Take the 125th Street ChallengeIt is not racist to permit yourself to feel fear when you are afraid or to permit yourself to feel revulsion when you are revolted.
By Alexander Zubatov
July 30, 2022
As we passed, one by one, downtown’s hipster havens and the tourist hubs of midtown, the white and Asian population riding the Bronx-bound D train on a steamy Saturday night in July began to thin out. At 59th St./Columbus Circle, the last chance to transfer to a local train before the D would speed some 66 blocks north toward Harlem’s central thoroughfare of 125th St, or “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.,” most of the remaining whites and Asians disembarked.
“Next stop, 125th St.!,” the conductor barked and then said it again, louder, with more emphasis, as if to make certain we knew what we were in for. Soon after, the familiar two-tone accompanying the closing of the doors sounded, and we were off, the rhythmic clank of metal on metal, the tunnel lights shooting by, the train speeding up, slowing, speeding up again, screeching, lurching and moving on.
The onboard crowd was boisterous: sun people, for better or for worse, large in every dimension, with big bodies, big voices, Big Gulps in hand, big beats bounding off of the subway walls. It was easy to feel small in their midst, to cower in a corner, reduced to silence and stillness.
The train platformed at 125th St., and I got out along with what seemed like a good third of my car’s remaining occupants. I wove through the crowd, navigating my way around a small clot gathered around some sort of latter-day beatboxer, then made my way to the staircase, following the labored ascent of a 300 pound woman clad in a cellulite-baring, barely-there miniskirt. I got out on the northeast corner of 125th and St. Nicholas Avenue, the smell of grease from the Popeye’s on the corner mixing with a street vendor’s fragrance of incense.
I headed east. Much of Central Harlem, and 125th Street especially, had undergone significant gentrification, with all its associated upsides and downsides, as a result of plummeting crime rates in the area during the Giuliani and Bloomberg years and even into the Bloomberg carryover that insulated the first years of Bloomberg’s successor (whom it is better not to name for the sake of keeping this essay civil) from the full impact of his pro-crime policies.
* * *
I was on my way to visit an old friend who lived just off of Lennox. Lionel is a Caribbean immigrant and successful entrepreneur who’d moved into one of the area’s many beautiful old brownstones during Harlem’s late gentrification phase a few years back, when people were sure the 1970s and 1980s crack-era New York was gone for good, lingering only as a fitting subject for nostalgia about a vibrant, wild and free, sweaty, seedy, scary city before Disneyfication had taken hold—not a place in which we would ever want to live but one in which we still craved to set our imaginations free to roam for two or three hot summer nights.
Lionel and his wife, Marla, a white American-born Left Coaster, teamed up for a home-cooked meal full of international flavors, with her following a Peruvian chicken recipe to perfection and he, having grown up in a culture in which everyone did the cooking, able to freewheel a delectable lamb chili over coconut rice.
* * *
Marla and I were the only Caucasians we came across in the whole park, and there was nothing wrong with that. She lived in this neighborhood (even if Lionel confided that he often felt uneasy when she ventured out at night alone), and for me, meandering through the city’s diverse ethnic and racial environs, sampling the culture, the cuisine and the scenery, was something of a pastime.
What was troubling was not the race of the park’s occupants but, yet again, their dress, their verbiage, their behavior. There were the teetering addicts, too many to count, that one could now see behaving erratically or falling asleep standing up throughout the city. Commodore eyed them warily as we passed, sensing, perhaps, the disturbance in their souls the way some cats seem to sense tumors growing inside their longtime owners.
* * *
“I don’t understand it. This is their park,” Lionel remarked, with the distance his Caribbean heritage permitted him. “If I used this park like they did, for picnics and barbecues and whatnot, I’d be proud of it and keeping it immaculate. I’d be setting an example for my children and for anyone who happened to be passing through.”
And that was the nub of it. The quality that was glaringly lacking all around—in the way the people here looked and talked and walked and generally conducted themselves—was self-respect. It was a quality that no amount of well-intentioned antiracist intervention, activism and outreach could provide because, by its very nature, it could only be built up from within.
* * *
Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/30/take-the-125th-street-challenge/
