The Post's article on H Street is getting blogged-up all over the place today. Aside from the ridiculous ending ("OHHHHHH it's SYMBOLIC"), it's pretty good. The opening struck an especially familiar note:

A white woman and a little white girl are walking west on H Street Northeast, the 1300 block. Behind them, three black men are walking, not far behind, but close enough to invade their space, as if there is such a thing as personal space on a public sidewalk in the middle of a sunny Saturday afternoon.

Three invisible men, residents who lived in the meantime, the in-between years when this street was desolate, neglected by the city, when some white people would not be caught walking in this block of H Street.

One black man shouts: "Ma'am, please tell your daughter she don't have to be afraid of us!" The white woman turns and smiles. It is not a nervous smile. But she does not slow her pace; this does not appear to be done out of fear but is more a pace one might keep while running errands on a busy afternoon. The little girl holds the woman's right hand.

The men continue, as if to prove something. "Ma'am," one of them says again, "please tell your daughter she don't have to be afraid on H Street."

The woman climbs into an SUV and drives away.

I used to run into this sort of Affability Test all the time. Now that my neighborhood's a little more gentrified and I'm a little older and (hopefully) a little less bewildered-looking, it doesn't occur as much. But it still happens from time to time, and it's usually discomforting or depressing.

The best of these types of interactions are like the one quoted above: they're just overwhelmingly sad and plaintive. The speakers are daring you to disappoint them by failing to engage and acknowledge them. I do my best to defy that expectation with a cheerful response. But that's just self-flattery — it'd be a stretch to think that those guys don't have a good reason for their yuppie-equals-jerk heuristic. And, to be honest, I'm not usually thrilled about having to stop what I'm doing in order to cheer up and/or prove my worth to a stranger. Maybe that makes me an asshole.

And if it doesn't, then surely the way in which I respond does. Am I being patronizing when I pick my words, or just recalling the high school truism that a constrained vocabulary turneth away wrath? Are the subtle colloquialisms I find myself unintentionally affecting as glaringly artificial to the person I'm speaking to as they are to me? Probably, although the person on the other end of the conversation is usually very kind about it. In fact, when I find myself speaking to folks in these situations they're almost always very nice.

When they're not, they're generally homeless people with mental problems or young guys trying to assert their dominance in front of their friends. In those cases it's tough to know what the right note is to strike between friendliness, assertiveness and submission. Is it going to give offense or spark further engagement if I make eye contact, or if I fail to? In the case of the homeless, once I'm acknowledged as being okay how can I continue to be polite without getting sucked into a five-minute-long spiel about bus tickets that ends with me lying that I don't have any cash on me?

Maybe I'm just a less friendly guy than I like to think, but there's a definite edge to these interactions. I don't think I can be blamed for not wanting to be scrutinized by strangers. I haven't done anything wrong, although I know that the fact of many other people like me doing the same not-wrong things is, in aggregate, doing harm to the city's long-time, poorer residents. But what can I do about it? And what can they do, other than stop me on the street and demand answers without asking a question?

I don't mean to sit here and complain about being forced to interact with my fellow man. But I can't pretend to enjoy these little chats, either. Being confronted with a stranger's sadness and anger is uncomfortable, no matter how politely-expressed or justified it is.