I’ve posted about the times I was mugged growing up. I also did a TEDx talk about the sledding hill near where I grew up. I think a lot of people see a white guy talking about growing up by a sledding hill at the end of the block and think, how privileged.
For me, the parks and being mugged went together because I was mugged in the park near the sledding hill. Well, a bit of a walk from it, but on a bike path we went to as a family.
I was visiting Philadelphia and went by the spot for the first time in a long time. The experience was more emotionally intense than I expected. Here’s the spot:
I think the wall on the right may have been added since then. In any case, I took many more pictures of the walk there and back. In a separate post I’ll make a slideshow or gallery to show how beautiful this path through the woods along Wissahickon Creek is. [EDIT: here’s that post: More of my park visit besides where they mugged me]
This mugging was one of the more difficult ones for me to process, for reasons stemming from the details of the story I’m not up for writing today. Being threatened with violence is always difficult to process, though my childhood taught me that being white and male made you a target for violence without recourse to justice. Part of the emotional intensity I experienced today walking by this place was from reflecting on how simply sharing my experience nearly universally resulted in being silenced, told I didn’t understand the situation, lectured at, and told I was really the privileged one.
It took me a long time to realize that people were responding to their own preconceptions, not realizing how dehumanizing stereotyping is.
[EDIT: the next day I posted something similar: Another spot where a bike was stolen from me when I was a kid.]