I originally posted the following on Booman’s recent article, What Does it Take to be White? Upon further reflection, it appears to me to be worthy of a stand-alone post. So…here it is.
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What does it take to be “white?”
Light skin and straight hair.
Duh!!!
If you can walk into a white, lower middle class/working class bar sometime after working hours, you are not dressed or otherwise gotten up in physical cues that set you apart from the majority of people in that bar so that you do not not stop conversation in your immediate vicinity, you are “white.”
DUH!!!
The Irish, the Italians, many Jews, the Poles and other Central Europeans figured this out about one or two generations into the American experience. So have many light-skinned latinos and mixed-race people.
But…there are still kickers lying in wait there.
I had an interesting experience today in my Bronx neighborhood….Kingsbridge. It abuts one of the few truly “Jewish” neighborhoods remaining in NYC…upper middle class Jewish.
Riverdale.
Read on for more.
I rarely go up to to Riverdale because…well, because the prices are too damned high for most of the things that I buy. It’s only a 10 minute walk from where I live, but a 10 minute walk in the other direction brings me to a totally mixed-race neighborhood along Broadway where the prices are decidedly lower for exactly the same goods.
Better stuff, even, in a few stores.
Anyway, I went to Riverdale today because a friend had seen an item in one of the stores that she knew I needed. I am on a sort of Thanksgiving/Christmas “holiday,” a time of the year where my work usually slows down a bit, a time where I often just chill out on a lot of levels for a week or two. As part of that chill time, I decided that I would get breakfast at a relatively new upscale café in Riverdale after my purchase. It is an overpriced, chi-chi little joint but the baked goods and coffee are good and I feel pretty comfortable there because…Irish as I am…I grew up in a largely Jewish suburb of NYC where most of my friends were intellectual, middle class Jews and I spent a couple of years in Boston hanging out a lot of the time with the same kinds of people at Brandeis University. As part of my “chill” time, I made no effort to dress in a blending-in kind of way. I didn’t shave; I wore a hoodie because of the weather and a fairly funky, stained baseball cap.
Now…I am by no means an exotic specimen of grown-up American manhood. I often get stopped on the street, etc. by people who mistake me for the actor J. K. Simmons…
…but neither am I identifiably an upper middle class, Riverdale-style middle aged Jew, especially when I dress a little down.
Anyway…I walked into this very crowded café full of foodie-type, quite identifiably (if you have the right antennae) Jewish women from the neighborhood at about 11AM, and the “Jewishness”of the place nearly bowled me over. Maybe my own antennae are on high alert because of the recent Trump revolution or maybe I was just on high alert for other reasons…whatever…but I felt like a shark who had bumbled into a school of silverfish. I could feel the (muted) alarm in the room. Subtle but quite plainly there.
Outsider!!! Outsider!!! Be on the lookout!!!
I went out of my way to be extra polite but I was so uncomfortable…as were many of the people in the space as their eye movements and body language plainly told me…that I ordered my pastry and coffee to go and ate it outside.
No big deal, right?
But it got me to thinking of “Jewishness.”
Of “otherness.”
Of what black people commonly call “passing” and so on.
Then I went down to Broadway to shop for other stuff…food in my absolute favorite NYC store, Garden Gourmet, a little-known Bronx treasure. My antennae were way up from the Riverdale scene, and as I walked along the …mostly Latino and mostly female…midday crowd on Broadway in the mid-230th streets area…I noticed some more unexpectedly jumpy eye movements, especially from the younger female passersby. These were so different from what I had seen in the Riverdale area that I really had to stop and think about it. Much more…defensive. Much more fearful of “the other.” Maybe they were…maybe the whole thing was…a reaction to a sort of cop/authority figure in an unexpected place at an unexpected time. I have been mistaken for a policeman so many times in my life…by civilians and cops alike (as have both of my brothers, one of whom is a policeman) that I generally just ignore the reaction and keep on keepin’ on. Then…in the store, which is patronized by many smart Jewish women from up in Riverdale…I got the same damned reaction that I had gotten in the Riverdale area from two identifiably “Riverdale” female types who were shopping there. A subtle fear reaction…an almost submissive stance and pose…that had no real reason for occurring.
But why today?
Why now?
I looked no more or less “cop-like” than I have looked hundreds of times in the 15+ years that I have been living in this neighborhood.
Why now?
And the only answer that came to me was this one:
Trump’s success has upped the paranoid ante among people who have been more or less successfully passing as “not-the-others.”
So here we are, brethren and sistren.
At the beginning of the Trump Era.
It’s only gonna get worse.
Wait’ll he actually does something!!!
Deep.
AG
