Little Labors

Stranger danger

Some women and studies have reported to me, or to researchers, that during pregnancy they develop, alongside a heightened aversion to slightly overripe lettuce, a heightened fear of strangers. But fear of strangers is, in some cases, a euphemism. One woman confessed to me that she felt something she had never felt before, which was anxiety at night when she saw, in particular, black men on the street. She felt horrified by her own feelings. Having herself dated a black man for nine years, she said, she would have thought any primitive sense of dark-skinned people as strangers would have been eliminated. But no. Here she was, a professor who had done field studies, alone, in several central African counties, interviewing people about how they came to be involved in political violence, and regularly visited, not in a friendly way, by the local police, and through all that she had never been anxious, and now, here, alone on Amsterdam Avenue, in a New York with the lowest crime rate in years, she was worrying. However, once her baby arrived, she was, again, “cured.”