Dear Prudence,
I live in a ground-floor apartment in a major city. My bedroom is alongside the street, and, as happens in cities, sometimes people sit in their cars outside my room blasting music. Often the windows in the car are up, but the noise can still travel. This is only really a problem late at night or early in the morning when I’m trying to sleep. I’ve tried ambient noise machines and earplugs, but neither works for me. Usually I just wait for the noise to stop. Sometimes I go out and ask them (politely) to turn it down, and people are generally cool about it.
This Saturday I woke up at 6 a.m. to the sound of loud music. I closed the windows, which didn’t help much, and after an hour I went out and asked the driver to turn it down. She was obviously annoyed, but she did it, and I went back to sleep. I’m a white woman, and the person playing music was Black. I worried about whether approaching her was itself racist or an attempt to control public space. I don’t need validation, but I’d like to critically evaluate how I can best interact with my Black neighbors. Or maybe I’m overthinking it. Was there anything I could have done differently?
—Don’t Want to Be a Busybody