New York, a Retrospective of Sorts

The last view of my street. If I hadn't been carrying a bright pink over-stuffed duffle, binder-laden TC tote, and BTR currier bag while dragging my equally bright pink carryon with wheels, I would have turned to snap a picture of Landlord (and now friend) Larry and his associates supervising the demolition of the basement of the English Language Clubhouse I called my home with summer. I didn't want to seem weak by stopping to rearrange or visibly struggling with my bags while I strode down the block toward Frederick Douglass and the inevitable flow of attentive taxistas. I figured this picture taken during the first week of my stay in New York from the street outside my door was pretty good at approximating the visual feeling of my last moments in New York today.

I start with Larry because he rocks. An unexpected friend who got me out to live music twice in the city, once for excellent jazz on the Upper West Side and then again last night for a debut appearance at the Lenox Lounge in Harlem. Sadly, the zebra skin walls are no longer the real thing--though I did run my fingers down the wallpaper just in case. The music was R&B and the sax was unbelievable. I don't even like saxophones, but it really was amazing what this musician was able to do with his instrument. The company was good, five folks, one hailing from Boston (me), one from Japan, one from Brooklyn/Ukraine, one from Harlem, one from North Carolina/St. John. The catfish was cajun in all the right ways.

During the five plus hours we were at the Lenox in full surround sound, we happened upon the Skip Gates Beer Media Bonanza topic. Larry framed it in the most interesting of ways, and in my fixation with this evolving national interest in engaging with race in a sustained albeit odd manner, I had not heard anyone else describe the conflict this way. He referred to the Crowley-Gates encounter as a reference point for a broader discussion we were having about Republicans and Democrats.

In that moment engulfed by zebra striping and the hypnotic base-sax-drum thrust of Lenox Lounge sound, I realized that the majority of Americans had actually engaged in an authentic shared moment of discourse on race in America. In my lifetime, we had not yet had this "opportunity" for a common data point across lines of class and race able to illuminate the dangerous, almost instantaneous deluge of emotion, partial rationality, and secondary instinct that surge forth unnamed and unhindered to form words and actions. Across the range of the mundane and the menacing moments in our lives, we more often than we realize have the Crowley-Gates encounter with those we hold at arms length. In our most intimate relationships where trust and curiosity govern, we need not guard against these deluges--and more often in the easy and familiar contexts of those relationships it feels more like a trickle than a torrent. Yet in those untested relationships with others who pass in and out of our lives, we are constantly sizing up the other. It is the subtlest of language cues held in the body, the dress, the accent or twang in our voices that all signal how we should react to the unfamiliar other.

I do not think we can underestimate the power of careful examination of these moments. We are too untrusting of ourselves and others. We have few people in our lives who we can "go there" with, and when we do choose to actually go there, it is rarely with someone who stands firmly planted across lines of race and class. In a city like Boston where the wisdom and pain of past and present vividly paint a segregated community still separated physically by race and class, we must appreciate the startling opening this Cambridge scandal has provided for our nation. Let's face it: often times it is the sensational and only the sensational that gives Americans common ground enough to reach across the lines that divide and hold us firmly in place: American Idol, Michael Jackson, Osama, Sadam, OJ, Obama to name a few. Now add to that Crowley-Gates. More often than before, privileged Americans are examining race, power, and the other--and many Americans are doing it in a sustained way and with folks who may or may not share their point of view. Even those among us who have waded in these perplexities of race, class, and power differentials are finding this explosive episode an opening for a broader exploration of the validity of elite claims to understanding and representing blackness. This national splurge of perspective-taking, questioning, and listening is a welcome interruption to usually inconsequential (yet pleasant) banter of our daily news sources and doorway conversations.