Where Pluralism and Paranoia Meet

...A black man is playing an acoustic guitar, mixing classical and popular modes in a manner that makes what he's playing sound both familiar and unlike anything I've ever heard...

...They flaunt their gorgeous bodies through the cars and show off their agile minds with loud, blunt language that is often offensive...

...However, a display of bravado by a young, indigo-skinned black male, moving through a crowded subway car like a point guard bringing the ball up the court, sporting a haircut that makes the shape of his head resemble a cone of ice-cream, and wearing barge-size sneakers with untied laces thick as egg noodles, is immediately considered a dangerous presence whether he is or not...

...Living in New York demands that we become street-smart urban dwellers...

...I sense this in the other twenty or so people standing around me who also seem more involved in their own breathing...

...I see the outlines of the battles I will have to wage on his behalf, and I'm deeply troubled by segments of this city poised to expect only the worst from black and Latin youth...

...I can't help thinking that if the context of this scene were more overtly political, this black man (or anyone else for that matter) would not be able to command the attention of such a diverse collection of people...

...The public perception of attempts to draw attention to oneself is largely a matter of style...

...Our sophistication in coping with the ways of the city often numbs us to the cruelty in our midst...

...I've already had to fight with teachers and administrators who are quick to judge his spirit as armed and potentially dangerous...

...The Number One Broadway Local cleaves a path through the earth of Manhattan, filling up with and emptying itself of every conceivable grouping of people...

...Then something occurs that is difficult to explain...

...However, for a brief moment on a subway platform in mid-Manhattan, a black man playing a six-string guitar has helped us find a city within this city of sadness that affirms our common humanity...

...Men, in particular, have a way of encamping themselves in an open-sesame leg spread, with the knobs of their knees pointing out like closed-mouthed cannons...

...Each morning when I take my six-year old son Anthony to school, and later in the afternoon when I pick him up, a sunburst of mostly black and Latin adolescents blazes on and off the subway on Manhattan's Upper West Side...

...I walk through the turnstile and onto the platform at the West 59th Street station...

...and there's nothing particularly striking about him except for the mustache that completely smothers his upper lip...

...It is far more difficult to find the equivalent political gestures that not only speak to us across the borders separating us but also inspire a commitment to improve the quality of life...

...Italo Calvin once said that New York is a city of sadness, binding its inhabitants together by a thread that is continually stretching, "so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence...

...Maybe it has something to do with being underground...

...He holds the neck of the guitar like it's the hand of a dance partner and presses the wooden torso against his own as though he is comforting a friend...

...It's your attitude...

...I see that same "attitude" being attributed to my own son, who is outspoken, streaking in height as 482 • DISSENT though a Masai gene is stalking him, and a high-wire act in his own right...

...Despite all our high-minded rhetoric about the marvels of diversity, there is a wariness bordering on extreme caution when straphangers are confronted with the dizzying mix of cultural difference and life circumstances...

...People plant themselves into a spot with the finality of a tombstone...

...A man parachuting into Shea Stadium during a game of the World Series is applauded and not automatically viewed as a threat to public safety...

...Everyone stakes out his or her territory with no thought of giving ground...

...And although it is fleeting, if we refuse to be bullied into unawareness and fear, finding another city comparable to the one we've just experienced may be only a second away...

...It's as though some pocket of tension has been released, allowing the air keeping me alive to circulate more freely...

...The fact that riding the subway can summon up our worst fears and long-standing grievances makes understandable the tight facial masks lost in the sounds of a Walkman or locked behind books and newspapers...

...I've become much more aware of the pattern of my own breathing...

...What he has to say is voiced as a hum that is both throaty and nasal...

...But perhaps something just as significant is missing from that assessment, which is more cultural than political...

...As I once overheard a transit cop say to a young black man on a subway platform: "It's not what you did...

...The remarkable thing about what is happening is that, separated as we are by the fear of what makes us different, we are joined together by our profound attention to this music...

...He cocks his head to the left and eavesdrops on the conversation he is having with himself...

...Is it any wonder that the Bernhard Goetz trial held New Yorkers captive...

...q FALL • 1987 483...

...Whatever opinions people have about whether Goetz was justified in shooting those four black youths, the case touched every nerve where safety and menace intertwine with our conflicting emotions about race...

...Most of them will probably outgrow this brazen, self-absorbed behavior, which is symptomatic of an American craving for public disclosure of private life and the tendency to confuse freedom of expression with exhibitionism...

...In many ways this subterranean world reflects the irrational in our nature...

...He is dressed plainly, in a plaid shirt, jeans and sneakers...