My neighborhood is about 30% black, 30% white, and 30% latino. It gives my white neighbors daily opportunities to demonstrate whether they learned anything from putting BLM signs in their yards in 2020, or if they still have 911 on speed dial and universally white social circles.

At least once a month, somebody makes a gross show of posting security video of a “suspicious” black kid walking through an alley in a neighborhood “safety” Facebook group, or posting complaints about fireworks a couple doors down instead of just talking to their neighbors.

This is well studied in places that are getting whiter, where transplants police the lives of those who came before them. Here it’s a little different - the white population has been declining for decades. But the dynamics are quite the same, especially where intent meets action.

White people who move here often think of themselves as anti-racist. They’ve self-selected to live in a diverse neighborhood, in a part of the city that won’t cater to their whiteness anytime soon. But many of them don’t turn progressive self-conception into anything concrete.

So you get a concentration of a certain type of white newcomer who admires the work of many black and latino artists, donates money to POC-led organizations, and has all the aesthetics of anti-racism, but still fails to even know the names of their nonwhite neighbors.

And when something disturbs their peace, like somebody’s uncle waiting on a nearby porch step until family arrives or kids hanging out in the street, they still have such a mental remove from nonwhite people that field all their internal inquiries through calls to the cops.

The most painful part, frequently, is when a black or latino neighbor feels the need to reply to a scared white person’s post in a Facebook group explaining that the blurry security footage of “a man casing my house” is their 14-year-old son delivering the neighborhood newspaper.

And again, these are people who “believe the right things”. Who understand prejudice intellectually. So they’ll apologize, and they’ll mean it. But then weeks later they’ll be back at it with a new perceived threat. All because they don’t truly know their nonwhite neighbors.