Protecting White Women from Brown Boys

A friend forwarded me this local CBS story last week:

Denver Woman Warns Others After Alarming Encounter With Boy

This place borders between one of the area’s richest neighborhoods — Stapleton, now called Central Park — and one of the poorest — Aurora’s East Colfax, where I work.

This story caught my attention because this is my running route, and I have often seen brown people other than myself under this bridge. While running I muse over the massive wealth disparity on both sides of Montview. I often see brown people venture the path north, but I have never seen the richer white Stapletonians venture south, out of the former Stapleton Airport area.

At first the story sounded scary, but after thinking about it:

1. This is a white woman complaining about a brown man (a boy with darker skin). We have all heard of such before, even moreso recently. Here we have a white woman scared of a dark kid with an accent, getting publicity in an election year that has immigration as a focus. We have a President who makes up scary tales of brown people. Also this is the story of my life.
2. No one else witnessed this incident, yet her complaint of a brown kid made the news. It doesn’t matter that a couple other people saw brown kids under that bridge that day — I see them there all the time. This bridge borders on a brown neighborhood.
3. She abducted a child. Under a savior complex. Of course her story has to be about a child, because no one would approve of her letting an adult stranger from under the bridge into her car.
4. I went jogging there a couple mornings after this news, and saw an Aurora police SUV parked on grass monitoring that bridge, at 7am. I had never seen such prior. This maybe understandable after such media, but in those prior days I also had an incident at my business: I had someone scale the walls of one of my buildings, break a window, climb in, kick in about 30 doors, smash 4 glass panes, and loot the place. I gave the police the video. Yet I have had no increased police presence on my street at Galena and Colfax. My place is just a few blocks away from this bridge. But here we have a white woman with nothing but a story, in a rich white neighborhood, and we see stepped up police presence.
5. Even if the story is all true, there is something to be said about a brown kid with an accent, as it relates to white women in America. I was a brown kid once, and I now work with hundreds of brown and black teens. For the most part, we come from backgrounds that dress and act more conservatively. Look at advertisements, TV, pornography, or the tight pants worn everywhere— if the brown boys aren’t neighbors with white women, their first thought of white women is going to be a promiscusous one. And if white women are not neighbors with brown boys, their first thought is going to be that colored people are harmful. We shouldn’t blame a raped woman for how she dressed, but to what extent is the American notion of freedom creating this problem? Freedom of dress, freedom of promiscuity even in marriage, freedom of pornography, freedom of sexual advertisements everywhere. Of course the boy’s family should teach him better, but maybe his family works all the time and relies on the boy to navigate this society (many of my patient families are like this), and the boy’s notion of this society is based on what he sees.

Here is a picture of that bridge. Notice the irony of the sidewalk writing. The residents need to trade their “BLM” signs for “For Sale” ones, and get closer, not further, from dark skin kids with accents. Emmet Till is watching white women walk under Brown Boy Bridge.

Perhaps that policeman was protecting Central Park from itself.