The War on Cars

BONUS: 'Shade of Trespass' with Garnette Cadogan

Added 2022-08-30 10:30:01 +0000 UTC

Hello Patreon supporters! We've got a really special exclusive episode for you to round out the summer.

Last spring, we released "The Pedestrian," inspired by the classic Ray Bradbury story of the same name. If you haven’t listened already, check it out. It’s episode 83.

In my research for that piece, I read dozens of books, articles, and essays about walking—the physiology of walking, the history of walking, the politics of walking. Walking as performance. Walking as spiritual practice. Walking as a way of building community.

One of the things I read that really hit hard was a piece titled Walking While Black, by Garnette Cadogan, an essayist and scholar who is currently the Tunney Lee Distinguished Lecturer in Urbanism at MIT.

In that essay, Garnette writes about his experience walking in a few different cities: his hometown of Kingston, Jamaica, where he roamed as an innocent child and teenager; New Orleans, where he went to college; and New York.

Garnette describes how walking in the United States as a Black man forced him to radically recalibrate his mindset as he moved along the street, dismantling his innocent pleasure in wandering.

He talks about fearing the police, who so often assume that he is the one at fault in any situation. But the most insidious and poisonous thing he encounters is the way that white people in American cities so often fear him, just because of the color of his skin—a color too often judged, as he says, to be "the shade of trespass."

In his essay, which was originally titled “Black and Blue” after the classic jazz tune, Garnette beautifully expresses the conflicting emotions and realizations that arose as he learned the code of American streets by moving through them with a Black body.

I was lucky enough to have a long talk with Garnette about walking last summer. I used a few bits and pieces of that conversation in the Pedestrian episode, but the whole thing was so good, I wanted to share more of it with all of you.

So here’s an ad-free edited version of my talk with Garnette Cadogan, from summer 2021.

Thanks for making conversations like this possible!

—Sarah