When I moved to London to study at Queen Mary for a semester, I was told that Mile End was “dangerous” and that I definitely “shouldn’t go running there, especially after dark.” These kinds of assumptions were not foreign to me. I had also heard similar statements about Brooklyn via a particularly tense Facebook thread from a friend who “didn’t feel safe running in Brooklyn.”
As someone who frequently sprints in the Idahoan foothills, I do not have a lot of experience of running in metropolitan areas. I began to think about how we categorize areas as safe or unsafe. How much does actual violent crime intersect with our mere perceptions through other people? I talked with my cousin who lives in London, some friends in Brooklyn, and did statistical research of my own. I came to the conclusion that Mile End and Brooklyn do not have a high crime rate, but their primary similarity is that a large percentage of their demographics are people of color.
At Muhlenberg, students are often told not to go “past the graveyard.” We are segregated into a primarily upper-middle class bubble outside of the city of Allentown with the largely Latinx population that lives beyond our mental boundary. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, white men are actually the most likely to commit a crime, and that white on white crime is four times more likely than black on white crime.
I have noticed that a lot of these warning statements are often directed at women, who from a very young age are told not to hitchhike, not to go running after dark, and not to stray too far from where you live. Women are incentivized by fear tactics to limit themselves with constant vigilance and paranoia. I am tired of being told to watch my drink and plaster myself to a friend anytime I am out.
The truth is that the entire world is unsafe, and, if something bad is going to happen, there is very little that a victim can do about it unless they never leave their house. I don’t think that we should train girls to be constantly terrified that they are going to be murdered when they decide to run alone in the dark in London. This is avoiding the larger structural issue of white male violence.
The world should not be off limits to women who want to live their daily lives and we should not be reinforcing racism by profiling certain geographical regions. We should be teaching people, and white men specifically, not to be violent. We don’t need to be more vigilant; we need white men to recognize and begin to unlearn their destructive and violent behaviors.