Those Dangerous White Suburbs
During a break in Sunday night's hectic WAHA Holiday tour, I conversed with a new area resident who moved, she explained, after her daughter left for college. The daughter, she confessed, disliked the parents new surroundings in Adams-Normandie, and preferred instead their previous home in Manhattan Beach, "where the schools are good and it's safe".
"It's safe here too", I added, perhaps showing a bit of the chip on my shoulder, and also eager to challenge the dominant ideology.
What I've wanted to add, for the longest time, probably inappropriately is, "safe unlike those places outside city centers. You know, the places with the mass-killings." Leaving Virginia Tech out, because college campus craziness is a category onto itself, and yesterday's dire news in Omaha, we're still left with the Amish classroom tragedy, Columbine, the Tacoma Mall, Wakefield, Red Lake High, the Honolulu Xerox repair manhunt, the San Ysidro McDonald's massacre, and others. None of which involved "negro stick-up men", Crips, Bloods, La eMe, or rap-star posses.
For a change, I don't mean to be flip or indifferent, this is about people losing their lives. As much as I prefer to prick the hegemon and serve a little 'come get yours whitey' comeuppance, when Christmas shoppers are gunned down in a mall, it's sad news. When a 24 year old black man is shot dead on a street corner--it's also sad news (even if he wasn't a pro-bowl safety), and it's no more natural or environmentally ordained.
In El Pueblo stories abound of terrified outsiders, begging off dinner invitations and asking for escorts to the driveway on account of a graffiti scrawl three blocks away, avoiding the 110 freeway lest car trouble require surface street interaction, and mistaking film shoot pyrotechnics for street gang warfare. Probably fueled by yellow media, some legitimate hardships, and big screen depictions like Keven Kline's near car-jacking in Lawrence Kasdan's bromidic Grand Canyon.
Maybe urbanites should instead play the biggety fool, asking prickly questions about retail outlets in Thousand Oaks, or assuming cover formations whilst visiting relatives in tiny New England hamlets. Maybe then America would really get serious about gun violence, and recognize the universal vulnerability it has wrought.
"It's safe here too", I added, perhaps showing a bit of the chip on my shoulder, and also eager to challenge the dominant ideology.
What I've wanted to add, for the longest time, probably inappropriately is, "safe unlike those places outside city centers. You know, the places with the mass-killings." Leaving Virginia Tech out, because college campus craziness is a category onto itself, and yesterday's dire news in Omaha, we're still left with the Amish classroom tragedy, Columbine, the Tacoma Mall, Wakefield, Red Lake High, the Honolulu Xerox repair manhunt, the San Ysidro McDonald's massacre, and others. None of which involved "negro stick-up men", Crips, Bloods, La eMe, or rap-star posses.For a change, I don't mean to be flip or indifferent, this is about people losing their lives. As much as I prefer to prick the hegemon and serve a little 'come get yours whitey' comeuppance, when Christmas shoppers are gunned down in a mall, it's sad news. When a 24 year old black man is shot dead on a street corner--it's also sad news (even if he wasn't a pro-bowl safety), and it's no more natural or environmentally ordained.
In El Pueblo stories abound of terrified outsiders, begging off dinner invitations and asking for escorts to the driveway on account of a graffiti scrawl three blocks away, avoiding the 110 freeway lest car trouble require surface street interaction, and mistaking film shoot pyrotechnics for street gang warfare. Probably fueled by yellow media, some legitimate hardships, and big screen depictions like Keven Kline's near car-jacking in Lawrence Kasdan's bromidic Grand Canyon.Maybe urbanites should instead play the biggety fool, asking prickly questions about retail outlets in Thousand Oaks, or assuming cover formations whilst visiting relatives in tiny New England hamlets. Maybe then America would really get serious about gun violence, and recognize the universal vulnerability it has wrought.
Labels: The Modern World
posted by Adam at 8:51 AM | Permalink
4 Comments:
But, seriously, Adam, come on. This neighborhood does present itself as a defiantly urban one. Cars park in the middle of the street to converse with one another, refuse to move out of the way, the occupants or pedestrian conversers stare at you like you are the one with the problem for wanting to pass them. Or the stray dogs that force normal dog owners to either not walk their dogs or walk them leash in one hand, metal pipe in the other. They're not stray, either, the owners just don't care. Or the neighborhood council members who, at meetings, will cry foul against anyone else's wrongdoing but leave her garbage cans in the street in front of her house to hold her parking space and threaten anyone else who deigns to try to park there.
It's different here. You know that. To try to pretend that it isn't is to stick one's head in the sand.
Different, yes, no question about it, but as a 5-year West Adams resident, I, too, grow weary of the view that we live in a dangerous war zone. Before we moved to Harvard Heights, I lived in the tony neighborhood just south of Carthay Circle and while there was less double-parking and graffiti, I barely knew any of my neighbors and felt the neighborhood lacked a pulse. For all its urban blight (which, thank God, is beginning to change), I've never known a friendlier, more committed and united bunch than I've encountered in West Adams. I still have friends who are terrified to drive east of La Cienega but they are missing out on a vibrant community. That said, don't get me started on the occasional LOUD parties and other annoyances of the 'hood that make me want to join a vigilante group. But I do feel SAFE here, I love the history and the urban feel of the neighborhood (which does not mean I love the UGLY strip malls or houses that are not cared for), and I'd take West Adams over Manhattan Beach any day of the week.
P.S. I went to a public school in Chicago and had a great experience. My brother went to an all-white high school in the suburbs and got in loads of trouble with drugs and other vices. I agree with you that that leaving the city centers is no guarantee of a peaceful existence...
I don't think Adam's point is that there isn't a difference between urban and suburban/exurban places. What I believe he's saying here is that, in his experience, people who live in affluent and largely ethnically/racially homogeneous enclaves often conflate areas populated by "minorities" (ha!), located close to city centers and boasting older housing stock with danger. People like this are responding, more often than not, to their own lack of comfort in such neighborhoods rather than any sort of empirically based fear. Adam's point is that all kinds of places present dangers but that people's PERCEPTION of danger varies widely based on their experience and, alas, on their prejudice. What we see in our media is generally generated by these folks and tends to reflect this prevailing bias, thus perpetuating it.
If we hear about a mass murder of young men in South Los Angeles or on the West Side of Chicago at all (and we frequently don't) and if those young men have (or are alleged to have) gang ties, we smugly shrug our shoulders and ask, "What do you expect?" and "What's wrong with those people, anyway?" When the same number of people are killed in a suburban mall or school, we wring our hands and ask, "What went wrong? How could we have prevented this?"
Americans have a strong and, historically, deeply rooted anti-urban bias that dates, minimally, to Thomas Jefferson. Not that anyone who holds this view would admit it to himself (let alone others) but many view urban places as, per se, dangerous and the depraved or merely unfortunate people who live in them should, therefore, expect whatever misfortune befalls them. Such events are considered typical. Non-urban places and people, by contrast, embody moral virtues such that when they experience violent mass death, it must be construed as both an anomaly else we, as a nation, be forced to grapple with the "inconvenient truth" that the differences between urban and putatively non-urban places are less substantive than we'd like to believe.
I agree with Adam. Senseless death by firearm is an equal opportunity tragedy.
Thanks for a provocative post, Adam.
Well, "Anonymous", if that's your real name, I don't disagree that we are desensitized to news of violence and mayhem in the inner cities. I think the news is biased to keep the black america scary and the white america scared.
That said, I have lived in many different places.
Suburban New Jersey (18 years), New York City (4 years) West Hollywood (3 years), Studio City (2 years), North Hollywood ( 2 years), Lancaster farm (3 years), Lancaster suburb (1 year), North Hollywood (Again) (1 year, West Hollywood, again (6 years) and Jefferson Park for 4 years.
I've seen it all, as they say. There is something inherently different about this area. Just driving down Jefferson blvd today, I had to honk the horn on my bike because the car making the left turn didn't notice that there was NO oncoming traffic. He flipped me off, then proceeded to drive 10 miles an hour, swerving from side to side. As I finally past him I first noticed that he has no side view mirror, only to then hit the cloud of marijuana smoke coming from the driver's side.
Would that this was a single occurrance. Or high school kids out on the weekend. Or just, you know, neighborhood kids doing their thing.
But it happens every freaking day. It's all the time.
Why should we have to call our representative's office to have him remove a commercial vehicle from our neighborhood? because the owner doesn't understand or care that it's against the law to park it there. And he just moved to the other side of Jefferson anyway.
Why should we have to call that rep again to have the garbage cans removed and stopped from being parking space holders?
This place is an anomoly. I've lived in nothing like it.
Adam may have a point about perception. After all, in politics, perception IS reality. But I live here. I came here as an open minded journeyman making a homestead. A bleeding heart liberal who didn't want to make snap judgments or biased attitudes that are, for the most part, cliche.
But, cliches are such for a reason. They are based in fact.
Jefferson park isn't "bad", but as one neighbor said, I wish i could pick up my house and move it to a nicer part of town.
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