Well THAT Happened…
So…
I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about my neighbors…
I’ve moved to a transitioning neighborhood in East Atlanta…transitioning meaning they’re gradually building new subdivisions in the 200-400k price range in the area to displace lower income families.
We have a few phases in the neighborhood…Phase one is mostly Black tbh, they’re the smaller homes. Phase 2 has newer style homes…honestly mostly white people…Phase 3 is a good mixture now actually, new construction. We have WAY more people of color in Phases 2 and 3 since I first moved in…
My time here has been interesting due to all the stuff has been happening in the past few years race wise. Tray.von, police brutality, protests, the recent Black Student protests. #blacklive.smater
And the neighborhood peanut gallery likes to chime in with generally racist comments, ideas, and fb statuses…to the point where I don’t really hang out with them anymore. (I did more often when I first moved in…)
The tricky part though is that their opinions get reinforced…especially around the holidays when the “transitioning” part of living in East Atlanta makes itself more obvious…lots of break ins or stealing of packages…by people who look like me.
This causes them to call the police on any loitering Black people even if they live here.
Which is again tricky. Some people are okay with this…but again it’s like…we have younger pre-teen kids and teen boys…why can’t they grow up in their own neighborhood without having the police called on them, you know? They’re just kids…
It’s just tough…how do you know the difference?
And then yeah the people who are up to no good, are up to no good, and it’s not cool to take people’s stuff (got broken into when I lived in Decatur myself), but the kids doing this are like high schoolers….and they’re doing it because they don’t know they have other options. The vitriol the neighbors write about them is crazy sometimes…like the kids aren’t human. The way to fix that situation isn’t really to wish them harm or write off 9th graders, it’s maybe to get involved at the school…mentor them..tutor them…keep them too busy to do other things like rob people. I went to Georgia Tech with graduates of our cluster’s high school. Yeah that place has horrible graduation rates, but the ones who are motivated to get out do and do well!
But yeah for the most part, I mostly just keep to myself or do an occasional wave neighbor wise…. I might also stop by the larger neighborhood wide gatherings to show my face…and I’m active on our fb group.
Recently, someone posted about some randomness went down at a local Kroger. Someone cut in line and the affronted person crushed the woman’s pomegranate.
The two then proceeded to fight….and so on and so forth.
Once again, the peanut gallery chimed in with nice hashtags like “pomograntelivesmatter and #kroghetto
Dumb, but in comparison to the other things I’ve seen them post, that was incredibly tame.
I don’t know how these comments were different, but I got a message of apology from some concerned neighbors.
I don’t know how to feel.
Partially amused…partially impressed…partially annoyed…partially curious if they called out the people who made the comments too.
I told them I appreciated their message, that microaggressions are literally a daily thing we deal with, and that I was glad they noticed those comments weren’t cool.
I didn’t really feel like going into more about privilege and all that…or to instruct them about how they should direct their efforts to the OTHER neighbors as a lot of us don’t hang with them because of the frequency of comments like those….
But still I often struggle with my role in correcting people’s perceptions of Black people. I don’t want to be the official representative of the Black experience, (I mean depending on who you ask, EYE don’t even qualify), but I do want to let them know we aren’t a monolith. There’s systematic stuff that happens that doesn’t have an easy answer to correct. The stuff goes deep and back generations…not even on the systematic racism thing but years of self hate…truly imbred self esteem issues that repeats itself over and over again.
I have aunts who call my darker skinned cousins names.
My mom literally sobbed when I first went natural because she though the hair the grew out of my head was ugly.
I think I probably have issues with it too…like I don’t want to straighten my hair because the curls will get damaged, but I am uncomfortable with wearing it in the shrunken state if I don’t do anything to it. Not just because “it takes forever to detangle” IT DOES and I’m not patient enough to go slow and end up ripping knots out…so I wear it in stretched styles….
I’m willing to admit though that a good bit of it is that I don’t think I look good with it in it’s normal state.
I am willing to admit I’ve got some issues with the features I was born with…ones that are inherently Black.
Everyone has their baggage.
The 14 year olds stealing packages and robbing people have similar baggage.
All of this is tough stuff to carry around and try to reconcile.
All of this is just the Black experience.
