There is [a] type of contagion that still keeps some of White America paralyzed: Fear of black men in public spaces. This Memorial Day weekend saw the release of two disturbing videos involving black men. One showed a white Minneapolis police officer with his knee on the neck of a black man who was gasping, "I can't breathe." The man later died. In the second incident, a white woman was walking her dog in New York's Central Park when she got into a dispute with a black man who asked her to leash her pet. A video [shows her calling] the police and saying, "I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life." Both episodes came not long after the release of another video that showed Ahmaud Arbery ... shot to death after encountering two white armed men while jogging in Georgia. All those incidents have a depressing familiarity to many black men. It's part of the ambient racism of our everyday lives. Black men have long been a bogeyman in White America's collective psyche. Why are black men still so feared in 2020? White America has long associated black men with criminality and hypersexuality. It permeates our history and our art. It's why some social science experiments show that even trained police officers are biased to see black man as threats. The stereotype of the dangerous black man is burrowed so deep in our collective imagination that even many black Americans see black men as automatic threats. Until more white people actually live among and befriend black people, that fear will persist. Until something changes, we black men ... keep our voices down, tiptoe through public spaces and stifle our fear. We try everything we can to avoid being the next black man in a viral video.

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