Chapter One: Home and Neighborhood Chapter One HOME AND NEIGHBORHOOD "In 1944 a sixteen-year-old Black student in Columbus, Ohio, won an essay contest on the theme ''What to Do with Hitler after the War'' by submitting the single sentence, ''Put him in a Black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America.''?" --Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race I don''t remember what I was wearing when I ran from my 250-square-foot apartment to Google''s mammoth Chelsea office, which took up an entire city block. I probably had on cargo shorts to survive New York''s sweltering summer heat. Or maybe I wore them to look "Googly" in the office. I can''t say. But I remember clearly stepping into the building and staring down the cold, sterile corridor at the elevators. My brain was paralyzed. I wanted to turn and run out and hide under the covers and call my friends and scroll the horrifying words and images on Black Twitter.
Even that seemed better than what I would do instead: shuffle along, into and up the elevator to the fifteenth floor, where I''d be greeted by my oblivious colleagues with a shit-eating grin on my face. The night before, George Zimmerman had been ruled not guilty of second-degree murder in the shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, and I was not okay. I was full of grief and fear. I did not feel Googly. If my coworkers cared or could tell I was in pain, they didn''t show it. And I did just enough to make sure they couldn''t sense my anguish. I trudged through a micro-kitchen stocked with Greek yogurts and organic snacks to my cubicle. I asked my colleagues about significant others and babies and dogs who were all very important to them.
They were as willing as ever to filibuster about these characters in their lives. A couple asked how I was doing. I knew the question was an empty gesture. Good. Great. I''m fine. Whatever will check the box that we were done and let me get to my seat. It seemed inhumane that I was expected to show up at work and send emails like any other day.
I had seen the photos of Trayvon. That kid looked just like me. I wondered how my coworkers could look at me and not see him. But perhaps they couldn''t really see him and they couldn''t really see me. Well, one of them could see me--Andrea Taylor. Dre was Stanford-educated, and light enough to pass for white, but she chose not to. She emerged at my cubicle with her hair in a big, curly bun. "Come on, let''s go," she said.
I followed her. Dre led me into an overly lit meeting room. She touched my hand, lightly. "Chad, I can tell you''re not okay," she said. How could she tell if nobody else could? I''m almost sure I didn''t cry, because my mom had taught me since I was ten years old that Black folks weren''t allowed to cry at work. The fear of death was on me. I thought I was hiding it well, but Andrea could smell it in a way none of my white colleagues could or cared to. Their apathy felt personal.
Andrea''s comforting presence reassured me I was not alone, but icy loneliness was otherwise a common feeling for me in certain corporate environments. Andrea sat there beside me, holding on to my arm. Maybe I yelled, maybe I just sat there. I really don''t remember. She knew why I was hurting but she let me tell her anyway. It wasn''t that an innocent kid was dead. It wasn''t that his killer was acquitted. I''d known as long as I''d known anything to expect such atrocities from this country, our home.
That was on brand. What hurt me was that I was expected to smile and drone and punch out mind-numbing emails and laugh at my coworkers'' corny jokes and affirm their experiences without receiving affirmation in return. I knew what Andrea was about to say. She was hurting too, but she processed the pain much more stoically. She gave me three minutes to be emotional. And then. "Okay, Chad," she said. "C''mon, we have to get back to work.
" I knew she was right. As two of the very few young Black people at Google, we both felt immense pressure to perform at the highest level. I couldn''t risk squandering my opportunity because of feelings. If I did, would the same opportunity be available for someone like me next year? Would I be able to support myself? The cost of trading time at my desk for time in the conference room, sorting myself, was too expensive. And for those few minutes I spent in the conference room, I wanted to apologize to my father. My dad is a tough guy. He''s a college athlete. He''s a lawyer.
He was born in Detroit, in the 1950s. Growing up, he shared a bed with his older brother in the kitchen. His father was an army veteran with a sixth-grade education. During the 1967 Detroit riot, one of the deadliest in American history, my dad sat with his father in front of Grandaddy O''Neal''s small laundromat bearing shotguns in case the mostly Black rioters didn''t notice or care that their business was Black-owned. When I was six years old my family moved up-county, from a small townhouse on the Maryland side of the D.C. border to a quaint cul-de-sac, and this, I think, made my dad keep a very close eye on my sister and me as well as our white neighbors. We moved from a modestly sized brick townhouse to a single-family house with a two-car-garage.
Our old neighborhood was diverse, with a number of Black and Latinx families. Our new neighborhood was mostly white. Our old neighbors were an eclectic mix of government employees, teachers, and laborers. Our new neighbors were more affluent white-collar professionals. We had moved on up . With its square lawns, tall trees, and general American Dream-iness, our new neighborhood resembled the gated community where Trayvon was murdered for being Black after the streetlights came on. But what I saw, as a child, was a giant playground. I was six, the age where I wanted to explore on my own.
I thought I would ride my tricycle down our street or trudge through backyards adjacent to ours, as freely as the white kids in our neighborhood did. My father knew better. Like Andrea at Google, he knew there was a different set of rules for me. My dad was a hands-on father. Not in the physical sense--in fact I can''t remember ever being spanked by him. But he paid close and constant attention to my every movement. He coached my youth basketball games and was particularly firm with me compared to the other players'' parents. After every game and every practice from age six through fourteen, he would run through a list of detailed questions about specific plays and decisions I made.
These intense discussions often felt like emotional interrogations. But if I tried to slither out of the questions for a bathroom break, or hide behind my mother, he was always there, on the other side, waiting with fixed intention. "Why didn''t you shoot the ball more? What did you see when you made this decision? Why are you passing the ball to James so much? Do you think he''s a better shooter than you?" he would say, plowing through one question to the next before I could answer. Every discussion was followed by another--a meta-discussion on how basketball principles we explored related to life decisions. "Every shot you pass up is a missed opportunity, Chad. What do you think happens to Black boys who grow up passing on opportunities in this world?" he asked. It all felt very urgent. Everything felt urgent.
He approached my schoolwork with the same hovering fervor. We''d sit side by side at the dining room table every night, mowing through hours of homework, studying for tests, arguing, struggling, learning together. The white neighborhood kids would show up at the door and ring the bell to see if I could come out and play. My dad would crack the door just enough for them to see me sitting there in front of a table covered in books and scattered papers. The white neighborhood kids would ask my dad if I could join them outside, and he''d quickly, gruffly, inform them that I was unavailable. Slam. Click. He''d shut the door, shaking the bottom two levels of our three-story house, then snap the lock closed.
He wanted them, and me, to get the message that I would not be joining them anytime soon. Perhaps never, if that''s how long it took for me to finish my homework. At times, I felt trapped. But I had my father in my house. Many of my Black friends didn''t. As I grew, my high school coach took over my basketball training. Coach Pigrom was only thirty, a Black man who had played college ball at HBCU Hampton University. He was even more no-nonsense than my dad, but still my father hovered and pressed.
He''d watch my basketball practices from the gymnasium window. He was the only dad who did that. When my teammates and I lined up on the baseline of the basketball court for sprints, a few would make jokes about my dad, who was always there watching. I was embarrassed, but I guessed that underneath their jokes was harmless envy. They loved to spend time hanging around my dad, maybe as a proxy for their own. We''d pile into his Acura SUV on weekends and he''d drive us across the county to high school football games, teenage dance clubs, parties, and fairs. Five, six, seven of us Black teenagers would fold into the back of his car and rap along to Kanye West''s College Dropout album, which had just come out, or my dad''s favorite, Tupac. When we arrived at any destination, my dad would usually go inside to inspect the premises then sit out in the.