Race & Place (pt 1 of 3): The Extraordinary of the Ordinary
“Where do you live?”
It’s a simple question, but we tend to read a lot into the response, as we see it as providing important information. In that response, we may reach conclusions about the type of job someone has and their level of income. We may make conclusions about where they attended school or where they work (Ie. if you tell me you live in Cambridge, I may assume you attend or work at Harvard or MIT.). We may make conclusions about the types of amenities that they grew up with.
“This is a trust fund brat, he doesn’t know about the struggle.”
We may make conclusions about their political affiliations.
“This lady is in the projects and living on unemployment. She’s certainly a democrat.
or
“This guy has a 3-bedroom condo in Manhattan and interacts with nothing but rich, white people… he’s probably republican.”
Interestingly, a lot of the conclusions that we reach vary depending on the race of the person in question, right? On my note about the gentleman with the 3-bedroom condo in Manhattan, you probably envisioned a white man. If you reread my comment though, I said no such thing, but that’s probably the conclusion you reached anyway.
Ahhhh, now we’re talking!
New York is actually a really great example of this though. If a black person tells you they live in Brooklyn, a white person tells you they live in Brooklyn, and an Asian person tells you they live in Brooklyn, we have a tendency of viewing those 3 situations very, very differently. I’ll admit, part of that is because of gentrification. The other part of that is how we view circumstances though. When a black person lives in a mostly black neighborhood, we frequently assume it’s because they don’t have any other choice or option. In other words, that’s the best they could do. When a white person lives in a mostly black neighborhood, we may be inclined to see the neighborhood as “up and coming” or “trendy”. In other words, our assumption is that white people in those communities choose to live there and they don’t have to live there. Because who on earth would choose to live in a black neighborhood if they don’t have to, right?
There’s a lot more I can say about that, but I’ll save it for a bit later.
I feel like my experiences at school and work both reinforce the general idea. While I was in Philadelphia, I was working at a highly esteemed and selective consulting firm. For context, if you don’t know anything about Philly, it’s a very, very pro-black city (that means a lot of different things, but the most important is probably that 46% of the population is black, so almost half). If you don’t know anything about consulting, it tends to be a pretty lucrative field, as they hire people that are very good at what they do and pay them a lot of money. When I first started, I met the other analysts, who were also fresh out of school. Not surprisingly, everyone lived in downtown Philadelphia, Center City. That’s to be expected. I have no qualms with that. You move to a new city as a new or recent graduate, living downtown is a pretty safe bet. Makes sense to me. Coincidently, or not so coincidentally, most of Center City is white, and Philadelphia, as a whole, is overwhelmingly black. I chose not to live downtown. The parking situation wasn’t going to be ideal. It’s more congested. Lastly, one of Philly’s greatest selling points is its affordability, so living in the priciest part of town undoes one of Philadelphia’s most attractive features.
I opted for an apartment in West Philly. West Philly is Best Philly :-). I have 0 regrets.
Maybe it was all in my mind, but I always felt like I had to give an explanation to my coworkers as why I chose to live where I did. Nobody would ever come out and ask me to, of course. I don’t want to paint this picture of my colleagues like they were awful people, because that’s not true. As far as coworkers go, they were all pretty decent, and I don’t say that about everyone. Maybe it was all in my head (as I’m sure you would imagine, being the only black person in the room, consistently, didn’t really help), but I always felt like when I told people where I live, their response was “Oh. Okay.” But their thinking was along the lines of, “Why would you live over there, with those people, when you can live over here, with these people? Who on earth would choose that instead of choosing this?” It echoes similar notions to the post I did on Social Expectations, many moons ago when I first started the blog.
When you make a lot of money, people just expect you to live a certain lifestyle, even if it’s a lifestyle you don’t really care for.
It’s not just a phenomenon specific to conversations at work, though. It happens with school, too, particularly schools that tend to attract a certain demographic of students. I attend a well-known, private school down south. The campus is absolutely beautiful, and the surrounding neighborhoods are gorgeous, albeit a bit pricey. I opted to live on the South side of town instead, in a more modest neighborhood (As a result, even though I live off a graduate stipend, I put ~$1,000+ in my savings every month). Although the city has a large black population, understandably, the neighborhoods surrounding this private school tend to have quite a bit less. The south side is the opposite. It has a very large black population, although my primary interest was in finding a house so I can host my dinner parties without paying exorbitantly high rent. The discussion tends to be the same though.
In the defense of students at my school, most of them are from other cities (many are international students, actually), so when I tell them I live on the south side, they have no idea where that is or what that means. Maybe I’m a tad cynical though, but the logic seems to remain, “Who wouldn’t want to live over here, with all these people?” Again, it doesn’t help that there aren’t a ton of people who look like me on campus, so I always feel like I need to explain, even if people don’t mean to imply that with what they say or do.
There are many, many reasons I’ve chosen to live the places that I do, but I think one of the highly underrated reasons is… sometimes I just want to interact with normal people. In the case of my university, the residents of those surrounding communities tend to be extremely accomplished. It wouldn’t be unusual at all for my neighbor, to have done his undergrad in chemistry from Duke and be enrolled in the MD/MPH program. Suffice to say, he’ll graduate, probably do exceptionally well, and make a crap ton of money (over $300K, after residency)… good for him (or her). The reality though is that most people in America aren’t going to do anything even remotely close to that… people having 3 degrees, all from highly prestigious institutions of higher education, is not that common.
I could make a similar comment about not living downtown in Philly. If I lived downtown, which I thought about doing, it wouldn’t be a stretch for a neighbor in my apartment to have an undergrad in History from Yale and his JD from Penn. Depending on his area of law, he’s probably making close to $200K, just a year or two out (that base salary might be a bit inflated for a newly minted lawyer in Philly but certainly not for big time law in New York). Good for him (or her)! That’s wonderful! In a city like Philly though, that’s just not most people’s experience. Philly is very much an inner city that faces a number of socioeconomic challenges, poverty included. In fact, Philly has the highest deep poverty rate of any major city in the country. Among major cities, Philadelphia is still one of the poorest. I would be naïve to think otherwise, just because my neighbor is a successful lawyer, and everyone else in my apartment complex is doing well, too.
Personal experience plays a role in this just as much as interactions do. I lived in West Philly for 3 years. As a result of where I lived vs. where I was working, I lived off of about half my income (a huge blessing). I put $2,000+ in my savings every month. Suffice to say there were probably a number of members of my community wrestling to figure out how they were going to get the money to repair their car or pay for health insurance. These were the furthest things from my mind… I just never had to think about them. Even so, this is relatively normal for working class America. I feel that much more in tune with the realities of life because of where I chose to live and the people that I was interacting with. Sometimes, it’s good to just be with “normal” people with “normal” jobs and “normal” struggles. It’s normal. Earning 3 degrees from ivy league schools and earning over $200K a year? That’s wonderful… but it’s not normal. Maybe depending on the school you attend or social circle… but for the 320 million Americans that call the United States home, that’s just not going to be their experience. Median HOUSEHOLD income in the US is a little less than $60,000 per year, in case you were wondering.
This is what I think happens in America. You have upper-class people who only want to interact with upper-class people (and don’t know how to interact with anyone else). You have middle class people who have exposure to both upper and lower-class people. Finally, you have lower class people, who interact predominantly with people in the lower and middle class but assume the upper class takes no interest in relating to them. I’m enrolled in a PhD program at an amazing university, so career wise, things are going very well… but I think one of my biggest fears is losing my ability to connect on a meaningful level with “normal” people. Just… normal people. Maybe people who don’t have a PhD, or didn’t attend a private school, or don’t have a 4-bedroom house with a beautiful front yard. Just normal people.
I understand this post was highly anecdotal. In part 2 though, I’ll dig more into the history and social structure of residential segregation. Feel free to weigh in with your personal anecdotes on segregation.
Nnam’