Anyone who bristles at the imaginary scenes of sexual violence in a Tyler the Creator rhyme is certainly not prepared for Kara Walker’s visual narratives of horror. Walker has become known for her illustrations of the not so imaginary sexual and physical crimes of the antebellum south. Her large black paper silhouettes of rapes and lynchings have decorated the walls of many a prestigious museum, from New York to Paris. In Dust Jackets For the Niggerati- And supporting Dissertations, Drawings Submitted Ruefully by Kara E. Walker, now on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co, Walker continues to explore the grotesque situations of slavery, racism, sexuality, violence and gender in America. But a few of the subjects have been removed from the south into the space of the northern cities.

What struck me as the most interesting part of the exhibit, a collection of about 40 graphite drawings and some hand printed texts, was the theme of the female artist. In “Billie Holiday” and “Nina Simone”, Walker shines a light on the abuse and insecurities of the most talented women who are known best for their creative contributions to the struggle of black folk in the mid-twentieth century. One of the drawings, “Excape”, sent me on a Dana-esqe (protagonist of sci-fi novel Kindred) trip into the past as I thought about the subject- a runaway slave girl who tightly clutches a guitar as she wades in the water- and the real life characters, women who scarcely escaped the death of slavery with their life and talents in tow.

In fact Kara Walker’s work maybe the visual contemporary to Octavia Butler’s Kindred because she plays so much with time and space with her images. “Muckracking Prophet from the 21^st Century Fortells Coming Doom” is a perfect example of this point. In the piece, a woman in stilettos dances on an auction block to an audience of slaves and overseers and in the backdrop a servant girl is distracted by her iPhone. Although Walker’s subjects occupy a certain era, she artfully blurs the line between past and present and makes the viewer focus on how contemporary the issues are.

Margaret Bowland’s solo show at Babcock Galleries, Excerpts from the Great American Songbook, brings me back to the days of hot combs by the stove and fresh Easter Sunday clothes.

It is a wonder how Bowland captures this facet of young Black American culture so accurately. That is until you notice the direct references to Kehinde Wiley and Kara Walker, which shows her scope of influence.

The portraits hold beautiful, somber and precocious young girls as the subjects. In the illustrations, little brown girls wear halos of cotton over pomade greased scalps and single plated name chains around their necks. Their faces bring me back to the days of summertime block parties where copper skin glistened in between the ropes of double-dutch games.

In the quiet and carpeted rooms of the gallery the dark brown eyes in the portraits look down on the viewers as if asking for help. Yet they are not pitiful. The girls give off an air of agency and self-assurance.

It is Bowland’s belief that “sorrow allows beauty to cast a shadow.” That notion is evident in the vibration of the collection. Yet, I couldn’t disagree more with the artist’s statement. When I was in the gallery with my Nike Dunks stuck to the floor, mouth slightly ajar and my mind completely enthralled I was struck by the correlations between the portraits and Willow Smith’s new single, “21^st Century Girl.”

Smith is a contemporary example of how a little brown girl’s life experience does not have to be steeped in sorrow for beauty to shine through.

One can only hope that the visages of somber Black girls become more apparent in the artistic world as long as the triumphant voices like Lil miss Smith’s continue to resonate.

-Jay-Z, Monster

It was around 2 am on a calm summer night in Bedford-Stuyvesant. There was still life on the streets. Senegalese men in traditional Muslim garb hung outside the twenty-four hour Halal restaurants. Homeless schizophrenics mumbled as they moseyed on down the street. And he and I walked hand in hand down Fulton Street toward the Franklin avenue train station. We had just left a friend’s house where the three of us spent hours talking about Hip-Hop, the cosmos, poetry, dreams and magic, regular topics of conversation for young, urban artists such as ourselves.

We also talked about love. Usually, when I say it aloud, love, it tastes like a cliché. In today’s consumer culture it has become more of a selling point than an actual experience. It is air brushed and glossed over in the trite plots of the romantic comedies that get pumped out of Hollywood incessantly. It gets trivialized in the empty lyrics of many songs of all genres. Using the word without any intention to concretize it with action is as trendy as sporting those god-awful Ugg boots and matching leggings. It isn’t often that I experience the unassuming affection for another. Yet there are moments like these on Fulton street.

“You’re the only girl who I hold hands with and the palms of my hands never get sweaty,” he said. He is a Mexican American kid born in Brooklyn and raised in the suburbs of Queens. He is a freestyle rapper and poet, who can write some of the illest punch lines and couplets I’ve ever heard. His hair was gelled and sculpted into a sort of pompadour, which makes him look like a Hip-Hop Sonic the Hedge Hog in high top Adidas sneakers. And on a late night on Fulton Street, in Bed-Stuy, he sticks out like a black kid on a hockey team.

I guess that is why they targeted him. As we walked holding hands, with blank stares and faint smirks, our heads still in a daze from the heavy conversation, they began heckling. One of the men, a drunkard in his late forties, cupped a beer in a brown paper bag. He and his buddy stood in the shadows on the side of the street furthest from the curb. The man with the beer looked me up and down, and licked his lips. He grabbed his crotch and screamed at the kid next to me. “Mmmm mm uh, you don’t know what to do with all a dat, nigga!”

He and I looked into each other’s eyes, clenched our palms closer together and doubled over with laughter. We kept walking. I felt the drunkard’s eyes still tattooed to my nether regions as he continued to yell nonsense behind us. We laughed all the way to the train station.

My friend, his name is El, and I weren’t dating. In fact he was on his way back to Queens to meet his girlfriend. El and I met through the youth poetry slam community, where hundreds of kids, ages 14-19, from the tri-state area would fill up venues like the Bowery Poetry Club and The Nuyorican Poet’s Café. We would perform poetry in a series of competitions in hopes of wining a spot to be on of the six poets on the NYC youth poetry slam team. Eventually El and I made it to the last six. As a team, while learning the art of writing and performing poetry we were also reminded of the art of love. It was normal for us to hold each other when we needed support and rub each other’s shoulders while we were choked up on the truths that we shared amongst ourselves.

We stood in the train station laughing until tears ran down our faces. We laughed and slapped each other’s shoulders. We laughed and leaned on the turnstiles to keep our balance. We laughed and laughed until we missed our trains.

There was no way to explain to those men, or anyone else who mistook us for a couple, that the love we shared was not the romantic kind. They would never believe that our desire to hold each other was as pure and innocent as the way children demand to be held. As we get older, we have experiences that make us cynical and that teach us to be afraid to reach out. Or we are taught that it is inappropriate to ask for love and help. But I don’t give a fuck about most rules so I reach out, often. Although, most times I get shot down rejected and sent on my way. I never stop reaching. And there are those rare moments when someone reaches back. Like that summer night on Fulton Street when we held each other’s hands and laughed at the rest of the world that was too afraid to love the way we did, purely, innocently and without asking for anything in return.

All endings may be artificial, but this night ended with a savage beating, so at least we have a clear point at which to break. But although we begin here with drinks after Parvati’s play, this is really the middle. A better beginning would be the night I met Parvati, or even the night I met Romit, and it would definitely include all of the revelations about Parvati that Romit made to me. But we need a beginning that holds everything together; a container for the events of this night. And so we start with drinks.

The play was bad. There’s no way around this. It wasn’t painfully bad. Rather, it was an Indian version of Friends placed on stage and set in a call center. It was timed like a sitcom; paced as if the writer was pausing for commercial breaks that never came. Priya and I laughed hysterically at a golden shower joke. The rest of the auditorium was silent.

After the play, Parvati pretends to want our opinion. I limit my comments to facts; “It was the best play I’ve seen in Bombay,” and “the physical comedy was really committed.” Parvati is actively inviting fawning, but the play made that difficult, so I leave it to Romit and the rest of the group.

Not being with the kind of people who think much about money, we’ve ended up on a rooftop bar of a five star hotel, overlooking the sea. The kind of place where everything is made of white leather, the music is bad pop-house, and they try far too hard.

We are nine. My girlfriend Priya and I. Romit is there. A Swiss Indian, I suspect he’s living off of his parents’ largesse after the music/film/television production company that he worked for went out of business, still owing him several months of back pay.  Although he will eventually go on to join the entertainment wing of a large consulting firm, at this point he’s mostly trying and failing to produce films and music on his own. There’s Vijay, a 36 year old, massive pothead, indie film producer. He makes the kind of English language films watched by rich metropolitan Indians that are often only half as clever as what they strive for. Sundance bait. I knew him for almost a year before I found out that he has a wife and two children in another city. He’s rather baby-faced and doesn’t try to advertise his entanglement, but despite the whispers of wild group sex I’ve heard, I doubt whether his efforts at infidelity lead to much. From what I can tell, his job mostly involves begging various investors for money, and he’s just taken on his first mainstream commercial Hindi movie to pay the bills. Parvati is his new star. She’s here, of course. A stunning Australian Indian, fresh out of law school, who has moved to India so that her acting career can take off.

Our group has picked up two Caucasian members. An Australian with a social climbing Indian-Canadian friend and a French guy with the Indian fashion magazine editor. They don’t talk too much, or perhaps I just don’t listen too much, and their presence is only notable for the fact that you couldn’t have chosen two more stereotypical representatives of their respective nations. The Aussie is loud and brash, sporting an unkempt mullet, healthy stubble, and a loud white t-shirt with garish flower printing. The French guy works for some French government trade group, has bad teeth, wears an untucked button-down shirt and chain smokes over his daintily crossed legs.

An Indian film director joins us. He’s short, looks a bit like Danny Devito as The Penguin, and he seems incredibly gay. He’s also blatantly hitting on my girlfriend in front of me, telling her how beautiful she is, and loudly scheming on how to get her drunk and me deported. I know she’s not interested, and it’s hard to imagine how anyone could be, but I’m a bit put off by her failure to be more obvious in her disinterest.

The crowd is, to put it gently, privileged. As Kunal, the trollish director becomes ever more sloppily drunk, he flings a glass off of the table. He lambasts the waiter for failing to keep the champagne bucket stocked with tallboys of Kingfisher, as per his demand. Eventually, Romit throws Kunal’s wallet to him, and knocks over a second glass. The bar manager comes over to scold us for breaking two glasses. Instead of apologizing, Kunal begins a tirade about how it’s only a glass, and he’ll call so-and-so to go golfing the next day, and he’ll explain everything. I got the impression that maybe he was talking about the owner of the hotel, but I really couldn’t say. What’s certain is that the point is he can do whatever he wants there. The manager doesn’t bother us much after that.

The other revelers express outrage as soon as the manager leaves, and I’m about to join them until I realize that their outrage isn’t at Kunal for his boorishness, but at the manager for his scolding.  The general consensus is more or less that at the prices we’re paying, the rules ought not to apply to us.

I, of course, am not paying anything, and have been greedily throwing back beer from the moment I confirmed that it was on Kunal’s tab. I don’t have to like someone to accept free beer. I’m a student. The crowd is generally on the tipsier side of things, and Vijay passes me a lump of hash and asks me to roll a joint at the table. I don’t have any influential family members to bail me out in the event of legal difficulties, so I balk at the suggestion and go to the bathroom to take care of the job.

I emerge from the sweltering bathroom with two neatly rolled joints and place them on the table. I had forgotten that I was with the jeunesse doree of Bombay who can do no wrong, so the bright young things proceed immediately start smoking them at the table. Nobody says anything, and hash joints smell much less than weed. Perhaps nobody noticed.

Of course, thanks to Kunal’s insistence that “the champagne bucket at our table must never have less than two cans of beer until I’m too drunk notice,” he quickly meets that goal.

I said these people were high class. That doesn’t mean they have class.

Kunal stands up, slips on a floor that’s lost all traction having been liberally doused with his beer throughout the night, and goes frantically sprawling, tossing chairs as he falls. We attract the attention of both the entire staff and those people who just had chairs thrown at their tables, and decide that this is our cue to depart, navigating a teetering Kunal to the elevator.

Upon reaching the outside of the hotel, there’s some dissent about whether we should stop at a late night street-side kebab joint. I’m hungry, but mostly I’m tired, and I successfully advocate for a return to the suburb of Bandra, where most of these people, Priya included, live. Kunal, sadly, has a very large car and driver, and manages to fit all of us in, so I’m not yet free of him. The gambit to convince Kunal to head back north is based on suggesting that we all go to Zenzi. Of course, I – and most of the others, I imagine – realize that Zenzi will be closed this late on a Sunday night. Kunal is far too drunk for such vagaries. A few minutes into the drive, Vijay turns to me and mutters “Wait, what time is it? Zenzi’s going to be…” – I quickly elbow him. He gets the point and plays along. And so the car alternates between silence and drunken ridiculousness, mostly emanating from Kunal. We, or at least I, make fun of his idiocy by prompting him along to ever more foolish heights by encouraging him in a manner that I assume to be subtle and clever. I doubt very much that it was. In any case, the subtlety bar was set very low in that car on that night.

***

Halfway through the ride home, it happens. We’re on the Western Express Highway. We’re approaching an overpass, locally referred to as a flyover. There are small slums on either side of the road. Traffic slows. It’s the middle of the night. This isn’t normal. Trying to figure out what’s going on, we notice that two lanes of traffic are being diverted into one ahead of us. I don’t know exactly what the laws are, but police traffic-stops in Bombay don’t seem to need any PC and there’s no fourth amendment around here. As I look ahead, I expect to see the familiar road blocks that usually serve as a sign of an interminable wait. Instead, I see a boy, perhaps 17, being thrown to the ground and punched and kicked violently by three others of about the same age.

It takes some time for this to sink in. There is a brutal beating going on in the middle of the street, and nobody is stopping. They are slowly waiting in line, merging into one lane, passing the violence, and speeding back up. I have never before seen Indian traffic this organized. But mostly, I just can’t believe that this many people could pretend that what’s happening right in front of them isn’t happening right in front of them.

Inside the car, it is somewhat chaotic. Kunal can barely figure out what’s going on. Parvati decides that the best action is to open the window and start yelling at them. Romit’s trying to restrain Parvati. Priya is in utter shock. I start muttering, mostly to myself, that we need to stop them. At this moment we merge into the other lane, and the boy gets off of the ground and staggers towards the narrow lane of the slum with the others in fast pursuit. I realize that talking to myself isn’t enough.

“Gari bund karo,” I shout at the driver; “Stop the car.” I hope my Hindi’s right. The driver accelerates.

“What the hell are you doing?” I shout again in Hindi. I know I’m saying this right. Vijay joins in and yells at the driver some more to stop. His Hindi is flawless. But the driver keeps speeding up. Kunal doesn’t want to stop. Romit is skeptical, but I don’t think he’s made up his mind. The driver doesn’t stop. As we get further from the fight, we all stare at each other in a shocked silence. Except it wasn’t a fight, that’s the wrong word. A fight has two sides.

I know that I should be yelling to turn the car around, to stop, to do something, to fight. Something has happened. There’s a heaviness in the car. A guilt, I hope. I can only speak for myself. The more distance that comes between us and the beating, the more impossible it seems to start yelling that we have to turn back. I’m frozen. And I’m ashamed.

But Priya finally emerges from her shock and starts talking. Or maybe she’s still in shock, but at least she’s saying something, unlike the rest of us.

“We have to stop them. We have to stop them. They’re going to kill that boy. We have to stop them.”

***

We have to stop them. They’re going to kill that boy. When I reread the words, they sound dry and antiseptic on the page. They sound like bad writing. But when I go to delete them, to modify, to paraphrase, I can’t do it.  It was that stark.  It was that simple. We had to stop them or they might kill that boy.

Priya was barely coherent. She continued saying that we had to stop, and maybe more. I don’t remember the rest of her words. I think I offered some platitudes about how there was nothing more we could do. I think I hated myself as I said them. I know I do now.

And then she acted. And I can hardly remember respecting someone more. It would have been so easy to keep driving.

“Stop the car,” she said, “I’m going to throw up.”

This time, there were no arguments. The car stopped, she got out, I got out, and she started running across the street. She didn’t have to throw up, but she knew how to make them listen. I chased after her and asked her where she was going.

“We have to stop them.”
“They won’t even be in the street any more.”
“What if they kill that boy?”

We got in a cab. We started back. Romit called to ask what was happening. I answered, and he told me to be very careful, and to call him after to confirm we were okay. I wanted to tell him he was a coward. There were three of them. I’m not a big guy. My girlfriend barely weighs 100 pounds. And there Romit was in a car a quarter mile away with five people. The two of us are driving into the slums to stop a boy from getting beaten to death, and all he can do is tell me to be careful. But I didn’t feel like I was in a position to accuse anyone of cowardice that night. Not after what I didn’t do. We reached the flyover and made the u-turn. We drove back underneath, between the slums. The street was quiet. The alley was quiet. There was nothing.

What if they killed that boy?

***

We rode the taxi back home silently at first. The weight felt too heavy. Priya was crying. I felt like doing the same. Every now and then she would repeat the phrase that was in both of our heads even when unspoken. And then she started to apologize.

For making trouble.
For making us stop.

And as proud as I was of her, I was ashamed of myself. How could she apologize? How could she, the only person in the car who did the right thing, think she had to excuse herself for the inconvenience? How could the rest of us be so worthless, say so little, that she thought that she had done the wrong thing?

“You did the right thing. You’re the only person who did the right thing.” I repeated and repeated and repeated.

And the alternative visions wouldn’t leave my head. What I should have done. What a better me would have done. I saw myself yelling more loudly, more forcibly. I saw myself getting out of my seat and making the driver stop. I saw myself doing anything other than sitting numbly silent as the horror faded behind us in the distance.

But that’s not what I did.

Words by Kerry

The NYC Department of City Planning defines “zoning” as the important process that shapes a city’s landscape as well as its activities. Zoning plans determine what the appropriate sizes and uses of the city’s buildings shall be. The Bloomberg administration has rezoned 20% of NYC’s neighborhoods, which is the largest percentage that has been enforced in the city’s history. In short, this process is the beginning of a major cultural change.

Many New Yorkers believe that Mayor Bloomberg’s intentions are to make the city an oasis for upper middle class Americans, a yuppie-ville town of glass condominiums, spiffy bike lanes and organic farmer’s markets. Many of the changes in landscape and real estate have affected the disenfranchised, lower class and creative/art population.

In an attempt to salvage some of the NYC magic of yesteryear check out this historical museum:

Back in ’91 at a construction site for an office building on Duane Street, the graves of 419 Black American slaves were found. By some divine twist of fate Mayor David Dinkins, NYC’s first and only Black mayor, was in office. Dinkins ordered the halt to all construction on the site to insure a thorough archeological excavation. Over a decade later the spot is now a national monument memorial and a museum/visitor center where folks can learn about New York’s involvement in the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade. After the discovery of the cemetery, professionals estimate the number of graves of the slaves buried in the lower Manhattan region range from 10,000-20,000.

African Burial Ground National Monument Visitor Center
290 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
212-637-2019
Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm

Jay Electronica – “Exhibit A (Transformations)“

Not too long ago, you and I were watching an online interview conducted by Steve Forbes, the chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes media and publishing company, who questioned Warren Buffet and Jay-Z about their success and the art of giving. As the webpage finished loading and the video began to play, our cerebral cortex salivated over the exquisite idea of Jay-Z and Warren Buffet shooting the shit, sharing ideas about business and achieving the American dream.

Jay-Z, the Marcy projects marauder and New York City public school drop out who slung crack cocaine. Warren Buffet, the Nebraskan billionaire investor, who holds degrees from the University of Nebraska and Columbia University. Black and white businessmen, who hail from two different upbringings, yet find themselves equally successful in their respective fields.

While we were watching the video at home in our subsidized housing, where we do not have any worries of the neighbors stealing time on our wireless Internet connection because none of them have computers, you wondered aloud what steps were necessary for you to achieve your own concept of the American dream. Somewhere near the thirty-minute mark in the interview, Buffet admirably explained, in an honest non-condescending tone, that had he been born Black or female his talent would not have been nurtured to the same capacity.

At that point I watched you reach over to the MacBook Pro’s sleek aluminum unibody enclosure and press the pause button on the video. You leaned back in your chair. Then you interlocked your fingers and placed the palms of your hands on the back of your head, cradling the idea of inferiority that has been lodged in your brain for as long as you can remember, rocking it to sleep.

I know you so well; I could already mouth the words to illustrate the thoughts that were taking shape in your mind. So I asked you, how do you feel about being Black and female? These two attributes define your existence in this country and on this planet, until this paradigm shifts you are arguably perceived as the lowliest on the ladder of racist patriarchal hierarchy. How do you feel about this?

You rolled your eyes, started talking out of your neck and making your fingers snap. And you said to me, “It doesn’t matter how I feel about it. Who cares what others think of me? I shouldn’t pay attention to the dismissive magazine editors that detect the stench of a single parent home and public school pedigree in the subject matter of my writing samples. Surely, their perception is that I am too edgy to be the token black intern at their publications. There is too much Lenox Ave in my lexicon. They aren’t comfortable with my political leanings toward Black Nationalism. All too often I point my phonetic pistol at the craniums of young professionals, intruders who gentrify my beloved Harlem, those who happen to work at these very same institutions. Why should I care that I may never get hired at a respected publication?

Being, young, black, articulate and rebellious as a man may get you a mascot status in the realm of academia and the arts, the “cool guy” symbol. But being young, black, articulate and rebellious as a young lady makes you the flaming angry black bitch. But why should I worry about that?

Who cares that these perceptions of my identity and professional worth spill over into my personal life? There are also several people who identify with the same cultural groups to which I belong that consider me to be a nuisance. For example, he and his friends don’t think that the length, and kink to curl ratio of my hair pattern is worthy enough to run their fingers through it. Their commitment to radical and critical thinking come to a screeching halt when it pertains to their personal beliefs of what is beautiful, virtuous and womanly. And never mind that when I try to tell them how I feel the lump in my throat and the flavor of the silence on their tongues tastes like an almost four hundred year old misunderstanding.

This is my lot in life and it’s not a lot to work with but it doesn’t matter how I feel. In this world there is no room for the intellectually violent, emotionally sensitive and hyperconscious black girls who will not compromise what they believe to be right and true, as they make the crucial decisions that lay the brick foundation on paths toward the roads that lead to young womanhood. So it doesn’t matter how I feel. The only thing that matters is what I do to change it.”

From me to you,
Janine Kali Simon

“It doesn’t have to be pretty to be true. But if it is true its beautiful.” -Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava documented everyday people. As one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, he became the first black person to win the Guggenheim fellowship in 1952. His work is best known for capturing the essence of people in Harlem, NYC. His subjects of melanin moved mellifluously on Lenox ave, 125th street, Seventh Ave. These are the same streets that embraced Detroit Red, Malcolm X and El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. These streets. These people and their truth. DeCarava did not brandish overtly political techniques, and he didn’t want to necessarily make a sociological statement. For DeCarava, the people’s stories were not to be scientifically dissected. The point was the rhythm of their life, their honest experiences.

In between that one-fifteenth of a second, there is a thickness” -Roy DeCarava (on Jazz and photography)

With the Harlem Renaissance as a childhood backdrop, a single parent home can become a multi-dimensional universe. Coming of age in Harlem during such a culturally saturated era led DeCarava to collaborate with many of America’s greatest writers and musicians. Aside from the portraits of everyday life, he has a catalogue of portraits that focus on Jazz musicians. Some of them include John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. Also, in 1955, Langston Hughes and DeCarava joined forces to produce a book “Sweet Fly Paper of Life.” Within this work, the poetic fiction of Hughes wraps around a collection of Harlem steeped photographs.

“I never work with light”-Roy DeCarava

DeCarava chose to sacrifice the sharpness of many images by not using flash lighting. Instead, he focused on what the story of the image represented rather than getting the perfect shot. This technical element added to the gritty truth of his work, which continues to offer glimpses into overlooked slices of the past, urging the viewer forward, while making us more sure of our footing.

December 9, 1919 – October 27, 2009
In Memory Of Roy DeCarava

“They fall as if in love,” she thought to herself. In slow downward spirals, alone. If a snowflake is lucky they will find another snowflake to hold their hand. Then together, falling hard, they will commune with family and friends. Sticking together, grounded, becoming blank white sheets of snow that brings out the poet in small children like Aaliyah. With a melanin-dipped fingertip, she bent over, crouched low and wrote her melancholy.

“Help Me”

When she got to school the last bell had already rung. Her daydreaming made her late again. Her thoughts moved faster than her little legs. Scurrying up three flights of steps, pushing through the double doors of the staircase and floating above the crowds of school children filing into classrooms, Aaliyah finally made it to room 365.

She took her permanent seat by the window, where she could watch her stray ideas play in the snow. As Ms. Brown marked Aaliyah late, her nine-year-old frame folded into itself like heartbreak. “How embarrassing,” she mumbled to herself quietly. Aaliyah was not ashamed of being late but embarrassed because she could not understand why she always felt uneasy under the glare of another.

Aaliyah believed eyes and the crystal balls of gypsies to be one in the same. Both unveiled the past if you looked into them close enough, but she much rather preferred looking into snow globes than crystal balls.

Her world was still shaking and so the snow continued to fall outside.

Pulling out a number two pencil tattooed with the marks of her molars, she scribbled, “Why?” onto the desk before erasing it.

She is like a snowflake that falls alone. After landing on the ground, there is only a second left to marvel at her beauty, before she melts away.

-Janine

I was on a bus on a very small road on the Konkan coast, two hundred miles south of Bombay. I was going from a medium sized village to a small town, and I was going far too fast for safety. The bus was full, and so I – along with my French roommate – had been seated in the driver’s compartment, crammed in along with the driver, the conductor, and… someone. It was unclear what role the fifth person served aside from making it more crowded and eating my cashews. Indian long distance buses are terrifying enough when you are sitting in the back. But we were sitting right in front of the windshield and shuddering at each near miss while the driver payed more attention to my cashews than he did to the road.

So when you’re terrified by death and speak only very broken Hindi, how do you respond to a dusky Indian bus conductor telling you that he’s a stupid black monkey and that, but for the fact that you elected George W. Bush, you’re a smart white man? The answer is that you try, and you stumble, and you blurt out some kind of simplistic refutation, and you wish that you had some way to put all these thoughts directly from your head into his. But you can’t. And for the duration of the two hour journey, you watch a man sit in front of you and abase himself because he has skin of a darker color. And it’s heartbreaking.

I’m a White man who grew up in a state with a black population of less than two percent. I went to college at a tiny elite liberal arts institution in small-town New England. Without usually being aware of it, I have been the beneficiary of white privilege my entire life. I always will be. No matter how much I read about it, no matter how much theory I cram into my head, I still go through my day to day life without noticing when I get accepted on every rent application, when nobody hassles me for sitting in the coffee shop for hours after buying only one drink, or when I talk back to a cop as a matter of principle without fearing arrest or violence. But I’ve found a path for any White person from a majority White place who wants to be slapped across the face by his privilege on a daily basis. Come to India. Stay here. Don’t live in one of the expat neighborhoods.

Knowing me is a privilege. I don’t say this out of any hubris; I don’t think nearly that highly of myself. But being seen with me in the part of Bombay I live in provides an immediate status boost. When I leave my apartment, my building manager asks how I am, where I’m going, and if I’ve eaten. I walk twenty feet and pass Rattan and Raju. They ask the same questions, then they try to buy me tea – which I like – and cigarettes, which I don’t. If I don’t have time for the tea, Rattan sometimes tries to physically drag me there – he wants to be seen buying me tea. He is probably in his mid forties, he has nearly shaved grey hair, and no front teeth. He is very, very thin. Rattan sleeps on the floor of the local police station, where he is an office boy. Raju sleeps on the street. But they won’t let me pay for a thing.

Once I make it past the pair, I reach Pappu, the corner drunk. Regardless of the time of day, he’s usually full of moonshine. We chat in broken Hindi as I walk. I reach the intersection. If I take a right, Babu the autorickshaw driver will come have a conversation with me – he likes to show off that he’s the only autorickshaw driver at the stand who speaks English, and seems to revel in the stares he draws while we talk. If I take a left, I’m drawn into conversation of the group of men who hang around the shoe repair stall of Ravi. They ask to listen to whatever is on my headphones, and get thrilled on the rare occasion that they hear Bollywood. They use a stack of paving stones as a stool, and whoever is sitting immediately pops up and demands that I take his place. At this point, I have walked perhaps two-hundred feet. Unless I have been rude and refused to engage with anybody, it has taken me fifteen or twenty minutes.

If I told all the stories, it would be boring. When I take a long distance train at the last minute in the unreserved compartment, there are never enough seats. But White people never take this class, and my shocked neighbors vehemently demand that I take their seats. They stand for hours. When I walk along the local train tracks – slums on either side – I am taken by absolute strangers and introduced to every acquaintance that they can find to show off their new White friend. When I go hiking in the desert near the Pakistani border, the soldier that I pass laughs and asks why I’m out of breath. After all, he says, I’m strong and English. I am called “Sir” every day. I often get into clubs even though an Indian would never pass through the doors if he were dressed like me. And although my race turns off the majority of women, it is a definite plus with those women who share, shall we say, some of my more liberal social values.

I face barriers because of my race as well, of course. But the benefits far exceed the cost.

But this is only what happens. A description of the facts, and only a very small number of them. What is more important, what is truly scary and much harder to see, is the way that this effects the beneficiaries. The way that it effects me. I’ve wanted to write about coming to terms with White privilege in India for some time. The ideas were jumbled about in my head, but they weren’t ready to come out.

Three days ago, I went to a club with a friend. His mother is White, his father is Indian. We approached the door, and the bouncer said “I’m sorry Sir, no single men allowed after 11:00.” And, to my great shame, my first thought was this:

“But I’m White.”

We all like to think that we would be resistants in Nazi Germany. That we would fight Apartheid in South Africa. That we would have been at the heart of the Prague Spring. And when I try to convince a man who is calling himself a stupid black monkey that he’s wrong, I get to reinforce that feeling of benevolence. Only when my privilege is revoked do I discover how much I have internalized it. Only when the basic presupposition that I’m more valuable and more important than those around me is challenged do I even realize how much I’ve come to believe what I’m told. It’s easy enough to rationalize away this response, and when I brought it up with my friend, that is exactly what he did. And I’m not ready to condemn myself as a hopeless racist because of this incident. But it is a potent reminder. I thought I was careful enough, aware enough. I thought that somehow I was immune. But I am not. And I’m glad I experienced this. I am humbled. If it weren’t for these small shames, we might find ourselves confronted with greater ones.

-Kerry

Visiting a friend yesterday, I ventured uptown from union square to an area where the borders of the west side of Harlem and Washington Heights flirt, losing themselves within each other. Getting off the 1 train on Broadway, I then began walking north. In its finest hours Broadway is one of the most seductive smelling strips in the city. It smells like arroz con everythinggoodyoucaneverthinkof.

Mixed well into the waves of smell are the seasonings of memories; I am reminded of the two years I spent on Broadway, at Roberto Clemente Intermediate School 195. Junior High. That was a little time before the blizzard hit this neighborhood. The snowflakes of gentrification flurry around as I go on my way, my mind shifting gears into the present.

It is very cold outside, blistering.

-Janine
1/5/10