 train stop on the tracks and the rail light turn red. The doors opened and a swarm of high school students exploded onto the platform. The screaming turned to a roar instantaneously as a circle formed and one boy quickly collapsed.
There must have literally been a hundred students. Everyone in the station was looking that direction holding their breath that no shots were fired.
It was one of those moments when you are acutely aware of yourself. When you are smacked by the realization that you are the minority - in skin color, in language, in cultural deportment, in number...
That is still a new feeling to me having come from an area of the midwest where there is about 8% diversity. I wondered if my classmate Chad ever felt that way when we were in school. He was the only black student among us, but even his parent was white, so you have a sense of the homogenity of the area.
Anyway, back to the story.
Just as the cops came down the platform, the 1 pulled in, so I got on and sat down quickly. Students flooded into the train to escape being arrested, etc. It was the oddest sense of reality.
Here I was sitting in a subway car, anxiety spiking, trying to look disinterrested as throngs of high schoolers dressed in what I'd call urban gangwear canvassed the cars looking to displace their energy from the previous situation.
Unwittingly, a homeless women entered our car from another, and began pandering for change. About fifteen students immediately surrounded her and instantly it was all manner of raucous. Chanting, banging on the windows.
A young hispanic woman sitting across from me looked at her friend and said, "Why don't we say anything to them anymore? As adults, why do we let them act this way?"
So true. The whole situation is the reason I'm in grad school. Yet at that moment I had no answers. In the immediacy of the situation, I wouldn't have said anything to them because of the physical threat. You realize that one voice in a scenario like that would not create a change. If I said something, it wasn't as if they would have all turned silent, sat down, and lived the rest of their lives according to the unwritten rules of adulthood and civil demeanor.
It troubles me.
They weren't actually a gang in the formal sense, although interestingly when I got off at my stop there were several Crips representing on the empty platform. It brings up so many questions - tangled, messy questions without clear answers. Sociological, psychological, economic, the list goes on.
Posted by Amanda at November 13, 2002 11:33 PM
