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Elle

It Does Not Matter If You Are Good

7 min read

  May 29, 2020 at 04:44PM BY R. ERIC THOMAS   GETTY At some point you learn to speak clearly and slowly, to widen your eyes a bit, perhaps to smile, in situations where the underlying danger of everyday existence races to the surface like an air bubble in murky water. Of course you do this with law enforcement, at a traffic stop or in a random encounter on the street, but you do this also in the most anodyne situations—with the train conductor when your ticket won’t scan, with the concierge at an apartment building, with the random white stranger who suddenly wants to know what you’re doing, where you’ve just come from, where you think you’re going. You learn to perform harmlessness, not as a way of selling yourself out—though it often feels like that—but as an attempt at heading off a conflict that seems to always be brewing. You learn—or, at least I, a black, cisgender man, learned—that there will be moments, random and unbidden, where to save your life you must convince a stranger that you are in some amorphous way good. And at the same time you learn that it probably will not make a difference.  RELATED STORY What You Need to Know About George Floyd This week began for many with footage filmed by a black man of a white woman, Amy Cooper, frantically calling the police on him and alleging that he was threatening her. The black man, Christian Cooper, unrelated to Amy, can be

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