This notion of America being divided into white spaces, black spaces, and cosmopolitan spaces explains why a West Texas elementary school teacher posted on Facebook, “I’m almost to the point of wanting them all segregated on one side of town so they can hurt each other and leave the innocent people alone.” She wanted them all back into their black space, in the Section 8 housing that the one McKinney woman imagined they were from.
You take the mask off when you come home.” I wish I had that luxury in life. Black folks are always on and watching their backs and surroundings. “I feel like I have to be ‘on’ all the time while non people of color have the freedom to just be themselves,” said a black friend, who said a typical example is “when you travel with co-workers on business and they go to dinner have three or four drinks and dance all over the place, tell too many personal stories and make inappropriate statements. But the police never would have been called if the black teenagers hadn’t seemed out of place to the white neighbors. Why would this woman assume that her black neighbor was trespassing? The community pool, like most of the places we work, shop, eat, and goof off in America, is what sociologists call a “white space,” or an area where black Americans feel and look, at least to many white people, out of place. That black teenager lived in the neighborhood. “Go back to your Section 8 home,” said one white woman to a black teenager at the pool before slapping her. They saw black people who didn’t belong in the mostly white neighborhood. They didn’t see the invited guests of a black neighbor getting a little rowdy at an end-of-school pool party. Before Eric Casebolt shoved a black girl’s face into the ground and pulled a gun on her two unarmed friends, white neighborhood residents at the pool assumed that all those black teenagers were in the wrong place. Craig Ranch North Community Pool in McKinney, Texas was not a “whites only” pool, but it might as well have been.
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