My older brother, as a teenager, was mugged around the corner from my house by a gang of a different race, for being a different color than all of them. I grew up only allowed to play to the end of my front yard. I did not have the luxury of having neighborhood friends to play with for fear of the worst that can happen to an unattended child.
On the boundary of Southwest Philly, Yeadon, the town I grew up in, is noticeably economically deteriorating and has been for years and years. Belonging to my grandparents before my parents, my family has seen firsthand the changes that have occurred to the neighborhood when the crime rate went up and the property value went down.
To this day my parents still worry about me driving through a certain area of town and the walk from my car to my front door late at night is nerve-wracking. The most common crimes in this town are robberies, theft and assault, with rape and murder not out of the ranking–statistics that do nothing for my nerves.
We live on constant watch, not because we fear people of a different skin color, but for our safety. We know the mentality of “just to be safe.” With time, my family has become a minority in our town, the only white family on our entire block. For this reason and many others, we feel targets on our backs for the color of our skin.
I did not attend the public school in my town. My parents made the decision, for my benefit, to drive me 25 minutes away every day to a Catholic school in a safer neighborhood. And for that I am grateful, because there is not a racist bone in my body, but still I fear who I may have turned out to be if I had gotten in with the wrong crowd to fit in.
