About a month before the streets filled with protestors outraged by the murder of George Floyd, my husband and I devoted our time to walking them. Our presence was not born of politics or despair, but a reaction to Covid-19. Our county in suburban New York had been hit hard. When the weather warmed, we longed to get outside. The parks near us were either closed or dangerously crowded and we couldn’t travel. So we hit the pavement.
Back in March, during a stay-at-home-motivated basement decluttering, we came across an old paper street map of our town. Finding it prompted a plan: we committed to walking every single street in our town. Setting a goal seemed to give purpose to our daily forays. Now we’re more than a third of the way finished. The blue highlight we use to mark the areas on the map we’ve covered is expanding in all directions.
But this week our walks through our 80%-white town feel like something else entirely.
We are both white, in our sixties, and as we make our way down tiny lanes in new neighborhoods, rounds corners we’ve never seen before, or brazenly walk down the occasional street marked “private,” now we ask ourselves: what if we weren’t white?