A few weekends ago there was beautiful weather, so after a museum fieldtrip with my students, I took a long bikeride through a (black) neighborhood before going to an evening documentary; I esp. thought I'd see if I'd come across any bars on relatively quiet streets that I could pop into, for my bar project.
After I crossed a bridge over the highway, right there on a corner was a bar, and since things were quiet and the bar looked decent enough - clean windows, modern signage - I locked up my bike, then went through the sidedoor that was open on the street, and emerged into a sedate and underdecorated sportsbar where a young (black) couple was at the bar, and a young (black) woman was bartending, and there was a big yellow posterboard on the side of the cooler giving a list of recent increases in chicken wing prices.
Everyone said hi to me right away, and the woman at the bar ("Manibia") asked me if I went to this one club "Brown Sugar".
"Where is that?", I was like, and when she told me, I said I didn't think I had.
"That must be some other white guy," I was like, and at that everyone laughed.
Then, the younger (black) guy, this lanky guy in his early 40s with long dreads pulled back into a pony tail said that they had just been talking about how "the white man" was buying everything in the area up, and I had walked in "right on cue".
"Serious?", I was like. "Sounds like a situation comedy. But I don't have money to buy shit."
"Oh yeah," he was like, "Black folk are stupid, they don't hang on to anything, they just sell it to make a quick buck and then white people develop it and move them out of there."
They also said that I had gone into one of the only good bars in the area, but when I pressed them on what the other bars were, and the bad ones that I should avoid, they couldn't really name anything else, except for a bar like 5-6 blocks away that was "cool" and I could pop into.
"Any bars that I should avoid?", I asked again.
"What the hell?", the young black guy was like, laughing half-suspiciously. "You from the FBI?".
They also said jokingly to come back that night around midnight, when the bar got lively.
When I left, they said bye warmly, and to stop through again.
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