By Nicholas Powers
“Buy me the damn beer,” he pointed a hard finger at the two white boys. “No don’t fucking look at each other!” Faces pale, they looked at the homeless drunk brotha in the bodega then at us, all the Black customers staring in silent judgement.
I was angry at them for being here. I was born in New York. My family came to Bed-Stuy from Puerto Rico decades ago and I remembered being scared of the city as a child. A dark, manic energy crackled in my brain when I thought of those times. Trash. Angry eyes in slow creeping cars. Dirty subways. Yelling. I came back as adult to heal those memories and now, Bed Stuy was vanishing before I could.
“Ok, gentrifiers,” I thought, “welcome to the hood.” I see your scared eye-to-eye telepathy begging each other to man up—lips pulled tight like zippers. “You wanted cheap rent? You wanted street cred? Okay, so pull up.” But they caved. It was almost audible—like bone breaking. One blinked in helpless anger and reached for his wallet. The drunk got his beer. We turned back to our business.
White Guilt: The individual or collective guilt felt by some white people for harm resulting from racist treatment of ethnic minorities by other white people both historically and currently
The white guy coughed up money because he was scared, sure, but on some deep level he felt he owed the guy. My hood has white people wracked by guilt. They need to release the anxiety of being interlopers. Some choose atonement like giving money. Some camouflage their privilege with ragged clothes, tattoos to the neck and 19th Century beards. Some practice obsessive allyship and recite social justice jargon like a litany. How they dress, talk, and walk in our neighborhoods all adds up to an aesthetic of white guilt.
They think hiding privilege with these methods is the same as challenging it. What they can’t hide is the ghetto curiosity that drives them here. How they feel white privilege more sharply against a black backdrop. How cops suddenly showed up to guard them. How new bars, new cafes and new restaurants opened, seemingly out of nowhere to cater to their tastes. How they shared the sidewalk with locals whose destroyed lives were plain to see. How the stumbling drunks and angry men cursing on the corner made them feel the power of their whiteness.
When white gentrifiers first moved here they never walked alone. Always in twos. Men in hoodies. Women with headphones. They came for cheap rent. But I saw a feral hunger in their eyes, an excitement to be in the hood that was erotic. I wonder if after a white life in white suburbs, learning white history, they came to bear witness to their ancestor’s violence?
They knew their people stole our land and stole our bodies, worked us, sold us, threw us in the backs of buses, threw us into ghettos, threw us into jails and once in a while, if we got out of control, threw us crumbs. Did they drive their U-Hauls here, move in and take that first walk in the hood so they could see firsthand the evidence of history, maybe on a subconscious level, tingle with white power?
If so, they had strategies to cope. Atonement was one. Camouflage was another. Outside the new bars I saw them dressed in ripped jeans, ripped shirts, ripped hair. They smoked. They drank. Sitting inside I heard them talk of their parent’s homes and cars and second homes and third cars. The tattered dress code was a way to hide their actual class and it was also a masochistic performance. It was as if saying without saying, “I am not a fortunate son.”
But maybe I was the fortunate son? I had a steady paycheck, flew out of state, came home with a backpack, talked with neighbors who couldn’t afford the subway. Bed-Stuy was where my family broke apart. Grandparents fighting until my uncles and aunt left for the far corners of the nation. Bed-Stuy was where mom saw a man shot and as a child I felt danger in cold eyes, as hungry strangers sized me up. I came back from an expensive college to see if I could survive what they couldn’t. But it was too late. Old Bed-Stuy was vanishing. White washed by gentrifiers who had their scores to settle.
The longer they stayed, the more I saw guilt on their skin. When gentrifiers leaned on the bar, their tattoos crawled like inky vines up limbs. A dragon on a calf. A tribal emblem on the arm. Calligraphy on the neck. When I bumped into a poet friend on the street, I asked her if she noticed all the tattoos.“Yeah, now that you ask,” she looked up as if going through rolodex of memory. “It’s like their ashamed to be white,” I said, “If they can’t have melanin…”, “They’ll use ink,” she barked out laughing.
And they know how to sound outraged. Liberalism is an obsessive liturgy. The rhetoric was a protective magic spell conjured to keep them safe in occupied territory by virtue signaling that they are on our side. In cafés or bars I heard the words “intersectional” and “white privilege” and “cultural appropriation” flying from face to face. It sounded convincing until I looked past their window reflections to the street outside, where a man rolled his wheelchair up to cars to ask for money.
On election night, I watched the map of America anxiously as the votes were counted. Every stare was colored red for conservative except for the liberal cities that floated like blue islands in a sea of lava. I looked up from the laptop to my street. Here is that concrete island. Here white youth come to get their GED in race. They use it well. White guilt is the KY jelly of gentrification—it lubricates the exit of the locals and the coming in of new stores and higher prices.
In a perverse way, they transform this guilt into a source of pride. They get on laptops and scold white America for being backward, behind the times, racist. They email, Facebook, Instagram, tumble and tweet their contempt for the people they used to be. They share and repost memes about how Thanksgiving celebrates genocide and they support Black Lives Matters and join the call to abolish prisons. I am literally sitting next to them as they hit the send button.
They don’t see me until I sit in their café. In that safe space, they assume anyone who can pay five dollars for a mocha is classy enough to talk to. I remember looking at my reflection in the drink. My face wobbled on the liquid. I was safe. I was a man of color who made his salary at a white institution, typed his work up in white cafes, wrote his articles to white audiences and was celebrated by white critics. I was a bottom feeder of white privilege.
So I stood up and grabbed a table. Heads turned. A voice shouted, “Stop!” I threw the chair at the window smashing our reflections and yelled at everyone in the street to come in and get this money. Yo it was magic! The hood came in. Families jumped over broken glass, beat hipsters, stole their wallets. The Black cook got in on it—chucking hot grease at them. Flames shot up and the drunk brotha from the bodega put photos of Martin and Malcolm X on the burning walls.
I snapped out of it and rubbed my eyes. The gentrifiers typed on their laptops. I sat here, inside the world I criticized. I looked down at my half empty cup, where a face stared back at me as if from the bottom of a well.
Suggested Readings:
Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche by Daryl Micheal Scott (2008)
Humiliation by Wayne Koestenbaum (2011)
The Selected Writings of Walter Pater (1982)
Nicholas Powers is a poet and a journalist. His book “The Ground Below Zero: 9/11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur, Haiti to Occupy Wall Street” was published by Upset Press. His writings appear in Truth Out, Huff Post, Raw Story and The Indypendent. All thoughts expressed are Nicholas’s alone.
