In 1972 James Baldwin, the acclaimed writer, told Esquire magazine what it was like to be black and try to get around New York City: “The American situation being what it is, and American taxi drivers being what they mostly are, I…” have been unable to get “a cab to stop for me in New York, and have been forced to hire cars.”
Baldwin’s experiences were sadly, typical for the city’s black population at that time. Darker New Yorkers, regardless of their status or accomplishments, often could not get a cab, merely because of their skin color. This madness went so far, I can recall an aunt who drove me to insanity because she refused to even enter a cab with a black driver.
Today, African-Americans only sporadically encounter this brand of prejudice in the Big Apple, an important, positive development. The funny thing is, I got the same treatment when I visited last year.
When it comes to taxis—among other things—being disabled makes you the new negro in Manhattan. It is standard procedure, right now, if you’re in a wheelchair, to have cabdrivers ignore you. Along with my wife and best friend, we went up and down the line of a cab stand outside the South Street Seaport and each of them refused to take us. In front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art the same thing happened; no cab would pull over. Instead, like Baldwin, we had to call a car service to get around the city.
The problem is, this attitude extends far beyond the folks who drive with medallions. David Brooks recently wrote about the fallacy of concentrating on “the bad apples who are explicitly prejudiced. In fact, the serious discrimination is implicit, subtle, and nearly universal.” At the Museum of Natural History, when my wife went up to an information booth and asked where the wheelchair accessible exit was, the lady sweetly replied, “Just up the stairs.”
There is a nice analogy between Baldwin’s situation and our own. Rejecting the fact that he was one of the great writers of his era, all the cabdrivers saw was a black man, nothing else. Irregardless of my own very modest achievements, the cabbies only saw a disabled person. In today’s city, the new negro can have any skin color, as long as they’re in a wheelchair.
