Columns | Digital Magical Negro

Tragic Gentrification Mulatto

I occupy an unusual space: Black enough to be terrified of the police, but white enough to not get pulled over for driving while Black.

This is Digital Magical Negro, a column by Chris L. Terry on his experiences as a mixed-race Black man navigating contemporary life in America.

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I live in a Black neighborhood and like waving to my neighbors, saying hello on the sidewalk as I jog past. I wring a ton of meaning from those quick, warm moments when I can pretend that I fit in.

I’m Black but pale and ethnically ambiguous, thanks to my white mom. I’ve been racially profiled, academically tracked, and “your hair looks like pubes”-ed by enough Caucasians to know that I’m a Black person. But to many people—white and Black—my appearance says otherwise. I’ve been called Argentinian, Jewish, and a leprechaun, for starters. I occupy an unusual space: Black enough to be terrified of the police, but white enough to not get pulled over for driving while Black.

The toughest thing to navigate is the times when I can tell that a Black person is reading me as white but not explicitly saying it. Maybe the conversation feels guarded, or incomplete, or it’s steered toward white shit: the neighbor who pointed at the mountains and said the view reminded him of Pasadena, the student at my old job who’d always want to talk about the fucking Red Hot Chili Peppers. Those times, I usually keep quiet and stew. If I feel the need to provide evidence, maybe I don’t have much of a case.

When I get acceptance from other Black people, it tells me that I was right to feel like a fish out of water as a kid in Boston. That there is a place where I can breathe easy instead of waiting for the people I’m around to say something anti-Black. The problem is that I want it badly enough that I know I can be overeager and off-putting, looking for an in with total strangers.

I say I want to fit in with Black people. But here’s the thing: no Black person fits in with all Black people. We’re not all the same. Some of us are cool. Some of us are assholes. And it’s all subjective. So, when I’m around my people, I’m still looking for my people.

When it comes to housing, my two main choices are to live around white people and hope they don’t call the cops, or live around Black people and hope I don’t get called white. So, I was excited but nervous when my wife and I packed up our fair-skinned child and moved to a rental in View Park, the bougie Black section of Los Angeles. I wanted to live around other Black people, especially middle-class ones that remind me of my family, but worried I wasn’t Black enough to blend in.

Black people with money bought houses in View Park a couple generations ago; Ray Charles’s mansion is still up the hill. When we moved to the neighborhood, it felt like I’d arrived at the tail end of a triumphant dream. I soaked up its remnants as I ran through the hills at night, passing wide, ground-hugging midcentury homes, where glowing ceiling lamps allowed glimpses of the 1970s dining nooks inside. I clocked the faded pink and green Alpha Kappa Alpha license plate frames in the driveways, imagining the stories of the Black strivers who had moved in a few decades back.

I swooned when my grandmother’s perfume wafted, floral and powdery, from a house on Homeland Drive and finished my run on memories of Grandma calling me “comical,” of her overcooked spaghetti that buckled under its own weight on the fork, on a big regret: not buying my grandparents’ house, in a middle-class Black enclave in Richmond, Virginia, when they passed five years before. Now, white people live there and the property is worth five times as much. I’ll probably never own a home in my family’s old neighborhood, never mind here in LA, but I dream of it. To me, home ownership signifies a certain stability that I’ve craved since I was a teenager. I worry I won’t be able to give that to my child.

While the older homeowners in my neighborhood are Black people who got where they are by sticking with other Black people—the “ain’t no stoppin’ us now” generation—the younger ones are white and seem to have got where they are because “there wasn’t enough room in our Venice apartment for our dear children, Phoenix and Bubble.” It’s gentrification, with some unique trappings since it’s happening in an affluent area. Instead of mixology lounges named after the hardware stores they’ve displaced, we get sideways fences blocking Spanish colonial homes. The newer cars have Patagonia stickers instead of those AKA license plates. I’m a newcomer and pale, so, as connected as I feel to the place, I am part of the problem. When I’m out running, I make the neighborhood look welcoming to white people.

I wanted to live around other Black people, but worried I wasn’t Black enough to blend in.

The first summer we lived in View Park, my baby was fussing, so I took him for a walk. We quickly encountered two white moms on the sidewalk, chatting with a retirement-aged Black man with a tidy military appearance.

One of the moms asked me, “Are you new to the neighborhood?”

“Yes.”

“Where do you live?” she pressed.

“Around the corner,” I pointed, vaguely.

I’m not comfortable telling strangers where I stay because I don’t want anyone breaking into my place. But after a second, I got that those yuppies weren’t trying to steal my TV. They figured I was one of them and wanted to know which house I’d bought. I pictured my Band-Aid-colored rented duplex, the biggest place I’ve lived in as an adult. I’m proud of my apartment, the dedicated dining room, the 1940s phone nook that my wife stuffed with earthquake supplies, the glimpses of the Hollywood sign I get while doing dishes. But, in that moment, it didn’t feel like enough.

The Black man pointed to his house and said he was a retired cop. He’d lived here since the ’80s. The conversation moved into the euphemisms that people use for gentrification: things were “changing,” “a lot of young families” were moving in. The old head seemed to want us to feel safe and started talking about how the neighborhood had remained untouched during the 1992 LA uprising, which tore through South LA.

“We had a row of police cars,” he said, “keeping them from crossing Crenshaw.”

Them.

I got the deflating-balloon feeling that happens when I think Black people are talking to me like I’m a white man. This time, it was worse. He was putting down other Black people in front of white people, real and imagined. It reminded me of the old Kanye line, “Even if you in a Benz, you still a nigga in a coupe.” We’re them too when we get pulled over.

I took this loss. I didn’t tell anyone that I’m Black. I usually don’t in those situations because what’s it gonna change? They might apologize. They might not believe me. They might insult me by reminding me of how I’m different from other Black people. And the damage is done. I know how they see me, and, try as I might, I obsess over it as a time when I did not feel “Black enough.”

My child and I walked on. Maybe I liked living in my memories, in my fantasy version of the neighborhood, more than I liked actually meeting my neighbors.

A couple years went by. A Frisbee golf course was installed in the park from the “Nuthin’ But A ‘G’ Thang” video. A camping-gear company moved into the old Urban League office. I went to the park across Crenshaw to buy some vegan soul food. There’s a drum circle there every weekend and a bunch of vendors set up. Black people hang out. I can hear the drums into the night, after I put my kid to bed. Their rhythms echo across the boulevard and make me feel like my heart is beating with others’.

This time, some brothers in ankh necklaces and other Afrocentric garb were preaching over the drums, voices echoing through a PA that was plugged in god knows where. As I walked toward my favorite food stand, a distorted voice bellowed through the speaker, something about white people not being welcome.

I feel sorry for the sap they’re yelling at, I chuckled to myself and walked on to get food.

A few minutes later, I was cutting back through the park, plate in hand, when the ankh-necklace brothers blocked my way and asked me what I was doing there. I lifted my meal in response. As a couple guys slipped behind me, the ringleader asked who I was.

I said, “I’m Chris. Who’re you?” and lifted a hand to shake.

Ankh #1 recoiled dramatically. “I don’t shake hands with white boys.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “Who’re you calling white?”

“You.”

I held his gaze with my blue eyes. “You sure?”

I’d taken a calculated risk that evening and worn a Negro League baseball cap, for Willie Mays’s team the Birmingham Black Barons. It’s a black hat with a red bill and a white BBB stitched across the front. Those hats had been popular when I was in junior high, and I’ve always held them up as a symbol of early ’90s Black cool, along with leather Africa pendants and Cross Colours jerseys. My wife bought me the hat when they finally became available in my huge head size.

Wearing the hat’s a Black thing, but it covers my red-brown curls—the biggest natural signifier of my Blackness. Wearing something red with a bunch of Bs on it is also a dicey move in my neighborhood, which edges up on Crip territory. These are the decisions I make when I leave the house, weighing physical violence against the emotional violence of being seen as white.

I raised the cap up off my head. An understanding “Ohh . . .” hummed through the group, followed by: “This brotha look like Malcolm X.”

They dapped me up. Detroit Red! I showed teeth, grinning in relief, hoping they couldn’t see how hard my leg was shaking. We talked for a minute, but I didn’t want to stick around. As much as I wanted to fit in, I’d always wonder when my invite would be checked next.

During a pandemic, LA’s spaciousness is helpful, germs-wise, but I’m still really lonely. Part of how I fight sadness is by jogging hidden behind a Covid mask, sunglasses, and a ball cap, looking like the invisible man as I greet my neighbors. The older ones, the Black ones, tend to value saying hello.

I have favorites who I look for: old guys, role models of how I might be in a couple decades, or who I might have been if I were born earlier, Blacker. The grandpa who raises his cigar in cheers from his driveway. The old-school geek with the funky glasses and wrinkly bulldogs. The hulk with the manicured white goatee who picks his way up one of the neighborhood’s many hills.

One morning last fall, I rounded a corner while running on the sidewalk and came up on two men walking toward me. Goatee Hulk was on the sidewalk. His companion, a slightly younger Black man, walked in the gutter. A car was approaching from behind them. I had no choice but to cut between the two men—not the politest move, but my safest choice.

These are the decisions I make when I leave the house, weighing physical violence against the emotional violence of being seen as white.

Goatee Hulk’s goatee was looking good. I could tell because he wasn’t wearing a mask, and I was about to pass three feet to his left. To avoid germs, I turned my head away, waved and said hi to his companion, and kept moving. Then I heard yelling.

“What, you’re not gonna say hi to me?”

That was Goatee Hulk, sounding like one of those creepy “Where my hug at?” guys from high school. I yelled, “Put on a mask,” then turned around and kept jogging. I’m not trying to show up in this neighborhood and start telling people what to do, but, uh, he started it.

Over my music, I heard him yelling, “Stop! Come back here!” as if I’d picked his pocket. I kept my pace and pretended I couldn’t hear him over my music, but he didn’t quit. Finally, I turned back around and popped out one of my headphones.

He skidded to a stop five feet and eleven inches away and told me he couldn’t wear a mask because he had trouble breathing. This man who just chased after me for a city block, bellowing at the top of his lungs, had breathing issues? Bullshit.

His friend lingered on the corner with a “here we go again” air. Goatee Hulk went on about how his family had lived in the neighborhood since the ’60s. I caught the subtext. I’m a newcomer and he read me as one of the white yuppies with no regard for the area’s history. The fence-builders. The cop-callers. The ones who don’t say hi on the street. I knew that any protest of mine would sound too well-prepared, that any argument would not be enough. He’d made up his mind.

I wanted to point out that, if this community was so dear to him, he might not wanna be breathing germs all over it. But I decided to be the bigger person that day. I told him that I’d seen him out here before and we’d said hi then. That we’d see each other again, and maybe we’d build. I told him my name. He said he wasn’t quite ready to tell me his. I snorted a quiet laugh under my mask and went on my way. Being neighborly was clearly not what this was about.

It’s frustrating to deal with someone who’s got you wrong but is still up in your business. I guess that’s why I like running. I can do it at a distance, taking in the world on my own terms and leaving quickly. I can’t control how Goatee Hulk sees me, but that’s not going to keep me from quietly enjoying a lot of the same things as him. I know who I am, and that I’m safer standing out in a Black neighborhood than a white one.

My kid’s six now, and, on Christmas Eve, we went for a walk. Between the holiday and the pandemic, the streets were empty and it was just us, the houses, and the vivid blue sky. We were on the stretch of Monteith between the lone palm tree and the only house I ever saw with a Michael Bloomberg for President lawn sign when the air was cut by the shuddering of a police helicopter’s blades.

Seeing a bird in LA is a common occurrence, and, as always, I tracked it, trying to calculate the area it was circling. The copter swooped behind us and passed in front again, placing us in the middle of its loop. Grabbing my kid’s hand and quickening my pace, I swiveled my head, looking for the drama, then got that sinking “police lights in the rearview” feeling. This time, we were the ones.

Up in the sky, a siren whooped, and I stomped to a stop, jerking my kid’s arm. If I wasn’t on month nine of Covid buzz cuts, my curls would have been blowing in the wind of the copter’s blades. We looked up at its belly and waited.

Then there was a crackle of static, and a cop’s deep, Black-sounding voice came through the loudspeaker: “Merry Christmas, brotha!”

The chopper bucked and sped off. I waved, mystified. My kid asked what just happened. My first thought was that, of all the people who might see me as Black, it had to be a cop who did it the loudest.