Empty Seat Next to Me? I Wish!

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By John McWhorter

I am mystified by John Edgar Wideman's account in The New York Times about how people on the Amtrak Acela train don't take the seat next to him until it's practically the only seat left. I am mystified not because I haven't heard plenty of claims of this kind. I am mystified because nothing of the sort happens to me.

Note: I am not questioning Wideman's experience -- which is what makes accounts like this such a challenge for me to wrap my head around. In my book Winning the Race, I devote a chapter to this type of thing -- of the sort that motivated Ellis Cose's classic Rage of a Privileged Class. It was the hardest chapter I have ever written.

Quite simply: Over the past nine years, I have ridden the Acela up and down the corridor from Boston to Washington, D.C., quite often. Like Wideman, I also prefer the quiet car, and thus our experiences are that much more equivalent. On top of this, I am always on the lookout for the kind of "subtly racist" experience that even middle-class black people, especially men, of unthreatening appearance are supposed to have, as what one of Cose's interviewees termed a "daily litany" of slights.

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