By Joshunda Sanders
March 22, 2018
I am good at leaving places, but it was hard to leave Austin.
In 2005, I moved to Austin from San Francisco to work as a reporter at The Austin American Statesman and to attend graduate school at the University of Texas. I am a native New Yorker, but somehow I fell in love with Austin: with the open sky and the people I worked with, with my fellow Longhorns, with Torchy’s breakfast tacos, queso and good margaritas.
I bought a house and thought I might stay for five years. I lived there for eight, the longest I have lived anywhere at a stretch.
I left in 2013 for a lot of reasons. I started to realize that in a place like Texas, you needed kin, but I lost mine. In the space of two years, I lost both my parents, one to suicide, the other to cancer. In my grief, I tried to write through it, but it was more than I could power through alone.
And in Austin, I felt a loneliness that was hard to explain. I wasn’t just a New Yorker in Texas. I was a tall, dark-skinned black woman with natural hair. I was an outsider in a place that is supposed to value weirdness, but I never felt like the right kind of weird.
I did the things everyone does in Austin. I went for runs around Lady Bird Lake. I went to hear live music. But whenever I looked around, I would always notice that there was no one else who looked like me. I tried to talk to some of my well-meaning white friends about this. They would try to “Well, actually …” me. “Well, actually, Austin is better than the rest of Texas.” What else could they say?
So I moved back to the East Coast, but I kept my home in East Austin and still visit when I can. It’s my home away from home.
I learned about the bombings on Twitter, and it was surreal to read these familiar names in the middle of the horror. These were people I wrote about, people I knew, people I shared laughs with: Nelson Linder, the head of the Austin N.A.A.C.P., and Freddie Dixon, a pillar of the community, discussing the deaths of 17-year-old Draylen Mason and 39-year-old Anthony Stephan House.
Image
A memorial plaque for Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins and Carole Robertson, killed in the 1963 bombing by white supremacists of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.CreditThe Birmingham News, via Associated Press
I worried for the people I knew, and then I felt, again, that deep, lonely sadness. I wasn’t the only one made to feel that I didn’t belong. Someone was targeting black people, but once the bombs appeared in other neighborhoods, the authorities no longer seemed willing to consider the possibility that hate crimes had been committed.
I don’t know what else to call them. When the bombings started, I had been writing about the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, so I knew the faces of martyrs of the civil rights movement. Whenever I hear about bombs and black people, I think of the four little girls murdered in Birmingham, Ala. I have family ties to Philadelphia, too, so I think of the Move bombings. Are there any black people who can separate news of bombs from notions of terror?
We are in an unusual cultural moment. There has been so much truth-telling over the past few months, so much affirmation about speaking truth to power. I hoped that this time, the authorities might acknowledge that, yes, black people were targeted. I thought someone might make the connection — East Austin is the only place in the city where black and brown people still live in large numbers, and they remain vocal. There are people who are afraid of that, and are threatened by that, and that makes East Austin a target.
Instead, there was silence, as these concerns disappeared into the broader panic about where a bomb might strike next.
It became clear to me that there is a limit to the way a liberal city like Austin sees itself. Yes, Austin is trendy and affordable, especially compared with other cities favored by the creative class. Austin is also largely white and segregated, and it is a city that holds racial truths at arm’s length. No one wants to admit that this beautiful hipster haven may also be a place where domestic and racist terrorism can thrive. But we know now that looking away won’t save us.
@JoshundaSanders) is a writer from the Bronx.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
Opinion | What It’s Like to Be Black in Austin
March 22, 2018
I am good at leaving places, but it was hard to leave Austin.
In 2005, I moved to Austin from San Francisco to work as a reporter at The Austin American Statesman and to attend graduate school at the University of Texas. I am a native New Yorker, but somehow I fell in love with Austin: with the open sky and the people I worked with, with my fellow Longhorns, with Torchy’s breakfast tacos, queso and good margaritas.
I bought a house and thought I might stay for five years. I lived there for eight, the longest I have lived anywhere at a stretch.
I left in 2013 for a lot of reasons. I started to realize that in a place like Texas, you needed kin, but I lost mine. In the space of two years, I lost both my parents, one to suicide, the other to cancer. In my grief, I tried to write through it, but it was more than I could power through alone.
And in Austin, I felt a loneliness that was hard to explain. I wasn’t just a New Yorker in Texas. I was a tall, dark-skinned black woman with natural hair. I was an outsider in a place that is supposed to value weirdness, but I never felt like the right kind of weird.
I did the things everyone does in Austin. I went for runs around Lady Bird Lake. I went to hear live music. But whenever I looked around, I would always notice that there was no one else who looked like me. I tried to talk to some of my well-meaning white friends about this. They would try to “Well, actually …” me. “Well, actually, Austin is better than the rest of Texas.” What else could they say?
So I moved back to the East Coast, but I kept my home in East Austin and still visit when I can. It’s my home away from home.
I learned about the bombings on Twitter, and it was surreal to read these familiar names in the middle of the horror. These were people I wrote about, people I knew, people I shared laughs with: Nelson Linder, the head of the Austin N.A.A.C.P., and Freddie Dixon, a pillar of the community, discussing the deaths of 17-year-old Draylen Mason and 39-year-old Anthony Stephan House.
Image
A memorial plaque for Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins and Carole Robertson, killed in the 1963 bombing by white supremacists of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.CreditThe Birmingham News, via Associated Press
I worried for the people I knew, and then I felt, again, that deep, lonely sadness. I wasn’t the only one made to feel that I didn’t belong. Someone was targeting black people, but once the bombs appeared in other neighborhoods, the authorities no longer seemed willing to consider the possibility that hate crimes had been committed.
I don’t know what else to call them. When the bombings started, I had been writing about the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, so I knew the faces of martyrs of the civil rights movement. Whenever I hear about bombs and black people, I think of the four little girls murdered in Birmingham, Ala. I have family ties to Philadelphia, too, so I think of the Move bombings. Are there any black people who can separate news of bombs from notions of terror?
We are in an unusual cultural moment. There has been so much truth-telling over the past few months, so much affirmation about speaking truth to power. I hoped that this time, the authorities might acknowledge that, yes, black people were targeted. I thought someone might make the connection — East Austin is the only place in the city where black and brown people still live in large numbers, and they remain vocal. There are people who are afraid of that, and are threatened by that, and that makes East Austin a target.
Instead, there was silence, as these concerns disappeared into the broader panic about where a bomb might strike next.
It became clear to me that there is a limit to the way a liberal city like Austin sees itself. Yes, Austin is trendy and affordable, especially compared with other cities favored by the creative class. Austin is also largely white and segregated, and it is a city that holds racial truths at arm’s length. No one wants to admit that this beautiful hipster haven may also be a place where domestic and racist terrorism can thrive. But we know now that looking away won’t save us.
@JoshundaSanders) is a writer from the Bronx.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
Opinion | What It’s Like to Be Black in Austin
