I still have rules. Not many, particularly not many that I haven't broken exposing myself as a Liar and A Hypocrite (as well as a Gentleman and a Scholar), but some nevertheless. For instance, I never drink alcohol before 11 am. Kept that one. So far.
As part of a promising initiative to change the way we live now, Long Wharf Theatre and the New Haven Public Library have launched Community Conversations to discuss race and gentrification in New Haven. Using Bruce Norris' "Clybourne Park" they've held Conversations hosted by Colin Caplan, Tom Ficklin and Clifton Graves at different branch libraries with each site's meeting having a particular tenor.
I attended the first one at the Stetson branch (in Newhallville) and wound up not only quoted in the Independent but photographed, too. After that I said, if you go to another Conversation, you are Not To Say One Word other than hello. Because, y'know, nobody likes a yaktivist, (my new favorite portmanteau), a person who talks incessantly about injustice and social change but does very little in terms of action.
I decided to go to the Fair Haven discussion last Saturday. While the Dixwell meeting felt like a reunion of many of Newhallville's African-American families, Fair Haven's was a more astringent gathering in part because of the fascinating mix of people who live there and because there were no small number of folks who knew a lot about the history of US residential segregation thanks to legislative and judicial policy hand-in-hand with the standing practices of the banking and real estate industries.
When it comes to talking about Race in this country when we get together in these rooms we are Very Polite. And trust me when I tell you that I was trying, I really was trying to follow the rules of the game not to mention my own which was to come to Listen not talk. But somebody said something and before you know it I had opened my mouth on the way to losing my shit. Bam!! All she said was that her own daughters now lived in Brooklyn (I'm guessing Bushwick or East New York) but that when she was a student in the 80's she, as a young white girl from Connecticut country, she wouldn't dream of living in those places ....
And I shot back (and I'm paraphrasing here) that this is what gets to me in these discussions, that the normative perspective is supposed to be how white people see things and that even though all of those places (Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, East New York, Bushwick) are full of complex communities that talk of specific neighborhoods in New York being dangerous for "me" is so reductive generally because it's based on ignorance and to use a fashionable phrase, white privilege, that it makes me crazy. Now, this woman doesn't know me and it would be easy to think that I'd just become the "Lena" from the play her employer had produced. It would be too easy to think that yet another Angry Black Woman doing what we do. (Her: Sheesh, I just speak my mind and a black person bites my head off.) She certainly doesn't know that if a black person had started talking about not going into Greenwich to shop because blah-de-blah-de-blah I would light into their asses, too.
When the Conversation was officially over both she and I made it a point to approach one another and shake hands. She wanted to finish her point about being a small town white girl from Connecticut and not being safe in the city. But, again, I cut her off. Well, yeah, I said (and again I paraphrase) you'd have to have some street smarts but frankly a white girl is more safe in a black neighborhood in a way a black person wouldn't be in a white neighborhood. A fact and I'm not even angry about it.
Or am I?
As part of a promising initiative to change the way we live now, Long Wharf Theatre and the New Haven Public Library have launched Community Conversations to discuss race and gentrification in New Haven. Using Bruce Norris' "Clybourne Park" they've held Conversations hosted by Colin Caplan, Tom Ficklin and Clifton Graves at different branch libraries with each site's meeting having a particular tenor.
I attended the first one at the Stetson branch (in Newhallville) and wound up not only quoted in the Independent but photographed, too. After that I said, if you go to another Conversation, you are Not To Say One Word other than hello. Because, y'know, nobody likes a yaktivist, (my new favorite portmanteau), a person who talks incessantly about injustice and social change but does very little in terms of action.
I decided to go to the Fair Haven discussion last Saturday. While the Dixwell meeting felt like a reunion of many of Newhallville's African-American families, Fair Haven's was a more astringent gathering in part because of the fascinating mix of people who live there and because there were no small number of folks who knew a lot about the history of US residential segregation thanks to legislative and judicial policy hand-in-hand with the standing practices of the banking and real estate industries.
When it comes to talking about Race in this country when we get together in these rooms we are Very Polite. And trust me when I tell you that I was trying, I really was trying to follow the rules of the game not to mention my own which was to come to Listen not talk. But somebody said something and before you know it I had opened my mouth on the way to losing my shit. Bam!! All she said was that her own daughters now lived in Brooklyn (I'm guessing Bushwick or East New York) but that when she was a student in the 80's she, as a young white girl from Connecticut country, she wouldn't dream of living in those places ....
And I shot back (and I'm paraphrasing here) that this is what gets to me in these discussions, that the normative perspective is supposed to be how white people see things and that even though all of those places (Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, East New York, Bushwick) are full of complex communities that talk of specific neighborhoods in New York being dangerous for "me" is so reductive generally because it's based on ignorance and to use a fashionable phrase, white privilege, that it makes me crazy. Now, this woman doesn't know me and it would be easy to think that I'd just become the "Lena" from the play her employer had produced. It would be too easy to think that yet another Angry Black Woman doing what we do. (Her: Sheesh, I just speak my mind and a black person bites my head off.) She certainly doesn't know that if a black person had started talking about not going into Greenwich to shop because blah-de-blah-de-blah I would light into their asses, too.
When the Conversation was officially over both she and I made it a point to approach one another and shake hands. She wanted to finish her point about being a small town white girl from Connecticut and not being safe in the city. But, again, I cut her off. Well, yeah, I said (and again I paraphrase) you'd have to have some street smarts but frankly a white girl is more safe in a black neighborhood in a way a black person wouldn't be in a white neighborhood. A fact and I'm not even angry about it.
Or am I?
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