Much of the scholarship on poor Black urban communities focuses on social disorganization at the neighborhood level and how Blacks experience various institutional inequalities that impact their access to quality education and housing, jobs, and equitable public transportation. But Black social life is not a monolith of chaos, subjugation, and inequalities, nor is it confined to stationary neighborhoods. Black urban life is in fact vibrant, celebratory, and communal. Using two years of ethnographic observations on Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) buses and trains, we highlight the sociality of Black mobile experiences within Black spaces. Specifically, we examine how Blacks, while traveling into and through majority Black communities, form positive intraracial relationships that we refer to as Black transit affinities, which are a type of actively developed, temporal, meaningful interactions that take place on mobile systems. These transit affinities move beyond linked fate and solidarity but are actively formed and have four distinctive features, they are: 1) personal; 2) mutually engaged; 3) actively maintained although interrupted by stops on the bus or train; and, 4) particular to majority-minority areas of the city. These transit affinities are intraracial and were not observed, as defined, interracially or in majority White areas of the city. We do not argue that they are exclusive to Blacks but that they took place among Blacks in Black spaces that have often been ascribed a narrative of disorganization, violence, and social fragmentation.

Bentholyonsia teramachii has hitherto been described from Japan, but a conspecific specimen is herein recorded from Western Australian shelf waters at a depth of ∼100 m. Hitherto placed in the Lyonsiidae, B. teramachii is herein relocated in the Lyonsiellidae, alongside a second genus – Lyonsiella. Features of the anatomy of Bentholyonsiateramachii, including highly sensory siphons, reduced ctenidia unable to collect and transport particulate food, non-sorting labial palps, and a simplified Type II stomach and muscular gut all suggest that the species is a predator like Lyonsiella formosa. Other features of the anatomy, such as pallial taenioid muscles, radial mantle glands, and the structure of the ctenidia all point to a link between B. teramachii and the Lyonsiellidae and thus with the Verticordiidae and Parilimyidae and, therefore, with some of the oldest anomalodesmatans, the Pholadomyidae. In the possession by B. teramachii of a unique pair of antero-dorsal suspensory muscles, the link with fossil pholadomyoideans is reinforced. Bentholyonsia thus represents another genus of predatory bivalve, not only expanding our view of the prevalence of this feeding mode in the deep sea by this class but also helping us show how it evolved, in anatomical terms, from a suspension- (or deposit-) feeding ancestor.