living in fear

I walk down the street, I look down at the ground, I never make eye contact, and most importantly, I never smile. I don’t want to encourage them or make them think I’ve noticed them. I somehow think that will keep them from saying anything. It never does. I still hear, “hey! Come back here! I want to talk to you!” “where you going baby?” “you have a good day now.” “you’re gorgeous baby.” “I’d like to take my dick and stick it in you, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” “you should let me fuck you hard, baby.” I refuse to respond to these comments. I want to run away from them. But then I hear, “what, you too good to stop and talk?” “you should say thank you, bitch!” “where you going? I’m trying to talk to you?!”

And all of them act like I’m a bitch because they were “just trying to be nice.” “no. no you’re not,” I want to say to them. Did they say hello to the guy that just walked by? How about that overweight girl? How about that older woman? Hell, how about the tall skinny girl? They see i’m diminutive, they feel some kind of power over me, they see I have breasts (no matter how loose-fitting the clothing), and they think they can harass me. They pretend they’re complimenting me, when we both know they’re humiliating me, they’re objectifying me, they’re degrading me.

What bothers me the most is that these men are always minorities. I’m uncomfortable talking about race. I’m certain it has something to do with a disconnect with my own status as a person of mixed race. I hate feeling a fear of minority men just walking down the street. It’s never a fear of violence, but a fear of what is the imminent violation of my womanhood in a deeply personal, though non-physical, way. Why would anybody think it was okay to do this? When they see women like me, who keep their heads down, and are obviously bothered by it, afraid of it? Not a single day goes by that I don’t get a handful of degrading comments tossed at me. Not a single day goes by that I don’t pray for silence every time I pass a man whose eyes I feel on me.

I was leaving my building and I hear a hispanic accent, “you so beautiful baby! Hey baby, where you going?” and like always, I keep my head down and quicken my pace. I hear, “hey yasmeen, stop!” in a peppier, more girly voice. It was my door guy, the cutest gay Puerto Rican ever, Ceasar. I turn around and relief swept over me. i started yelling, “oh my god, it’s you! Don’t do that! Do you have any idea what I put up with every day!” and he giggles, like always, and when he sees how exasperated I am he apologizes. It has happened to me before. I have a hyper-sensitivity while I’m walking down the street. I see a figure. I know he’s looking at me. It’s drizzling and I lower my umbrella to try to cover my face so he’ll stop looking at me. I hear a voice say, “hey!” and his arm reaches out to touch me. I jumped and hit him with my umbrella. It’s danny. A security guard I know at a Lincoln center building (where a friend works and where I often meet her for lunch) was walking by me and was trying to say hello and I almost beat him down, assuming he was one of them.

When I was in 4^th grade I had stayed at school late. We were building bridges out of popsicle sticks. We were having a contest to see whose could hold the most weight. I had mine in a big box and was walking back to the babysitter’s house, where I would wait for my mother to get home from work. A white man with blond hair in a ponytail was fixing his bike on the sidewalk. I walked around him and half a block later he was riding down the street at a slow pace. I heard him say, “little girl…little girl would you like to touch my penis?...hey…did you hear me? Would you like to touch my penis?” terrified, I started running with my box, my backpack strapped tight, to my sitter’s house. She went off in her car to find him but never did.

I blame that white man for making me afraid of half the men in this city today. Though I’ll never appreciate the comments, I think they’d roll off my back a lot easier had that day in 4^th grade not been seared into my memory.