After videos of police shooting unarmed black men, are they now more afraid?
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Jawad Pullin picked through a pile of clothes in his dorm room at Georgetown University earlier this year. He pulled out a pair of faded jeans, then decided against them. He tried on a red Phillies cap, then tossed it across the room. He picked up a hoodie, then threw it back in the pile.“
I should be able to wear faded jeans and a hoodie if I wanted,” said Pullin, a 20-year-old sophomore, “but that would make me stand out too much.”
Like millions of other young men of color, he must navigate a world where in 2015, according to statistics compiled by The Washington Post, an unarmed black man was fatally shot by police about once every nine days.
Pullin can never be certain whether he, too, might become a statistic, just like some of the awful videos he has seen on social media.
“The fact that it happens at all, I have to associate it with every daily maneuver,” says Pullin, who grew up in North Philadelphia, aced his SATs, got A’s in high school and won a Gates Scholarship. “I’m making those decisions, whether it’s the friends I walk with or the clothes I wear.”
Pullin started college when the country was reeling from a series of police use-of-force cases. Every other week, it seemed, someone was tweeting another video showing a young black man being shot or a black woman being slammed against a car. The incident that bothered Pullin the most, he says, involved a 15-year-old girl in Texas lying on the ground in a bathing suit and being pinned by a police officer as she cried for her mother. “They were just teenagers living a normal life,” he says.
Last year, after he arrived at Georgetown, he decided that when he left campus, he would do so only with a white friend.
“If you go with white friends, there is a far lower chance of bad things happening,” he explains. “It’s like it defuses everything.”
His cellphone rang. It was one of his white friends. They were heading to a party together.
“I’m on my way,” Pullin told him. “I still have to pick up the Sprite and the party lights.”
Pullin decided to wear a white button-down shirt, a black tie and a navy coat. He checked himself in the dorm mirror.
“A pea coat,” he said. “You can’t associate a pea coat with criminal activity.”
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