Nope

[Content Note: Privilege; racism; classism.]

Not long after I posted my earlier piece on risk assessment, I saw this piece about two young white people, a man and a woman, who have developed an app called SketchFactor, which advises people how to avoid "sketchy" neighborhoods.

The developers, who are "already finalists in a $20,000 startup contest," promise us they're not racists—but the term "sketchy" doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's a word with a very particular use, especially among young white people, to describe neighborhoods that are typically inhabited by poor people of color.

I always understand exactly what a white person says when they describe a neighborhood as "sketchy"—and what they mean is that they've seen evidence of poverty and that they've seen people of color, usually black people, and/or lots of business signs in a language other than English, usually Spanish.

I've written before about how I lived in Rogers Park for the entire decade I lived in Chicago, and I routinely heard from other white people that I lived in a "sketchy" neighborhood, whether they were asking me wasn't I worried about living in "sketchy" neighborhood or telling me they'd never risk living in such a "sketchy" neighborhood.

The thing about Rogers Park is that it was then (and may still be) the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in Chicago, which is still an incredibly segregated city. And, although certain parts of Rogers Park are gentrified now, it was then generally not a neighborhood in which wealthy people lived.

When I bought my flat in Rogers Park, one of my then-bosses asked me, "Don't we pay you enough that you can afford to move out of that neighborhood?"

Because it was "sketchy."

That's not to say there was no crime in Rogers Park; there was. And it is not to say I was never approached by a man who wouldn't let me politely extricate myself from his company; I was.

But I got approached by men like that on the way to and from my then-job in a building on Chicago's Magnificent Mile, too. And no one described that as a "sketchy" neighborhood.

The makers of this app are saying their software will allow people to document incidents of racism, sexism, harassment, etc. Which, if nothing else, merely reveals they are ignorant to the reality that, if it's only the existence of such incidents which mark a neighborhood as "sketchy," then every neighborhood is sketchy.

Bias and harassment aren't limited to certain neighborhoods. I have noticed, though, that the designation of "sketchy" certainly is.