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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 2115
Registered: 07-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, March 20, 2006 - 09:42 pm: | 
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How the Other Half Lives
Published: March 20, 2006
by: Natasha Santos
Last year, I started talking with another writer here, Pauline, about our neighborhood, Brownsville, Brooklyn, where poor blacks and Latinos live isolated from wealthier minorities and other races. In Brownsville, I've often been afraid to walk down my block alone for fear of being attacked.
For a long time I believed that roaches, violence and chaos were everyone's childhood memories. But as I realized that other people weren't living in fear like I was, I began to feel like a statistic-a black girl who lived in a place where mothers dote on drug-dealing sons and ignore the gun hidden under dirty laundry in the closet.
I wondered if I had less of a chance to achieve the American dream because I had had less of a childhood, and whether my race and the poverty I grew up in would hold me back from success and happiness. I had guidance counselors and teachers who sang the same old song about reaching for the stars and determination, and I believed them enough to get good grades and plan to go to college. But those dreams were starting to sound like fairy tales.
Visiting the 'Other Half'
Pauline and I wanted to interview other teens to find out how they thought their neighborhood, race and class might affect their lives. Our editor told us that she had been brought up in a suburban town where many races and classes attended the same school.
I wanted to visit this place, partly see how the other half lived (the wealthy, suburban, BMW-driving, as-seen-on-TV people) and partly to prove my editor wrong. The idea that many races and classes could live together in a kind of unified community seemed unreal to me.
I'd been taught growing up that most black people live in poor neighborhoods in cities while the suburban life is a kind of Caucasian paradise. Even though I attend a racially and economically diverse school-Edward R. Murrow HS-I just couldn't picture a school in the suburbs looking like mine.
Neatly Manicured Lawns...
I brought all my skepticism with me the morning we got off the train in Norwalk, Connecticut, expecting the cliché of private houses owned by scared upper-class Caucasians ready to move out as soon as a family of color moved in.
Indeed, much of Norwalk looked the way I expected. I saw neatly manicured lawns with houses tucked serenely into foliage and generously spaced apart, giving the inhabitants enough room to have a 50-person cookout in the backyard without disturbing the neighbors.
When we arrived at Brien McMahon, my editor's old high school, I noticed it had a parking lot. "That says it all," I thought. A vision of Beverly Hills 90210 came to me: all the students driving to school in their Ferraris and BMWs with surfers' bodies and manicured nails.
...and Diversity?
So walking inside, I was surprised to find a setting resembling my school: Diversity, loudness, cliques and teachers in the halls making sure that everyone was in line. This was disappointing. For the story I planned to write, I was counting on the school to serve as a metaphor for how naive and sheltered these suburban teens were.
Pauline and I sat down at a table in the cafeteria to question seven teens who had agreed to be interviewed. Jesse, Amanda, Dipti, Daphney, Ashiah, Jessica and Malcolm openly answered the questions we threw at them.
Three were black, one was half-black/half-white, one was Asian-American, one was half-Cuban/half-white and one was Indian-American. When we asked them how they believed their race and class might affect their lives, their answers surprised me. Though they were from different countries, different classes and of different races, they all agreed that African-Americans and other minorities are poor more because of their mindset than because of race.
Daphney, who is black and whose family came from Haiti, said black kids at that school hold themselves back more than the system does. "I think it's because they have fallen into their own stereotypes. They criticize the people who want to get ahead," Daphney said. "This kid asked my sister, 'How come you get such good grades? Black people aren't suppose to get such good grades.'"
Pressure to Perform
Daphney's dad is a real estate agent and her mom is a nurse's aide. They moved to Norwalk because they wanted to raise her in a mixed environment, not just among Haitian- and African-Americans. Daphney said her family is just the opposite of African-Americans who don't believe blacks can make it. They constantly push her to do well in school.
"I'll be the first generation in my family to go to college and I feel pressure… [my parents say] why can't you get a 4.0 in high school?" Daphney told us.
Ashiah, who is black and Haitian as well, said she also believes that African-Americans are their own downfall. "I think black people are stuck in the past. White people beat the blacks in the past so now I hear people saying, 'Master beat me so now I can't get up in the morning.' It's a joke but they're serious. I don't think white people have anything to do with it."
Ashiah said she's also under constant pressure to perform in school. Dipti, who came to the U.S. from India at age 2, said she felt the same way. Most of her adult relatives are professionals in in-demand fields such as engineering and medicine, and Dipti said she dreams of going into medicine, too. She had her entire college and professional career planned out.
'They Haven't Lived'
Jessica, whose mom is black and dad is white, was the only one in the group who said she'd had a direct experience with racism. Although Jessica now lives in one of the wealthiest communities in Norwalk, she said her mom had been a target of racism in the past and had faced discrimination from blacks and whites when she married a white man. Even so, Jessica agreed with the others that your life is shaped mostly by what you do for yourself and the only person holding someone back is herself.
Instead of finding their ideas about race liberating or hopeful, I simply thought, "These kids are obviously naive. They haven't been crowded into understaffed, segregated schools. They haven't been afraid to walk down their blocks alone. They haven't lived." I guess my feelings were obvious, since I sat there looking a bit surly and most of the kids seemed to avoid eye contact with me.
Visiting Norwalk brought me back to another time in my life when I felt angry and different from my classmates. In the beginning of elementary school, my best friend was a quiet girl of Middle Eastern descent named Farrah.
Like most of my first grade classmates, she lived on the "other side" of the school. The school was a boundary between the poor and the well off who lived in comfy houses. I never visited Farrah's house. She never invited me. Maybe in our own ways we could both sense my jealousy.
Jealousy Turned to Anger
Farrah and the kids from the "other side" seemed well kept and happy. Farrah told me her dad drove a cab and her mother always fixed her a snack when she came home. My dad was in jail or never around. When I came home from school, my mom was usually in her bed watching TV or sleeping. I was unhappy, unkempt and malnourished. I felt like an outcast among the perfectly clean, perfectly white 6-year-old kids with parents who noticed every skinned knee and missing tooth. My mother didn't know my birthday, much less if I had a skinned knee.
My jealousy turned into anger and anger turned into violence. I took out my anger about my family and the unfairness of life on Farrah. I stole her things, pulled her hair, and tried to stab her with a pencil once. I picked on her because her family represented, for me, the normalcy that I wished my family had.
'Why Them and Not Me?'
Visiting those teens in Norwalk reminded me once again of all the advantages I haven't had in life and made me feel doomed to fall through the cracks in society. In the months after the interview, I wrote several angry drafts of this story, lashing out at those teens for living in a bubble.
I just wanted to rant about all the experiences I could've had, all the things I could've been if I had been born into their lives. I felt frustrated and shortchanged. What invisible hand had given me hamburger while they got steak? Why them and not me?
But as time passed, I started to feel a bit ashamed of the things I said in my rants-the stereotypes I was writing about rich people and white people, even though most of the teens we met in Norwalk weren't rich or white, just working- and middle-class.
Will I Escape the Mold?
It took me a year to sort out all my feelings and think through what they were saying. I still think those teens are naive to believe that race hasn't and won't shape their lives in any way, but at the same time I could kind of see why they would think that way. They've been lucky to live a place where racial and social boundaries don't seem to feel as constricting as they feel to me, living in Brownsville.
These days I'm feeling a bit more hopeful that success comes from a mixture of things-not just where you come from and how society views you, but also what you think and who you are and how much you work for it. There are those who escape the mold and go on to be great despite their background and culture. Those are the exceptions, but I'm trying to believe I'm capable of being one of them.
Maybe one day-when I've gone to college and have a six-figure salary-I can shed my jealousy and pessimism. Maybe I'll move from Brownsville and find a place in the surreal suburbs. Maybe one day it'll be my kids who are saying that success has nothing to do with race, that those days are over and that it's all in my head. Maybe.
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Roxie
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Roxie
Post Number: 741
Registered: 06-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, March 21, 2006 - 07:24 am: |
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Way to generiaze natasha.
"In a bubble" MY ASS.
It's women like her that made my own childhood a
nightmare. It wasn't my fault I had more than
she did materially, but it sure as HELL didn't
make my life
any easier. It didn't stop my father from bring
guns in the house or breaking every window with
his bare hands, or yelling at me for not
ordering the right food at KFC. It didn't stop
those racist indian therapists from treating me
like a dog day in and day out in the hospital,
destroying my insides with medicatons and the
same verbal abuse my dad gave me because they
hated my mother's succes and decided to take it
out on me.
And then I had to deal with not only MY OWN
sheltered peers taughting me for not being able
to stay up past ten among other minor bullshit,
but guilt trips from girls like natasha and my
own relatives who feel I have no right to
complain because I have a "nice house".
Well you know what I say to Natasha?
FUCK YOU! |
Roxie
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Roxie
Post Number: 745
Registered: 06-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, March 21, 2006 - 09:20 am: |
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I'm calm now.
The upper middle class is just as restrictive for blacks as they are for whites and if you are different from the rest of the group you never get any peace. There is more of a pressure to conform and keep up appearances that those who are naturally rebellious are never nurtured by their parents or friends. In the lower classes problems aren't delt with cause everyone has their own problems to deal with, while in the suburbs, everyone's so focused on trying to look perfect that problems (or the people with those problems) are supressed or hidden away rather than helped. Of course Natasha cannot see that.
I'm not saying our problems are worse up the ladder, but natasha is just like everyone else I've known before: believing that money and a different enviroment makes the problems dissapear.
Money only relieves the pain, it doesn't make it go away.
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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 2118
Registered: 07-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, March 21, 2006 - 10:44 am: |
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When we asked them how they believed their race and class might affect their lives, their answers surprised me. Though they were from different countries, different classes and of different races, they all agreed that African-Americans and other minorities are poor more because of their mindset than because of race.
Daphney, who is black and whose family came from Haiti, said black kids at that school hold themselves back more than the system does. "I think it's because they have fallen into their own stereotypes. They criticize the people who want to get ahead," . . . .Daphney said her family is just the opposite of African-Americans who don't believe blacks can make it. They constantly push her to do well in school.
Ashiah, who is black and Haitian as well, said she also believes that African-Americans are their own downfall. "I think black people are stuck in the past. White people beat the blacks in the past so now I hear people saying, 'Master beat me so now I can't get up in the morning.' It's a joke but they're serious. I don't think white people have anything to do with it."
_______________________________
Hi, Roxie..
aren't these kids guilty of the same thing that Natasha, at least, admitted to being guilty of?
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Roxie
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Roxie
Post Number: 746
Registered: 06-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, March 21, 2006 - 12:13 pm: |
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Your right. My emotions in control again.  |
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