Letters to My Tutor…
Reading: America Day by Day
My dearest Simone,
You write of Harlem as if it’s the same America as the rest of New York City. I wonder whether people at the time were upset about that. Even in my lifetime there was still this heavy sense that black America was America with an asterisk. It’s not so much less true nowadays as it is that many right-thinking people, as you say, have declared that being a different skin color isn’t a problem anymore as long as you’re just like white America in every other way. A lot of lip service is given to multiculturalism, but I find that most (particularly middle-class white Americans) are not comfortable with that concept in practice beyond a colorful holiday or the like; in social situations and everyday encounters, (middle-class) white people expect non-whites to act white or at the very least to acknowledge that the white way is the right way (gender roles, household makeup, family structures, rules of politeness…) In some ways the “racist” South is more geared toward accepting cultural difference than the rest of America. Among people who believe that a god made the “races” separately, there is a deeper acceptance of the idea that you have to learn to live with difference somehow; they do not as readily accept or apply the concept that homogeneity is the solution to inequality due to racism. I often heard growing up that in the North a white person can have a black person over for dinner, but they can’t be friends, while in the South, a white person can’t have a black person over for dinner, but they can be friends. After living out West for a while, I find it easy to imagine the genesis of that statement.
I appreciate the bits of history that you include. I was not familiar with the “Father of Harlem” Philip A. Payton, the black man who spearheaded the idea to rent spaces in difficult-to-fill apartment buildings to blacks. I was familiar with the “white flight” that you described, that as blacks moved into more of the apartment buildings in Harlem, whites left the area en masse. A recent article in the Washington Post makes note of a trend toward more segregated neighborhoods in Prince George’s County resulting from affluent blacks wanting to live in neighborhoods with other affluent blacks. Some of the comments may speak to the fact that despite the promises of post-racial rhetoric, it may not be so simple for blacks, even educated, affluent ones, to pass for white once skin color is discounted and further they don’t want to. I’m interested in whether the trend in Prince George’s County is present elsewhere.
I will write more on February next time.
With all my heart’s sweetness,
S.
