I have a confession: I get anxious bringing my kids to the playground.
If the other kids are Black and Brown, I can exhale. But we all know the “best” play structures—the ones with the soft ground and the newest slides—are usually in neighborhoods where the residents are overwhelmingly not the same shade as mine.
Every time we go, I feel a tightness in my chest. I feel like I am being watched. And I know it isn’t just my paranoia.
I remember taking the twins to a story time in Guilderland, a suburb of Albany, NY. There was a white mother and an Indian mother there, and they were utterly entranced by me. My son, AJ, had popped up with excitement during the story, just being a happy kid. These two mothers were so busy watching me—waiting to see how I would “discipline” him or if I would be “too loud”—that they paid no attention to their own toddler boys, who ran headfirst into each other right in front of them.
They wanted to police me and mine instead of tending to their own.
I eventually stopped taking my kids to that story hour. I felt criminalized just for wanting my children to be excited about books.
The History of Being Watched I’ve been reading Healing Justice Lineages by Cara Page and Erica Woodland, and Chapter 7 stopped me in my tracks. In an essay titled “We Are Our History,” Erica Woodland writes:
“Criminalization functions as a primary tool to incarcerate, murder, surveil, and control our communities in order to undermine the work for collective liberation.”
She goes on to say that we are criminalized for engaging in our land, body, and spirit traditions.
This isn’t a new symptom of a broken system. Woodland describes two historical attacks on Black and Brown liberation. In 1889, the Lakota people were massacred at Wounded Knee for performing the Ghost Dance—a spiritual tradition meant to bring hope. In the 1970s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO illegally surveilled Black activists to disrupt our organizations because they wanted to prove that we couldn’t organize peacefully.
Generations of white America have been bred on these untruths. They are raised to believe that their way of being—whatever that means for them—is the “appropriate” way, and anything outside of that is a threat.
From the Playground to the Theater We saw this explode recently in a viral video of a man screaming at the cast and audience of a Mamma Mia show because people were singing along. He felt entitled to stop the show because the joy around him didn’t match the silence he thought he was owed. I have scrolled past several videos voicing support.
It happened right in upstate NY, too. Last September, a production of Dreamgirls opened in Schenectady. Now, Schenectady has a long history with Black bodies—it had some of the highest numbers of enslaved Africans in the region from 1790 through abolition in 1827.
When Black audiences went to see Dreamgirls, they did what we do. They sang along. For us, this is radio music. It is the sound of an era. Black Americans who grow up in the Black Church are accustomed to “Call and Response.” We express joy and emotion collectively. We don’t just watch the show; we represent the “Amen Corner.”
But the white audiences were upset. They felt the Black audience members were being “disruptive.”
It reminds me of Zora Neale Hurston’s famous essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” She describes sitting in a jazz club with a white friend. The music makes her want to jump out of her skin, to dance, to scream. But her friend just sits there, smoking calmly, and says, “Good music they have here.”
He heard the music. She felt it.
We Owe the World the Full Story When we are in these spaces—whether it’s the library in Guilderland or a Broadway show—we are often sensing a clash of cultures. One culture views silence as respect. Our culture views participation as love.
The problem is that their preference is backed by a history of power and policing. They feel entitled to criminalize our joy because it looks different from theirs.
Woodland writes, “We owe the world the full story, not just the tragedy of what we have done to survive and resist since the founding of this country.”
Part of that full story is our joy. Part of that story is our music, our loud laughter, and our children popping up with excitement at story time.
The next time you feel that anxiety rise up at the park or the theater, remind yourself: You aren’t crazy. You are sensing history. But you also have the right to be there, fully and loudly yourself.
So, what space are you going to take up today?
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