While I was jogging (actually plogging) along the Hudson River around 7:30am, a person not wearing a mask stepped into my path, blocking me, saying the person’s shoes had been stolen. The person seemed to let me pass, but then threatened me and threw a bottle that shattered at my feet as I ran past. I kept running, the hair on the back of my neck standing up and my adrenaline high. I don’t know if the person had a weapon.

I describe more and some of how it affected me in the audio.

I was first going to say I was threatened since he didn’t touch me. I’m not a lawyer so I looked up the definition. According to FindLaw.com’s page on Assault Torts and Injury Law:

legal scholars define assault as an intentional attempt or threat to inflict injury upon a person, coupled with an apparent, present ability to cause the harm, which creates a reasonable apprehension of bodily harm or offensive contact in another. Notice the words “attempt” and “threat” above. In tort law, assault does not require actual touching or violence to the victim. We use another term for the touching or contact: “battery.”

Here are the notes I read from:

• The story from this morning running
• Happens all the time, not daily but throughout my life
• I don’t think he did it because black, but I suspect were I not white it may not have happened. Can’t say this time.
• When I stayed in Atlanta
• Friends say, you can say to us but careful with others
• Shared about mugged childhood, but still happening
• Maybe there is a secret white suburban life I don’t know about
• Recently white friends have started sharing how they’ve been mugged
• Consistent with Dov’s saying how sharing stories will lead to others feeling they can share too
• That’s all background. Here is my point: every time I bring up suffering or being threatened, while I may get some listening, the other person always says, remember others have it worse—not that person, not even someone with their skin color
• So they don’t know from experience but they’re telling me as if I haven’t heard before, and they’re presuming to know my experience
• I don’t know anyone’s experience but mine, but everyone absolutely everyone dismisses it without asking, presuming it’s the caricature in the mainstream.
• When I hear white people talking about BLM, George Floyd, there’s always this mea culpa. Maybe they are guilty, I don’t know. I never hear them speak about their problems. Maybe they have no problems, maybe I’m unique, but that people open up with me when I share and they hear I’m not white supremacist or racist—though in today’s world white people even mentioning race without saying how they are allies or something making up for guilt or things like that—then they tell me about their experiences, but they insist on my respecting their confidence, which of course I do.
• So much of what I hear from white people sounds so similar and
  inauthentic, I don’t think they’re being open, honest, or candid. Maybe
  many are as privileged as they say, but people have told me about being attacked, their lives threatened with weapons, and so on.
• I think about risks maybe not every day, but all the time. And when I
  don’t, some guy walks into my path, throws a bottle at me, and threatens me.
• For a while I feared sharing messages like this because people might
  suspect I’m turning into a white supremacist. I came to terms that if
  people think that about the opposite, I can’t let their preconceived
  notions hold me from acting for equality.

 

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