Does He Look Like a Hero?

On Tuesday morning, a 50-year-old African-American man dove onto the subway tracks at the 137th Street No. 1 station to save the life of a man who looked nothing like him. The teen was not related to Wesley Autrey. The two had not even been conversing prior to the seizure that caused the young man to fall onto the tracks. However, within a split second, Autrey leaped onto the tracks, covered the teen with his own body and held on for dear life as a train roared overhead. Did I mention that his two young daughters witnessed it all from the platform edge?

Take a look at Autrey. He looks like many of the Black men we pass on the streets of New York City everyday. We pass many of them without so much as a second thought but there are those among us that would never suspect that one of these men would be the one to change the start of a phone call from, "Ma'am, I'm sorry to have to tell you this..." to "Your son has been in an accident but is alright".

The video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N2zhu5RH34 shows a man who looks and acts like many of my uncles. He looks like the same man that causes women to clutch their purses. The same man that makes men double check the back pocket. How many people have continuously looked over their shoulder when he was walking behind them after dark while he was simply headed home after work. And we all know that it gets dark pretty early here in NYC during the winter. Some days I swear it's dark at like 4:30p.m.

Long story short...I'm not saying that sometimes that little feeling in your gut isn't right about some of the creeps on the streets. However, the next time you think you have that feeling stop and ask yourself is this intuition or conditioning?