Because you know, white people are lame. I moved to Williamsburg from New Hampshire because I was looking for a little change of scenery. Everyone in Keene looked exactly the same. Same shirts tucked into the same long pants, and everyone was white, wrinkled, and bald. It was boring. So you could imagine how thrilled I was to get to Brooklyn: everyone was pierced, scarved, bearded, and with iPhone. I breathed a sigh of relief; finally, a little bit of diversity!
But things aren’t as cheap as they used to be, and I stumble into people who use the term “employed” more and more generously. Even though I never talked to the Puerto Ricans or the Polacks, I did enjoy the Polish delis scattered about my neighborhood, and I especially enjoyed yelling at little Puerto Rican kids to quit breaking open fire hydrants to cool off in the summer. My roommate saw a kid letting the water pour onto his back, and he came up with a great name for it: ‘wetback.’ So that’s what we started calling them. I’d never heard that before. See, that’s the kind of awesome cultural stuff I was missing out on in New Hampshire.
All I can see now for the most part are coffee joints and art galleries and internet cafes. I guess the internet cafe makes sense, because a lot of my friends are ‘professional bloggers’ by trade and that’s where they go to work, but all of my friends agree that the whiteness is kind of a drag, too. One of my friends, Alexandra (a guy) was talking about the decade-long ‘gentrification process’ that one of his old ‘mentors’ at ‘university’ lectured on. He says that privileged white people have been forcing the ethnic enclaves out for at least a decade, and so he had been forewarned. “So when my parents bought me a condo in East Williamsburg, I sort of knew what to expect,” he said. “You know how they knocked down that run-down subsidized housing complex, buncha Italians lived there? Probably not, because you weren’t here for that. Well, that’s where I live now. It’s a really obscure area, you probably never heard of it. I like the realtors that sold the place, but I liked their earlier condos better.” As for a lot of my other blog friends, they feel the need to do more to stop the emigration of all the culture. Thing is, none of us really eat at the Polish delis because we’re vegetarian, we don’t go to the usual mom-and-pop coffeehouse because the stuff isn’t fair-trade and doesn’t taste good, and we usually can’t afford a late-night pasta dinner after spending our allowances on post-rock shows…but, still, we do like that the stuff is there, and we write love poems that name-drop those places sometimes. Since we can’t, don’t, or simply won’t purchase anything at those joints, we do what we can to support them. Like, you know, we’ll blog about it. We’ll post on Twitter that we’re standing outside a particularly ethnic restaurant. And everyone, I mean everyone, takes pictures of all the Puerto-Ricans and posts them on Flickr. That’s how we’re giving back to a community that gave so much to us.
As for me and all my gallery buddies, some of them can’t handle all the rent increases, and we even have to just move out. “Yeah, rent is going above how much my parents are willing to shell out for me and my hardcore band to stay here,” my buddy Alexander (a girl) was telling me. Instead of Alex, she goes by X, in solidarity with Malcolm X, even though she’s white. She’s gonna move somewhere else in September. “I don’t know where else I’m comfortable living; Bushwick still seems a little seedy. Nothing that looks like Harlem used to look, that’s for sure.”
