In the U.S., Blacks and Whites Live Side by Side, But Not Together

Even if African-Americans rally to the ballot boxes on November 4th in support of Barack Obama, a mixed-race candidate, blacks and whites will still not know much about each other in every day life.

Loretta Dickinson is excited. On Thursday she came with her 4-year old daughter to the Children’s Museum of Brooklyn, opened in 1899. The museum has just reopened a couple of days ago after being closed for a long time. Loretta and her young husband Vince live not far away, in Fort Greene, one of the renovated areas of Brooklyn, on a street where “the whites live on the right, and the blacks are on the left, meaning us,” she explained.

Loretta, 34, like Vince, both salespeople at the high-end department store Sachs of 5th avenue, are black and, for two years now, have been renting one of the charming brown rock houses called brownstones, built after the second half of the 19th century. “We were lucky. It was rented to us by the uncle of one of the salespeople, a white Jewish liberal.”

Previously, the couple lived with the family of a young woman in Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of Brooklyn’s black areas, a neighborhood bigger than the one in Chicago with its over 800,000 residents, “on a corner where you don’t even walk during the day and even less at night by car. There is violence constantly, just like there teenagers and children looking for drugs and money. We couldn’t do it anymore. We have another life now,” she pointed out. And that is why she is now in front of the museum with Lilah.

“I wanted to show her something other than cops, crack, or graffiti.” In Fort Green, you pay a fine of 500 dollars (350 €) if caught spraying graffiti. “Vince has two cousins in prison for at least twenty years for armed robbery, so we may never see them get out,” she mentions. While she wants to make a better future for her daughter, some in Bedford-Stuyvesant would wrongly accuse her of taking her into a place of whites and for whites.

A Mix of 40% White and 35% Black in Brooklyn

A lot of white and black kids come to the museum today. But Lilah will not be playing with two other Brooklynites, Suzie and Bruce. The two white children are carted off by their mothers who suddenly move them a little farther away to draw instead of going down the slide.

“We are part of the comfortable working class (the class that works and gets by relatively well), explains Loretta, when a small incident like this happens, I just tell myself: I am a real American and am part of an exclusive group that whites cannot mingle with, and which they avoid.” A little bit later, one of the communication directors, Rhea Smith, privately confides: “The new neighborhood in Brooklyn, those sitting between whites and blacks, has set itself up badly.”

Jerome Krase, a sociologist and professor emeritus at Brooklyn College, knows his borough well. A native son, he understood that the prevailing image of Brooklyn as being primarily Jewish has run its course, though the community is still pretty large. “Today, Brooklyn has a population of over 40% white (898,000) and 35% black (845,000). The blacks, those of the working class have gone into several areas of Brooklyn like Fort Green or even Crain Heights, while whites, who are often well-off, have started investing in the renovated buildings of Bedford-Stuyvesant,” he clarified.

As all of Brooklyn undergoes widespread renovation, prices go up and push out blacks and whites who can no longer afford it. Yet those who remain there don’t engage in niceties. It’s every man for himself for his community with much indifference towards anyone else.

Racial Equality Takes a Backseat To Making a Living

Some like Betty, 30 years old, don’t think too much about it. The young woman has a beauty shop where filmmaker Spike Lee, champion of the black cause, formerly had a bookstore. There they sold political books dealing with the 1960s-1970s, the Black Panthers, the radical black power movement, and Malcolm X, the black leader opposing to whites. Betty, busting out a smile, isn’t offended by the fact that few white women visit her shop. “It’s normal,” she emphasized, “We don’t have the same skin, the same hair. Blacks have dry skin, frizzy hair, and so we have to use different creams.”

Others, like Larry, seated on the stoop of a house across from beautiful Prospect Park, the wide green space of Brooklyn, identifies those differences as a conflict. A good student at a junior high school in Brooklyn and at only 17 years old, he explains that “he scares the white people who pass by.”

He adds: “There are no whites in this school, and I don’t have any white friends. I have lived here for eight years and am surrounded by white families with boys my age. My father is a businessman like theirs, but it’s like they don’t see me. So I don’t see them, either.” For Larry, the struggle is more about the dollar he earns than his indifference towards racial equality.

The Past Isn’t Dead and Buried. It’s Not Even Past.”

John and Mary Caldwells, a young white couple from Brooklyn, have done their part to be friendly with a black couple who live next door. John, an engineer and Mary, a designer, always saw themselves as liberal and open to others, regardless of their skin color. “But, it’s true,” they pointed out, “we don’t have any black friends. That’s how it is.” Mary recounts that “We tell ourselves we are being silly and that we should invite them for dinner since they just moved in and we’ve been here for three years. We could give them the addresses of good restaurants, grocery stores, etc.” They looked nice.

She is a fashion designer and he is a computer scientists. Some chance to get along. The two couples have since met. “That night,” she added, “all four of us were a little stuck. I don’t know why. Our American history in black and white flashed back to me: slavery, segregation and their look told me it wasn’t the same for them. The dinner had been a failure. And they have never invited us over. We smile at each other only when we cross paths,” Mary concluded.

John echoes a quote by the American writer William Faulkner : “The past isn’t dead and buried. It isn’t even past,” a phrase cited by candidate Barack Obama in his speech “Race and America,” on March 18th, 2008, and which means to John that, if he was elected, “relations between Blacks and Whites will be less complicated since it will become the hyphen between our two communities.”