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This is it. After decades of fleeing to the suburbs, white folks are opting to live in cities now but want to drag all those rules of the suburbs — the policing of private space, of quiet, of the imperatives of *whiteness* — back into these cities with them.
The suburbs were built on notions of a certain kind of convenience and safety, like never having to interact with or be in spaces with people you don’t want to. It’s about not having to share things. They were, quite literally, racist constructs.
So you take people who have been on the receiving end of generations of this conditioning, that they should never be inconvenienced or never have anything but absolute agency over how things sound and smell and look...
...and they’re loosed on the kind of communities made up of the exact kind of people that the suburbs were built to avoid and constrain, and you get the MetroPCS gogo mess or that Starbucks mess or that BBQ mess.
One thing those stories all have in common is that they’re in big, very Black and rapidly gentrifying metros. DC, the Bay/Oakland, Philly.
(And it’s not coincidental that these are deeply blue places; i bet you every one of these “i was told by AppleCare folks” proudly voted for Obama.)
Since cities aren’t suburbs, these people can’t control the spaces in the same ways. They can’t put up fences or hedge rows or rely on “inconvenient” populations being functionally barred from living next to them.
But they can call the cops or people’s bosses.
But they can call the cops or people’s bosses.
(Or in the case or the MetroPCS gogo shit, *both.*)
When we’re talking about policing being racist, we’re talking about the policies of the departments themselves — stop and frisk, traffic stops, etc. — but also their enforcement and legitimizing of the racist impulses and logics of the ppl calling 911/311 in the first place.
One more thing: i hope we can be more mindful/critical abt the way public sector employees are portrayed in our pop culture. like, the default depiction of a “difficult”/“lazy” DMV worker in movies and television is of a Black woman.
There’s a whole language we have around the illegitimacy of a workers who look a certain way. Sheeeit: Was it really a surprise that Michelle Rhee was able to muster support from so very far afield for her teacher purges?
Did white people suddenly just come to care deeply about the academic outcomes for poor Black kids in DC — stares at camera — or was that alacrity at her “house cleaning” motivated by an easily activated contempt for the kinds of people doing those jobs?
Okay, logging off for real. It’s my mom’s birthday and Mother’s Day weekend! Imma go celebrate her.
Be easy.
Be easy.
