Two Lines
I can no longer tell the difference between comedy and
tragedy in our country.
On a miraculously overcast, grey morning in Austin, Texas, I
find myself in a rush with a friend to get to a famous-foodie BBQ haven in time
to get my spot in the 4-hour line that will take us to what’s supposed to be
the best brisket in the ‘nation.’
Which nation, I’m not sure, because it’s Texas, and they’re
always flip-flopping what the word ‘nation’ means.
We have crossed the highway that makes Austin the most segregated
city in Texas, which is saying something, since, well, Texas is Texas.
Our google maps app tells us we are almost there. We drive
by a line that scoops around two blocks.
We’ve made it.
You jump out. I’ll
park.
I jump out, giddy and tired and hungry and happy and
hung-over.
This is it!
I run across the street, confident enough not to look, and
spring to my place in line behind two old black women.
Have you been here
before?
Yes,
the first lady tells me.
OK. Great! Does this
line look bad?
No,
it’s not too bad, they share. But
don’t forget your ID.
My ID? I ask
confused.
Yeah,
your ID. You need it to get in, they calmly explain.
Really? Hmm. OK. Well
I have my credit card, I say.
That’s
what I’m using. This is my first time too and I didn’t know either, the
other lady shares.
Oh. Weird. It’s funny
they ID you for BBQ, I offer in what seems to be your typical
waiting-in-line chit-chat moment.
BBQ?
They say and stare, tired.
Yeah, isn’t this the
line for Franklin’s? I ask back.
No.
I don’t know what that is, but this is the line for the food bank, they say
with more patience and kindness than any white-blonde-blue-eyed girl deserves.
Oh. Thank you. I’m not
from here, I reply with shame.
It’s
for the needy, she says, kindly and honestly, as if it is possible I have
not yet heard that there are people in America who are hungry.
Well, thank you. God
bless, I say before I turn and walk away to my friend who is coming over to
join me, trying to salvage the needless indignity I have created more of in an
already shameless world.
We get back in our car and drive around the block, to where
the famous BBQ joint actually is, checking the map for exactness this time.
There is also a line there, a massive one that crawls around
the block and a bit, though it is still shorter than the line for the food
bank.
Everyone in this line, however, is white.
To be honest, I would probably not have noticed this if it
hadn’t been for the other line for food a minute away.
We wait. For four hours. For the best BBQ.
And it’s great. It’s one of those organic, indie, artisanal
joints, 3 years old and already a staple.
And this says it all, I think.
East Austin.
People talk with reverence in this country about
gentrification, about old, forlorn neighborhoods being saved by savvy, young
(white) people, about glorious ancient architecture not going to waste.
I know. I’m one of them.
Or I was.
Until this summer.
It’s hard to do anything but admire those forward-thinking,
crafty individuals who buy cheap, sell high, transform what has seemingly been
forgotten into a gem.
I’ve always loved these stories, being the daughter of two
people in the field of education addicted to fixing houses up and beating the
market, thinking perhaps there is hope that as a teacher one day I too will be
able to live in a beautiful home in an “up-and-coming” neighborhood.
A place like East Austin.
In case you don’t know, it’s where all the hipsters are
going these days, in the fastest growing city in America, the litmus test of what
will soon officially segue from alternative to mainstream yuppy.
East Austin is the home of every new-cool-it dive food
truck, coffee bar, and boutique. Urban homesteading. Renewable energy.
You get the idea.
If you google East Austin, that’s what comes up these days.
What does not come up, however, are two new teaching friends
of mine, both born and raised in East Austin, like their family before them for
generations.
While white America paints these neighborhoods as the
‘forgotten’ jewels saved by white knights-in-shining armor, young ingénues, my
friends will be the first to tell you that these neighborhoods were not
forgotten.
Not by black and Latino Americans, that is.
By white America, yes (obviously), but by people, no.
White America sees chipped paint and rusty cars and thinks no one cares; it’s best for society if
‘people’ come in and fix this place up! (that whole American can-do
mythology).
My friends see chipped paint and rusty cars for what they
are, chipped paint and rusty cars, practical remnants of families living in a
society that subsidizes their obesity and poverty and imprisonment.
What’s chipped paint when an American Apparel hoodie on your
son exponentially increases the likelihood of his death?
What’s a forgotten old car yet-to-be-fixed-up when you have
to work three jobs to feed your kids (because minimum wage in this country does
not guarantee a life above the poverty line) and you want to at least have the
time to wish them ‘good night’?
As white yuppies swoop in (and that applies to you,
hipsters, too. It doesn’t matter if you voted for Barack Obama), these families
have already been paying years of rent.
By now, they have purchased their rented homes two to three
times over in the sacrifice of their monthly installments of minimum wages.
The only difference between them and the ‘gentrifiers’ who
bring up prices and raise local taxes and push them out of their
multi-generational homes is inherited privilege, the most powerful capital of
them all.
If these renters had inherited anything, even just a race
that would lend itself to a better chance at getting a loan in this country,
that rent would operate no differently than the monthly mortgage payments my
parents pay.
That I will one day pay.
After all, mortgage payments are usually cheaper than, or at
worst the same as, rent.
Instead, they are powerless to brutal market forces that
sweep them away, away, society a broom instead of a blanket.
The communities they have built while everyone else looked away
they have no official monetary stake in, just their histories and families and
stories and first –everything’s - and so what they have preserved for decades
while everyone else forgot, they do not get to prosper in its prosperity.
One of the more ironic and tragic parts about this, that
really gets to me, one of those brutal good-intentions-are-not-enough moments,
is that it’s mostly the well-intentioned whites doing this. Those liberals who
like these neighborhoods for their history and diversity. The ones least
repulsed by co-existence and interracial-anything.
Inadvertently, the only white people who potentially can act
as allies to minority communities in America are also destroying the very communities
that attracted them there in the first place.
If that’s not the epitome of a catch-22, I don’t know what
is.
What can be done? we ask each other as we wait for 4 hours
for the gourmet BBQ around the corner from the food pantry.
We put our privileged, elite, private-small-liberal-arts-college
heads together and talk about mixed-income housing, and what if Habitat for
Humanity could be extended to pre-existing houses where people already live,
where people could own a house the minute their rent equaled its value plus
inflation, about our inherited privilege, invisible and visible, tangible and
ephemeral, about how wrong it all is.
And yet, there is this: how we use it everyday, how we will
not give it away, how we are here this summer to fight summer learning loss
(that’s right, that fancy theater camp you went to is why you now go to the
very school you do) that accumulates with low income, first generation
students, who end up losing 3-4 years of education by the time they graduate
high school, if they graduate at all, because they spent their summers in front
of the TV or babysitting instead of out in the woods. Or even at the local
YMCA.
And yet, though we mean well, though we care, we will never
completely understand, and as we are teaching and working 70-hour weeks for our
kids, we are still accruing the interest on the white privilege we inherited.
In fact, we got these jobs because of the schools we go to,
because of their cache, and thus we are here because of what we have inherited:
whiteness.
It is a Saturday morning in East Austin. It is miraculously
grey and cloudy. There are two viciously long lines for food. They are almost
the same length, but they are color-coded. (To say America is now post-racial
is colorblind).
Most of the people in each line do not know of the other
line, a few blocks away.
There are two lines, and they are so set upon this earth,
that it still surprises me later how unclear our definitions for comedy and
tragedy are, how they bleed and knot and tangle into each other, how our
country has become a farce.
Two lines, so physically close to each other but infinitely
set a part, infinitely divided, should never make sense.
