Hey, Slick

I was listening to Stevie Wonder's Living For The City today. It's a song that I've heard a thousand times. It received fairly regular airplay when I was growing up, and I have it on CD. The song itself has a narrative arc, with an interlude in which an unnamed protagonist (whose voice reminds me of one of my uncles) arrives in New York City. Things start going sideways the moment he disembarks from the bus, and he winds up being sentenced to prison for ten years.

While the main thrust of the song is about the difficulties of being Black in the United States of the late 1960s into the early 1970s (the song was released in 1973), one part of it stood out for me today after listening to parts of a recent episode of the NPR podcast It's Been A Minute. Sam Sanders was talking about the tendency, in Black art, to avoid negative portrayals of Black characters, hoping to avoid giving racist critics ammunition for attacks on the broader community.

In Living For The City, someone offers the protagonist $5 to "run this down the street for me." That someone, judging from their voice, is also Black, and since the sirens can be heard closing in even as the person presses the unspecified package on the protagonist, it's a safe bet that it was understood that being caught with the goods would mean going to jail. Paying closer attention to the song today than I had in the past, I realized that Stevie Wonder was also pointing out another pitfall for Black people in the United States; the willingness of other Black people to use them as fall guys and patsies.

Sure, this habit can also be laid at the feet of American racism, but I think to do so absolves people of the responsibility that is required to actually take advantage of how far they've come. It's an interesting tightrope that I sometimes observe people walking, attempting to retain a sense of Black agency while avoiding a general sense of blameworthiness. I once read an article about some research into how reading about White Privilege lessened sympathy among social liberals for poor white people. It takes a careful reading of the piece, but I think it's valid to guess that the effect that the researchers were seeing comes from the idea that a perception of agency lessens sympathy. In this case, it would make sense for people to seek to limit the perception of the agency that certain groups possess. Yet casting them too much as victims runs the risk of portraying them as unable to make use of any tools that might be given them.

But I think I'm getting away from the point. Once I was paying attention, I found Stevie Wonder's inclusion of this bit to be a subtle, but incisive commentary, given that it wasn't strictly necessary for the whole narrative to work. The protagonist could have simply run afoul of racist police officers and courts, and the story would have still come together and made the broader point.