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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Lopate: It often shocked me that I was not being bullied. I was the only white kid at summer camp, and nobody picked on me. Why would they be even remotely threatened? There was no reason to pick on me. I felt a little bit ignored. It was their world. I experienced this confusion -- feeling scared and threatened and wondering why there wasn't more tension. And since I'm Jewish, I was threatened as many, if not more, times by the Irish kids, who waited outside Hebrew school, as by the black kids.
Conley: When you would go to, say, a different black neighborhood, to Harlem or to a different area of Brooklyn that was predominantly black, did you immediately feel a different dynamic? I know that when I would go to, say, Spanish Harlem -- which is almost demographically the same as the Lower East Side -- just because it was unfamiliar, and because I didn't see the same faces hanging outside of the Puerto Rican social clubs as I did in my neighborhood, I did feel threatened in that way, which is sometimes remarkably absent in your own home area.
Lopate: I know what you mean, because where I grew up, in a black neighborhood, I definitely felt that people knew who I was, that I belonged. But a friend of mine who went up to Harlem one day was robbed, because everyone knew he didn't belong there.
Lethem: I think there are invisible zones in neighborhoods. I knew when I was moving from the terrain that was dominated by the kids from Wyckoff Housing Project, as opposed to the kids from the Gowanus houses, because they had different turfs, and some of them knew you and nearly had an investment in protecting you. You were OK because you were recognized. Those invisible codes were at work.
When I first lived in this neighborhood, in the early '70s, it was before there was an absolutely racial divide inside public housing. I had a couple of white friends inside the Wyckoff houses.
I knew a Jewish kid who lived there with his older brothers and his parents. The oldest of the brothers wasn't tough, just older, a big chubby Jewish kid, and when I visited he would walk me out of the housing project. He knew he had to. He had his turf and he could escort me back home.
But it strikes me that before those codes are in place, there's a degree of teaching that goes on. In Phillip's essay where he writes about that question: "What you looking at? What you looking at?" I felt such recognition. I remembered how I felt I was being initiated into codes of deference -- that until I'd learned how to move through the streets, I was going to be confronted.
Lopate: By the way, what is the solution to that question, "What you looking at?"
Lethem: Well, it's by definition an unanswerable question. That's the trick to it. You caught that beautifully in your essay: "How am I supposed to answer? What if I were looking at you, what would it mean? Why do I have to try to answer this question that has no answer?"
Conley: When you're alone, or in that sort of street-level interaction, somehow the societal-level paradigm always gets flipped. I don't know if it's because when you're poor and a minority in the United States that you've got nothing to lose, so just growing up that way makes you tougher. But it's likely going to be the person who's in the dominant group of society as a whole who acts very scraping and deferential in that kind of situation and says, "Nothing" when they're asked, "What are you looking at?"
