To Err

A middle-aged White woman is standing at the register in a New York deli. A young Black man passes behind her. The woman turns, startled. Then she appears to call the police to report that she'd been sexually assaulted.

According to the deli's surveillance camera footage, the young man's backpack had brushed the woman as he passed. According to the police department, there was no 911 call from the deli. The woman, facing a phalanx of reporters and angry local residents, apologizes to the boy for her error.

Welcome to the intersection of a newfound awareness of how often women deal with sexual harassment in public, and a newfound awareness of how often the police are called when White people become suspicious of the Black people in their vicinity. Question: which issue has the right-of-way?

In part the problem with the highly negative response to the woman's apparent call to the authorities was that her presumption that the boy had touched her intentionally as he passed was in error. The expectation of infallibility is simply too high a bar to meet. If we are going to encourage women to report situations in which they feel that men have acted inappropriately towards them, a certain number of false positives are to be expected. Another part of the problem is the assumption of racism (which, as I've noted before, is likely the most enduring legacy of past racism). It can be difficult to discern a jackass from a racist on the strength of one encounter; usually a racist is simply someone who is selective about whom they're a jackass to. But here, to even call the woman a jackass takes us back to the expectation of infallibility; sometimes, a supposed "bigot" is merely someone who misjudges someone who is not like them.

The article I read doesn't give us any details about the young man involved, other than to refer to him as a boy who is Black and had a blue backpack. (To be sure, the article's main thrust seems to be bandwagonning on the naming and shaming of the woman, which is why I'm not linking to it.) So we don't know how old he was, which may offer some insight into whether or not a charge of groping a woman would seem reasonable. (But I'm guessing he was fairly young.) But here again, we have a quandary. If we're going to encourage women to speak out, and encourage others to believe them, sometimes we're going to faced with accusations that, at first glance, seem unreasonable. The whole point of calling upon society to believe women when they claim that they've been harassed or assaulted is to free them of having to make that reasonability judgment for themselves, and by themselves. That becomes a pointless exercise if we're going to expect an error rate of zero.

As for living while Black, here again, we run into an expectation of infallibility that's likely unreasonable. While most of the incidents of Black people having the police called out on them strike us a patently ludicrous, it's likely that the truly ambiguous and edge cases don't make the news. And so again, a certain number of false positives are to be expected, and, perhaps just as importantly, forgiven. (Especially if, as studies note, White Americans are more prone to anxiety disorders.) Would the woman have been so quick to complain had it been a White child? Or would she have been more likely to assume good intent; or, in this case, a wayward backpack, from the start? There's no good way to know the answer to that question. But in the absence of that knowledge, assumption is a poor substitute. And I don't know if assuming that people who make such allegations are always knowingly wrong is any better than when it was assumed they were always right.

In the end, this strikes me as a fairly mild incident, although the woman who claimed she'd been assaulted is in for a hard time until the Internet turns its fickle attentions elsewhere. But in a way, even this is progress. In living memory, people have died for less.