IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 7 ENGLISH | Page 69

would take months, and years, in fact.
Fortunately, my skull was not fractured,
just a bleeding scalp and internal shaking
of my brain. It was an injury called
many things - closed head injury, concussion, acquired brain injury, traumatic
brain injury, “lucky I didn’t get worse,”
and so on. I was treated for the bloody
scalp and given stitches in two places,
and released from the hospital the same
night. Not ready to manage communicating with the detective who'd been in
contact with me, I handed the phone off
to my boyfriend. According to the detective, they had some suspects, the whole
incident seemed crazy and random, and
it probably had something to do with my
being a white female. So it started even
then. The detective placed some meaning on the gender and race of my attacker and on me who was victimized. It
only spiraled from there. I returned to
work (not realizing the severity of my
injury, because a bruise on the brain is
pretty much invisible). My boss told me
I should stay away from that neighborhood. Others echoed such a sentiment.
Some took it a step further and asked
why I would go to East Liberty to hang
out at night anyway. East Liberty is a
neighborhood on the East End of Pittsburgh that is a Black neighborhood, basically since the Black population of
Pittsburgh developed and took root in
communities around the city. My limited
historical understanding is that this was
probably around the 40’s and 50’s after
the war, in the era of the Great Migration
of Black folks from the south to metropolitan centers and industrial cities in the

north and west to escape from racist torture and systemic maltreatment by people, institutions, and the law in the South
after the post slavery era. It was during
this time that “White Flight” to the suburbs created the conditions of continually segregated neighborhoods, not necessarily by law as in the past, but by white
folks’ behavior based on racist supremacist beliefs. Only after I began trying to
excavate the hidden and silenced history
of the country I live in, of the family I
was born into, of the city whose rivers I
grew alongside, did I learn this history.
As an adult, looking for meaning and
searching anywhere I could find, I was
desperate to learn and unlearn. At a time
when people like my parents chalked my
experience as a crime victim to the [racist] assumption of young Black men as
“dangerous”, especially toward white
women, of Black neighborhoods as unsafe and inappropriate places for young
white women to socialize, let alone drink
and dance. I learned that one of the historic, world famous original Carnegie
Libraries was built in the East Liberty
neighborhood in 1895, and was summarily demolished and moved to a different
part of the neighborhood under the pretense of "urban redevelopment." I
learned bits and pieces of the appallingly
racist and unashamed irresponsible practices that had a city- wide impact, mostly
disparaging, of the URA of Pittsburgh,
the Urban Redevelopment Authority.
That organization was (and still is) responsible for taking federal funding to
destroy heritage and homes, such as the
historic library building, and much of the

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