#67. Sidewalks

Living in a major United States city has many advantages. Access to high culture activities and professional sporting events; lucrative employment opportunities with major companies; and best of all, sidewalks.

Sidewalks offer pedestrians an area to walk to their destination safely, unobstructed and unimpeded by motor vehicles. In fact, the origins of sidewalks date to England four centuries ago.

Lining most streets in major cities, sidewalks help make any city green and cut down on the usage of automobiles and public transportation as they offer encouragement to the citizenry to walk, jog or run instead of adding to the congestion of the roads.

Though bicyclists are want to use them, sidewalks also provide bikers with a safe alternative to the unforgiving streets where motorists find their presence unwanted and a nuisance.

The sidewalk has always been a source of contention, however, with Black people. Though other races have an inclination to use the sidewalk for scurrying from point A to point B, Black people have the strange propensity for loitering for hours on end without an end game in mind.

Sidewalks usually have a designated area for crossing to the next portion of the walkway, which normally is intersected by the road. Strange as it may seem, Black people find these designated areas run counter to their idea of suitable transfer points to the next sidewalk and they create alternative routes.

These routes are wherever they see fit, as Black people have an odd disregard for the laws that govern respectable sidewalk traversing and instead concoct rules that are applicable only to them.

Like bicyclists on roads, Black people believe the streets belong to them and they have every right to cross heavily trafficked avenues with an uncanny ambivalence to any vehicle that may cross their path.

Back in 2007, this phenomenon of Black people disregarding clearly-marked cross paths and engaging in jaywalking trickled down to Black schoolchildren in New Jersey:

Black kids in Teaneck, New Jersey are being issued $54 jaywalking tickets by the police. The kids are students at the predominantly Black Thomas Jefferson Middle School. The youngest child to get a ticket was 11-years old. Not only did these kids get jaywalking tickets, they were also placed into police cars and driven back to school.

The police say they aren’t singling kids out based on race, so why then the presence at this particular school? And, why aren’t they having police wait outside all middle schools to ticket all children committing the same offense? Certainly this school has been singled out for a reason. There’s always a reason for everything. It’s not just chance that police are targeting this school.

Jaywalking is against the law, however Black people are honestly unaware of any legislation that demands adherence to walking on sidewalks and the crossing of dangerously trafficked streets only at designated portions of the path.

Black people are coming offenders of Jaywalking, perhaps because they were never taught to look both ways before they cross:

Remember how you're parents always told you to look both ways before you cross the street, here’s one reason why.

In Richmond County alone an average of 65 people are hit by cars while crossing the street, according to County statistics.

Deputies say Jaywalking is illegal, but hard to crack down on because so many people do it.

Sidewalks constitute the continuation and perpetuation of racism from the horrible days of segregation and Jim Crow, when Black people weren't allowed to drink out the same water fountains or walk down the same paths as white people.

Jaywalking is a conscious decision by Black people to continue the struggle against white oppression by their blatant failure to acknowledge crosswalks on sidewalks and their creative manner in devising ingenious routes that were heretofore unknown. In heavily Black areas, Jaywalking is common and rarely frowned upon.

However, when Black people attempt to Jaywalk in areas where other races dwell a vocal public outcry isn't far behind:

Michael Thomas jaywalks out of necessity.

He regularly crosses five lanes of speeding traffic on Buford Highway to reach his bus stop. He never uses the crosswalk up the street, at the intersection with Jimmy Carter Boulevard, because that would require a seven-minute detour. He needs to be on time for his job at a sub sandwich shop.

“You have a choice,” said Thomas, 28, of Norcross. “You cross the street or you miss the bus.”

Jaywalkers have migrated to the suburbs. They venture across four- to eight-lane roads, often not using crosswalks, pausing on the raised medians or the middle “suicide lanes” to look for a break in traffic as cars whiz by. Sometimes the crossings end tragically, as it did last month for a young mother who watched her 4-year-old son killed in the road.

“My son was a wonderful little kid and I wish I’d gotten to keep him,” Raquel Nelson said.

Transportation for America, which advocates against sprawl and in favor of walking and mass transit, ranks Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta as the 10th-most dangerous metro area for pedestrians. (Orlando was No. 1.)

Sally Flocks, of the pedestrian advocacy group PEDS, thinks many roads in suburban Atlanta are more dangerous for pedestrians than city streets — where drivers expect pedestrians. Away from the cities, cars travel at higher speeds on wider roads. Pedestrians don’t have many marked spots to cross.

“There are often whole miles without a crossing,” she said. “If you look at the roads in the suburbs, they don’t treat them [pedestrians] as equals.”

Buford Highway in DeKalb and Gwinnett counties is the most dangerous road for pedestrians, Flocks said. Others are Tara Boulevard in Clayton, Old National Highway and Fulton Industrial Boulevard in Fulton, Six Flags Drive in Cobb and Candler Road in DeKalb.

Face it, Stuff Black People Don't Like includes sidewalks as the conformity to these safe paths for navigating through major cities is one more attempt by The Man to put Black people into their place and integrate with the mainstream.

To keep it real, Black people pay no heed to the crosswalk and brave many lanes of oncoming traffic to prove their disgust with sidewalks.

Why do Black people Jaywalk? Now you know.

Like bicyclists, Black people believe the road belongs to them even if they are merely on feet and impeding traffic. Share the road.

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Dwayne Perkins - Jaywalking in L.A.
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