James McBride

James McBride (1957- ) is an American writer and jazz musician. He is best known as the author of “The Color of Water” (1996), which became a number one bestseller in America and is required reading at many schools and universities. He also wrote “Miracle at St. Anna” (2004), which Spike Lee made into a film of the same name in 2008. McBride has written music for Anita Baker (“Enough Love”), Grover Washington, Jr and Barney (no, not “I Love You”).

In 1981 when he worked for the Boston Globe, he wrote a column about his mother for Mother’s Day. It got so many letters that he made it into a book, “The Color of Water”.

His mother was a rabbi’s daughter who ran away from home to Harlem in 1939. She married a black man and became an outcast among whites. Even her own family cut her off. She found herself a white woman bringing up her 12 black children in Red Hook, a poor black ghetto in New York. All 12 children got university degrees, two of them becoming doctors. McBride himself studied music at Oberlin and journalism at Columbia.

As a boy McBride noticed that his mother looked different and asked her if she was white. She said she was “light-skinned”. She always talked about whites as “they” and never as “we'”. Her past was a mystery. He asked her what colour God is. She said, “the colour of water”.

Race was not something she liked to talk about. The book “The Color of Water” tells the story of his mother’s life and, in parallel, his own life and how he comes to terms with colour:

I didn’t want to be white. My siblings had already instilled the notion of black pride in me. I would have preferred that Mommy were black. Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds.

He sees himself as black but came to understand that blacks and whites are pretty much the same on the inside. His Jewish background is part of who he is, but he is Christian.

His next book, “Miracle at St. Anna” is about four black American soldiers who fought in Italy in the Second World War as part of the mostly black 92nd Division. Like his first book, it also shows the ugliness of racism and yet at the same time  the underlying oneness of mankind.

His latest book is “Song Yet Sung” (2008). It is a true-to-life story about a slave woman who is being hunted down while she flees north towards freedom. It shows how slavery worked in practice, how it affected the moral lives of both blacks and whites.

His advice to writers:

• You learn writing by writing.
• Most books are written between five and seven in the morning.
• Do not wait; start now.
• When you fail, get back up, forgive yourself and try again. (Only about half of McBride’s books ever see print.)

Most of that goes for musicians too.

See also:

• James McBride: The Color of Water
• Danzy Senna
• biracial
• black father, white mother
• black ghetto
• Harlem
• Jews
• The oneness of mankind

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Ellen Holly

Ellen Holly (1931- ) is an American actress, the first black actress ever to appear regularly on a soap opera. She played Carla Hall on “One Life to Live” from 1968 to 1985. She also played the president’s wife in “School Daze” (1988).

Holly grew up in New York, the daughter of a chemical engineer and a librarian. She studied acting at Hunter College and went on from there to act on stage. By 1956 she was on Broadway. She got in to the Actors Studio, the first black woman ever to do so.  She later  got parts in film and television too.

In 1968 Holly wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times about what it was like to be a light-skinned black woman. Agnes Dixon, who was then starting a new soap called “One Life to Live”, read that letter. It led her to create the character of Carla Gray (later Hall). She offered the part to Holly herself. Holly took it and became the first regular black female character on a soap. Other soaps soon followed their lead and had black characters of their own too.

When Holly first appeared on “One Life to Live”, on July 25th 1968, the second week of the show,  no one knew that she was black! Because of how she looks viewers assumed that she was white – so much so that when she kissed a black doctor many of them called to complain!  So then they brought her black mother into the story, showing that Holly’s character was trying to pass for white.

Her character was supposed to only last a year, but it was so successful that she was on the show till 1985 (with a break from 1980 to 1983). She wrote some of the storylines for Carla, becoming one of the few blacks who have written for a soap.

She later appeared on “Guiding Light”, another soap, from 1991 to 1993 as Judge Collier.

“One Life to Live” was the first time she played a regular character on a television show, though before that she had made appearances on “The Defenders”, “Nurses” and “Dr Kildare”. Her first television appearance was on “The Defenders” in 1963.

She was on “Spenser: For Hire” in 1986 and on “The Heat of the Night” four times in 1990.

She is been in a few films. “School Daze” is probably the best known one.   In 2002 she was in the Mario Van Peebles film, “10,000 Black Men Named George”.

She has done quite a bit of Shakespeare, especially in the New York Shakespeare Festival. She has played Lady Macbeth in “Macbeth”, Desdemona in “Othello” and the shrew herself in “Taming of the Shrew”. You can see her in the 1974 film “King Lear” starring James Earl Jones. She plays one of Lear’s evil daughters, Regan. You can see a bit of it on YouTube (at least in April 2009 you could).

She wrote about her life in “One Life: The Autobiography of an African American Actress” (1994). It is a powerful account of being talented, beautiful and black.

See also:

• Tamara Tunie
• black actresses
• tragic mulatto

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New York Fashion Week and models of colour

New York Fashion Week (February 13th to 20th 2009), one of the top fashion weeks in the industry, has just ended. Of the appearances by models on the catwalk, 18% were made by models of colour. While that is well short of the 26% of America as a whole, it is much better than the 12% of last year.

Two years ago a third of the designers used white models only. This year only 9% did.

For years Bethann Hardison and Diane von Furstenberg have been saying that more models of colour were needed. Maybe their message is getting through at last. Or maybe it is the Obama effect – or the effect of the all-black Italian Vogue which sold out last summer.

Here is how the New York catwalk looked in 2009:

• 82% white
• 7.4% black (outnumbered last year by Asians)
• 6.5% Asian
• 4.0% Latina
• 1.8% other

Compare that to how America looked in 2006:

• 74% white (66% if you do not count white Latinos)
• 14.8% Latino (some also counted as white or black)
• 13.4% black
• 4.4% Asian
• 7.3% other

Here is the degree of over- or under-representation:

• 148 Asian
• 111 white
• 55 black
• 27 Latina
• 25 other

Whites and Asians were over-represented.

The counting was done by Tatiana the Anonymous Model of Jezebel.com. For some models it was a matter of her judgement where they fell: while most Latin Americans were counted as Latina, some got counted as black, like Sessilee Lopez, while others were counted as white, like Pilar Solchaga. Them’s the breaks, as she says.

These shows had no models of colour:

• Altuzarra
• Davidelfin
• Jenni Kayne
• Julian Louie
• Koi Suwannagate
• Temperley London
• Vera Wang Lavender Label

These shows had models of colour, but no black models:

• Alexandre Herchcovitz
• Behnaz Sarafpour
• Costello Tagliapietra
• Erin Fetherston
• Halston
• Marchesa
• Max Azria
• Milly
• Miss Sixty
• Monique Lhuillier
• Nicole Miller
• Philosophy
• Reem Acra
• Tibi
• TSE
• United Bamboo
• Vena Cavahad
• VPL
• Vivienne Tam

These had the most models of colour (30% or more):

• Tracey Reese
• Sophie Theallet
• Rachel Roy
• Victoria Beckham
• Ports 1961
• Oscar de la Renta
• Badgley Mishka
• Diane von Furstenberg
• Tory Burch
• Yigal Azrouël

Here are the black models who appeared, ranked by the number of shows they appeared in (the first three account for more than half of the appearances made by black models):

15: Jourdan Dunn: Alexander Wong, Anna Sui, Carolina Herrera, Donna Karan, Isaac Mizrahi, Jason Wu, Marc Jacobs, Michael Kors, Oscar de la Renta, Proenza Schouler, Ralph Lauren, Rodarte, Thakoon, Tommy Hilfiger, Zac Posen.

9: Sessilee Lopez: Badgley Mishka, Diane von Furstenberg, Isaac Mizrahi, Jason Wu, Malandrino, Marc Jacobs, Narciso Rodriguez, Oscar de la Renta, Tommy Hilfiger.

8: Arlenis Sosa: Diane von Furstenberg, Donna Karan, Isaac Mizrahi, Jason Wu, Michael Kors, Narciso Rodriguez, Oscar de la Renta, Tommy Hilfiger.

6: Georgie Badiel: 3.1 Philip Lim, Diane von Furstenberg, Isaac Mizrahi, Malandrino, Marc Jacobs, Oscar de la Renta.

5: Gracie Carvalho: 3.1 Philip Lim, Carolina Herrera, Diane von Furstenberg, Ralph Lauren, Vera Wang.

5: Chanel Iman: Diane von Furstenberg, Jason Wu, Marc Jacobs, Michael Kors, Zac Posen.

2: Ubah Hassan: Oscar de la Renta, Ralph Lauren.

4: Aminata Niaria: Isaac Mizrahi, Malandrino, Oscar de la Renta, Vera Wang.

1: Lyndsey Scott: Calvin Klein.

1: Rahma Mohamed: Malandrino.

1: Kinee Diouf: Yigal Azrouel.

See also:

• Tatiana’s article at Jezebel.com
• Jourdan Dunn
• The all-black Vogue
• black fashion models
• The most beautiful black women models
• race and beauty

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Meli’sa Morgan: Fool’s Paradise

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Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson (1898-1976) was an American singer, actor and a fighter for equal rights for all men. He is best remembered for singing “Ol’ Man River” (1936).

In the 1930s and 1940s he was one of the best known black men in the world, but by the 1950s he had become known as a suspected communist.

His father was a slave who escaped through the Underground Railroad, later becoming a Presbyterian minister. He spoke out against injustice and was forced to resign. His mother was a schoolteacher. When Robeson was six her clothes caught on fire from the stove. She died.

From his father Robeson learned to have an “unshakable dignity and courage in spite of the press of racism and poverty”.

Robeson did well in school, became an All-American football player and then went to New York to get his law degree at Columbia University. He got into a top law firm but then found that whites refused to work with him.

He turned to stage acting. He was best known for playing the lead in “Emperor Jones” (1924, New York; 1925 London) and “Othello” (1930, London; 1943, New York). He also acted in films, “Show Boat” (1936) being his best-known. But later he left film acting: the stereotypes that Hollywood made blacks act out sickened him.

Robeson had a very deep, rich singing voice. He gave concerts and put out records. In 1925 he became the first person ever to give a concert of Negro spirituals.

But despite being a famous singer and actor who travelled the world performing, many whites still would not accept him. He was refused service at restaurants, rooms at hotels – and not just in the American South either.

In 1934 he travelled to the Soviet Union and there he found something he had never experienced before: “Here for the first time in my life … I walk in full human dignity.” He saw communism as the answer to racism.

In the 1940s he spoke out against racism in all its forms and continued to sing.

In 1950 the American government asked him to sign a piece of paper saying that he was not a communist. He refused. They took away his passport.

It got worse: He was blacklisted by concert halls. His records were pulled from shops. His income fell from $104,000 (145,000 crowns)  in 1947 to $2000. They even took away his title as an All-American football player.

When he was brought before the McCarthy hearings they asked why he did not live in the Soviet Union. He said:

Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay right here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?

He wrote a book about his life story, “Here I Stand”. When it came out in 1958 the New York Times refused to review it.

He got his passport back that year because of a Supreme Court ruling, but by then he was a broken man.

See also:

• New York
• Russia – the heart of the old Soviet Union
• stereotype
• Dorothy Dandridge
• Malcolm X
• Solzhenitsyn

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white gaze, part two

Yesterday I wrote about the white gaze. Then later when I checked the news what did I see? We knew this one was just a matter of time:

It is a Sean Delonas cartoon from the New York Post, the top-selling newspaper in New York. It shows the police shooting a chimpanzee dead, something that was in the news. But then one of the two policemen says, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” President Obama had just signed the stimulus bill into law, as shown on the page before, and said we might need another one.

Some say the chimp stands for Congress, the Democrats or Washington, but it makes more sense that it is Obama: most people assume he wrote the bill or had it written under his direction. Also, white Americans have been comparing blacks to monkeys since who knows when and Obama is black.

This is an excellent example of white gaze: The picture places you with the white people in it – you are the third (presumably white) policeman – and it views people of colour as less than fully human – as a monkey in this case.

I thought the New York Post had more sense than to print a racist cartoon – especially one about the president – even if the Post is a right-wing newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, the one who brings us Fox News.

Even apart from the racism, since when did shooting the president – or anyone in Congress – become something to laugh at? How is this cartoon going to look if Obama is ever shot?

Al Sharpton, the best-known black leader in New York, called the cartoon “troubling at best”.

The Post, in its defence, said this:

The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist.

Trying to make it about Al Sharpton.

Delonas says he did not mean the cartoon in a racist way. Jeff Fecke of Amptoons said in defence of Delonas:

He hasn’t seen illustrations from a hundred years ago showing his people are more like apes than the purer, smarter, obviously more civilized race.

You hardly have to go back a hundred years. Try last year:

Surely Delonas remembers the Curious George T-Shirts, the ones showing a monkey eating a banana that said “Obama in ’08”. Surely he remembers how that went over. (If only black people remember that one then America is far more screwed up than even I thought.)

Delonas and the people who run the top-selling newspaper in a city that is one-fourth black are not that unwitting.

The cartoon was racist and they knew it.

I hope that everyone at the Post who signed off on this is fired – or, better yet, has the good sense to tell the public they are sorry and then resign.

See also:

• Jeff Fecke at Amptoons: Privilege Illustrated
• black people as monkeys
  
• white gaze, part one
• Is racism in America over?
  • Will Smith: America is not a racist nation
  • Of Limbaugh and Lowery
  • Abagond: Whites are still racist
• Michelle Obama’s Afro
• Oscar Grant
• Sean Bell

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Malcolm X

Malcolm X (1925-1965) was one of two main black leaders in America in the 1960s, the other being Martin Luther King, Jr. They were both ministers, King a Christian, X a Muslim, and they both wanted equal rights for blacks, but they disagreed about how it could be achieved: King said it could be done through peaceful protest, Malcolm X said, “Give me a .45 calibre, then I’ll sing ‘We Shall Overcome'”.

Some words and catchphrases that either started with Malcolm X or came to mainstream American society through him:

• the ballot or the bullet: the two ways to achieve power.
• white devils: whites as having an inborn evil nature unlike blacks.
• black power: the only way blacks can control their own destiny.
• by any means necessary: blacks must defend themselves with violence if necessary.
• chickens coming home to roost: why John Kennedy got shot.

For most of his life Malcolm X thought that blacks would never get a fair deal from white society, certainly not so long as they remained poor and powerless. They needed their own businesses, their own way of thinking, their own men with guns and, in the end, their own nation.

Blacks should separate from whites: whites cannot be trusted, whites will not give up power willingly. The way whites think suits them, not blacks. Trying to be white or act white or become a part of white society was not the answer – that was a game where only whites could win.

Much of this thinking he got from his father, a poor country preacher who spread the message of Marcus Garvey. Garvey wanted to build a black society in America independent of white society and then return to Africa.

Malcolm’s father was killed by white men who did not like what he was telling black people. Later his mother had a breakdown and was sent away.

He turned to a life of crime and wound up in prison. There he discovered the Nation of Islam, the black Muslims. It gave his life purpose and direction. It made him proud to be black. He stopped straightening his hair, something black men did back in those days (think James Brown or Al Sharpton). He started reading seriously.

Later, after he got out of prison, he became one of the top ministers of the Nation of Islam. It grew from 500 followers to 30,000. His mosque was at 116th and Lenox in Harlem. It stands there still with its green dome.

Despite his loyalty to Elijah Muhammad, who led the Nation of Islam, they had a falling out. He left and started his own mosques.

Then he went to Mecca.

And there for the first time in his life he saw black men and brown men and white men living together as brothers, as one. It blew his mind. He now knew that all the racism he had lived under in America all his life did not have to be.

But not long after he was shot dead. At age 39.

See also:

• Malcolm X
  • Malcolm X: On Afro-American History
  • What Malcolm X read in prison
  • Malcolm X: Message to the Grassroots
  • The oneness of mankind – more on his Mecca experience
• Martin Luther King, Jr
• Fred Hampton
• white people
• Harlem
• Islam

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Kara Walker

Kara Walker (1969- ) is an American artist who, as she puts it in the title of one of her works, shows us “the Peculiar Institutions as never before! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause”.

She uses silhouettes, cut pieces of black paper put on a white background, to make pictures. It was a common form of art in the 1800s, which she uses to make pictures about the 1800s! But instead of the safe, white middle-class pictures that silhouettes were used for back then, she makes those other pictures you never see: a white slave master running down a black girl to rape her, a white woman hanging from a tree after a slave uprising, the heads of the black people who died to keep a white woman pure, black girls giving head and so on.

Starting out with things like paper doll books meant for girls, she creates pictures of the sex and violence of the dark and sick history of race in America.

Many of us have certain pictures in our heads of the history of race in America: slave ships packed with black bodies, black men being sold as slaves, slaves working in the fields, black bodies hanging from trees and so on. But beyond that there are other pictures that we never see and those are the pictures that Walker creates.

Her blacks look like minstrel show stereotypes. She shows what sick things followed from seeing blacks as unseriously human as that.

Her work has been shown in top art museums, like the Guggenheim, Whitney and Modern Museum of Art in New York. In 1997 she won a MacArthur fellowship, one of those genius awards, the youngest person ever to get one. Her work once made the cover of the New Yorker. It seems she does not make white liberals uncomfortable with their own racism.

Sometimes, in fact, her pictures show the old days the way whites would like to imagine them: like half-naked black women with white men asking them for sex – the Jezebel stereotype, black women as sex animals.

Her pictures seem simple, yet the more you look the more you see: a knife held behind the back, a small white man in the hand of a black woman, a lantern held by a black boy hung from a tree – the boy is a lawn jockey, it turns out.

Walker:

A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected … that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.

She says that maybe her pictures look like they are about slave days of long ago, but for her they are a way to find out who she is and where she fits into the now of American history.

See also:

• stereotype
  • pure white woman stereotype
  • Mammy stereotype
  • Jezebel stereotype
  • coon stereotype
• minstrel show
• Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs
• gangsta rap
• black racism
• white people
  • white privilege
• Black History Month
• damali ayo

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The Delaware

The Delaware in the 1640s.

 

The Delaware or, as they call themselves, the Lenape (leh-NAH-pay, meaning the “common or ordinary people”), were the Native Americans who lived in and near what is now New York and Philadelphia in the north-eastern US. They had lived there for at least a thousand years when Whites arrived.

Country facts (circa 1500):

• Name: Lenapehoking;
• Location: New Jersey and parts of neighbouring states;
• Population: 30,000 to 85,000, maybe more;
• Area: about 55,000 sq km;
• Languages: Munsee in the north, Unami in the south, both Eastern Algonquian languages (related to those that Squanto and Pocahontas spoke);
• Religion: ethnic;
• Technology: Eastern Woodlands;
• Government: decentralized, ruled by sachems (religious chiefs);
• Currency: wampum, aka “glass beads”.

The Delaware grew maize, beans and squash, gathered strawberries and hunted deer (pictured), bear and elk. They lived in long houses, sometimes in towns of up to 300.  They were not the wandering bands of hunter-gatherers that most Whites imagine, much less “savages”.

Whites began arriving from Europe in number in the 1600s. Many Delaware died of White diseases, like smallpox, cholera and measles.

Whites got their land in three main ways:

1. war, preferred by the Dutch but practised by Anglos too, like George Washington, who fought them.
2. purchase, like when Manhattan was bought for $24 worth of trinkets and glass beads – a statement so misleading as to be a lie.
3. court cases – where White judges upheld fine print, where the Delaware had few rights or protection. Preferred by Anglos.

Money: mostly wampum, shell beads on a string. Whites sometimes call it “glass beads”, which is like calling their money “pieces of paper”.

The Delaware knew how to fight in the woods better than most White men did, and they even had guns (which were too slow-loading till the 1800s to be much better than bows and arrows). But one thing they did not have were numbers. More and more Whites kept coming over the seas every year. And whatever land Whites could not get by sale or the small print of a contract, they took by force.

An excuse to fight the Delaware could always be found. Once it was because one of them took a peach. Small things like that grew into years of war. Even those who had taken on Western ways were killed. Even those who had become peaceful Moravian Christians were killed. Even women and children were killed. It did not matter to Whites.

The Delaware who had lived through the White diseases and the White wars were pushed west bit by bit – through Pennsylvania in the 1600s and 1700s,  Ohio, Indiana and Kansas in the 1800s and so on till most of them came to Oklahoma by the 1860s. Some, though, wound up in Wisconsin, some in Ontario. By 2000 there were about 16,000. Unlike other Native Americans, few married Blacks.

 

Languages: They spoke Unami and Munsee.  In 2009, Munsee had seven or eight native speakers, Unami had none. You can still hear them in prayers and in place names, like Manhattan, the Poconos, Hackensack, Rockaway, Massapequa, Carnarsie, Parsippany, Minisink, Raritan and Jamaica (in Queens).

Mannahatta in 1609 | Manhattan in 2009. Image Mark Boyer WCS. Click to enlarge.

– Abagond, 2009, 2016.

See also:

• The Delaware Indians – where are they now?
• Munsee
• “Manhattan was sold for $24”
• Juan Rodriguez – the first non-Native to live in Manhattan
• Iroquois – inland and to the north
• Anglo Americans
• New York
  • a brief history: 1600-2017
  • Times Square through time
  • Jamaica, Queens

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In memoriam: Eartha Kitt

Eartha Kitt (1927-2008), American singer and actress from the 1950s and 1960s. She is best remembered for singing “Santa Baby” and playing Catwoman. She was one of the most famous black women in the world in her day. In 1952 the New York Times said, “Eartha Kitt not only looks incendiary, but she can make a song burst into flame.” Her sort of music fell out of fashion in the late 1950s with the rise of R&B and rock and roll.

See also:

• Eartha Kitt’s obituary in the New York Times.

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Citi

Citi (1812- ), also known as Citigroup, Citicorp or Citibank, is the biggest bank on Wall Street. Unlike Lehman Brothers, it is considered to be “too big to fail”: if it fell, too many other banks and companies would fall too. So on Monday November 24th 2008 the American government bought a $20 billion stake in the bank and stood behind hundreds of billions of dollars of possibly bad loans. This comes on top of a $25 billion stake the government had bought several weeks before.

All this money is coming from the $700 billion in taxes the government is using to save Wall Street.

The stock market, which fell below 8,000 last week, rose by almost 400 points on the news.

Citi has lost billions in the subprime mortgage crisis and the credit crunch that followed. It had made billions of dollars of home loans to people with bad credit histories.

Citi’s stock price, which stood above $50 before the crisis hit in August 2007, had fallen to $25 by February 2008 and $12 by October. In November it sank even further, to less than $4. Citi has been losing billions and laying off tens of thousands of workers.

Citi is huge. It has branches all over the world and has money in every field of banking. It lends money to foreign governments and to ordinary people. It aims to be a universal bank, a bank you can turn to no matter what you want.

If you have a credit card from Macy’s, Sears, Shell, Home Depot or Staples it is, in fact, behind the scenes, a card from Citi. Even some American Express cards come from Citi.

In the 1960s it gave the world the MasterCard. In the 1970s it was one of the the first banks to have ATMs, money machines. In the 1980s it was one of the big banks in New York. In 1998 it became not just big, but huge when it merged with the Travelers Group and changed its name from Citicorp to Citigroup. (It later parted ways with Travelers and changed its name to just Citi).

Citi is made up of not just the old City Bank of New York but also all the other banks and companies it has bought or merged with along the way: Bank Handlowy, Smith Barney (“We make money the old-fashioned way. We earn it.”), Salomon Brothers, Banamex, Primerica and others.

It is now partly owned by not just the American government, but also by Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and a Saudi Arabian prince, Alwaleed bin Talal.

Its size is what has saved it – so far. Losses in one part of the company can be made up by gains in others. And when all else fails, the American government can pump in billions!

Yet its huge size makes it hard to manage and lead, makes it slow to change. And all the little pieces that have been bought up over the years do not work well together and that will not change overnight.

– Abagond, 2008.

See also:

• The fall of Lehman Brothers
• credit crunch
• dollar

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Race in New York

Race in New York City has a strange double quality. On the one hand it is a pretty liberal place, a place where if you have a good education you can do well no matter what your colour, where most people will not try to force you into one box or another and you can just be yourself. And yet, on the other hand, it is profoundly racist. Something that stands out clearly in the Sean Bell killing, in how some neighbourhoods are as white as snow and others as black as coal, in how the neighbourhood can change suddenly when you cross a street.

New York is about one third white, one fourth black and 40% everything else – mostly Chinese and Latin American but also everything else under the sun. It is a city of 800 languages. Babel backwards. Not only do people come to New York from all over the world, but they even mix and create colours that are seen nowhere else – except maybe in London or Paris.

In most of the rest of the country there is just black and white and people who try to force you into one box or the other. But in New York, because there is a broad middle between black and white, because it has in it strange colours that no one can figure out, you can pretty much live your life without being forced into a box. And that gives you a freedom to be yourself in a way you cannot do in most of America.

This is not to say that when you go to look for work or for a place to live, employers and landlords are not going to look at you and come to unspoken conclusions about your colour. You can have an Ivy League education and still there will be plenty of white people who think you are not as good as they are and turn you away – or pay you less than whites.

But the thing is New York needs people with good educations, more than there are. That helps to make your education matter more and your colour less.

And yet the police are beyond bad. Sean Bell was just what made the papers. The police, in general, do not care much about black lives – not even black middle-class ones. As I found out from living in Jamaica, Queens, they care more about the lives of even white foreigners than they do about black Americans.

And it is very hard, at least for me, to see poor black neighbourhoods less than a mile away from rich white ones. But in New York you see that. It was something I saw day after day, year after year. I still cannot get it out of my mind. And there is no way for me to make sense of that other than naked racism on the part of whites. Either that or their hearts are made of stone.

See also:

• Race map of New York
• black ghetto
• New York
  • Uptown
  • Jamaica, Queens
    • Sean Bell
• Audre Lorde: Eye to Eye – in particular her Snowsuit Moment
• Race in America
  • All blacks are racist
  • All whites are racist
    • The hearts of white people
• race and crime and poverty and television

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Race map of New York

How it was in 2000. Yellow is for whites, green for blacks, red for Hispanics, blue for Asians and white for the mixed parts of town:

See also:

• Race in New York
• Race in America

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West 109th Street in 1987

Here is something I wrote to a friend in August 1987 about the difference between West 111th and 109th Streets in Manhattan. In those days 111th had been mostly gentrified but 109th not:

… I walked back up Broadway and for a change of scene I turned right at 109th Street, left onto Amsterdam Avenue and then left again on 111th Street to get back to Broadway.

The difference between 109th and 111th was amazing.

It was early Friday evening, the sun had gone down but light was still in the sky, and 109th was full of people: men sitting at card tables on the sidewalk playing dominoes, boys on bicycles, girls standing together talking, parents sitting on steps, a boy sticking his hand into the low spray of a fire hydrant, people talking, music playing, black kids and white kids playing together. It was a neighbourhood in the true sense as opposed to a street of buildings where people live next to each other.

I went up two blocks and turned down 111th Street. It was like another world. It was quiet and almost dead: one boy on his bicycle, a couple walking their dog, two girls leaning out the window watching their father taking out the trash. Both Hispanics and Anglos live on this street, but the minute I turned the corner onto 111th Street I could tell it was mainly Anglo: it was so dead. Dogs and cats take the place of children. People sitting apart in their air-conditioned rooms takes the place of a true neighbourhood.

I have seen this difference before: a black neighbourhood in the city is full of life while white suburbs are not just quiet but almost dead: you can walk down a street and hardly see anyone. The only way you can tell people live there is that the grass is cut and cars are parked. But you almost think they had all died an hour ago of some strange disease – like in some science fiction story about the end of the world.

People get down on the city and lately I have been getting sick of it myself, but things like 109th Street restore my faith. And yet in five or ten years 109th will be gone, a memory: it will be gentrified and become a street of air-conditioned yuppies instead of a street of laughing children.

This difference between white gentrifiers and others was not just something I imagined. Here is how many white gentrifiers see Harlem in 2008 according to a New York Times article:

And many new residents are uncomfortable with Harlem’s noisy street life, including sidewalk barbecues that can draw large crowds. Some believe there are too many churches on the one hand – Harlem has more than 100 houses of worship – and a casual flouting of the law on the other, with people littering, double-parking and drinking alcohol on the street.

See also:

• gentrification
• New York
• Uptown

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Bre Scullark

Brittany “Bre” Scullark (1985- ) is an American fashion model for the Ford modelling agency. In 2005 she came in third place on season five of Tyra Banks’s television show “America’s Next Top Model” (ANTM). In 2008 you sometimes see her on the “Tyra Banks Show”, as beautiful as ever. What eyes! And what amazing cheeks!

“Bre” (sounds like “Bree”) is what her friends have long called her.

After the show she landed a print modelling contract for Dark and Lovely hair colouring, appearing on their boxes. She has modelled for Prada, Valentino and Nicole Miller. She has been in television ads for Target, Old Navy and Pantene and is a spokesmodel for Ambi Skincare.

Magazines she has appeared in, among others: Vibe (June 2006), Essence, ElleGirl, CosmoGirl (June/July 2008), Hype Hair, Mahogany, Cover and Six Degrees.

You can see her in the music video “Change Me” by Ruben Studdard.

She has also been a television presenter on the show “Certified” for Music Choice. She is good on camera – or maybe it just seems that way to me because I am so taken by her beauty.

She is from New York, growing up in Harlem, which she has seen go from crack to Starbucks. She goes to the Abyssinian Baptist Church.

She had always wanted to be a model, but she never thought it would come to pass. But then one day she went down to Macy’s to try out for “America’s Next Top Model”. She and 2400 other women! That night she slept on cardboard on the pavement to keep her place in line. The next day she tried out. They kept calling her back and calling her back and then they sent her to Los Angeles: she had beat out 36,000 women all across the country for a place on the show!

Although she came a long way on the show, the judges felt that Nicole Linkletter and even Nik Place were better (but where are they now?). She was CoverGirl of the Week twice. Twiggy was one of the judges.

On the show she is probably best remembered for the Stolen Granola Bar Incident. She accused Nicole of taking her Granola bar. To get back at Nicole she emptied her Red Bull drinks and refused to pay for them. Looking back she now thinks the television producers took her Granola bar to set her off.

She says the show was a very humbling experience. Tyra Banks taught her how to handle herself as a young woman. The show changed her life, almost overnight, making her name as a model.

Her two heroes are Jesus and her mother.

She likes gopel music and hip hop, particularly Lil Wayne and T-Pain.

She has a butterfly tattoo above her left breast.

Some on the show said she was too short. She is 5 foot 8 or 172.5 cm, which is at the low end for models.

She says that if you want to model, do not let your skin colour or shade or your size stop you.

She says:

Succeed in stepping stones, never expect longevity in this career overnight, or it wouldn’t be well deserved.

See also:

• fashion model
• black fashion models
• Tyra Banks
• Twiggy
• YaYa Da Costa
• Harlem
• hip hop music
• Jesus Christ

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