What I do (Part 1 of 3)

First off, a bit of background information on this blogging mini-series.  As I have transitioned into this new, fabulous life in New York City, I have had quite a bit of time to think about how exactly I got here, what forces shape me in all of my daily interactions, and what I might make of myself – and the world around me – going forward boldly into the future.  Hence this sudden burst of candidness, emotion, wit, and reflection about my life, my newly adopted city, and where a changing world might take both of us – hopefully, together.

Though the themes presented here are hardly new ones for me, they are in this series imbued with stories and experiences from New York City, which in many cases have made me challenge certain assumptions, and in others have only steeled my already high level of intransigence given my age.  As always, I welcome your reactions, your thoughts, and your commentary.   What I present here is somewhat funny, pensive, sad, and all permutations therein.  And as always, they’re all 100% Adam Harpool.
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An incredibly funny – funny to the point of being quasi-surreal, in fact – thing happened to me a few weeks ago.  It was the final proof – quite early on in my time here, and probably for the better – that living in New York City will provide little shield against some of the same irritating factors I’ve been dealing with throughout my short life.

I found myself late on Friday night (more precisely, early on Saturday morning) at one of the trendy gay bars in Hell’s Kitchen.  This particular one is famed for its selection of flavored vodkas, and at the time I was casually enjoying a nice strawberry vodka and sampling the bountiful eye candy, having not yet attained the requisite level of inebriation to stumble up to a guy and attempt one of my ridiculously lousy small talk lines.  Turns out I wouldn’t need to – a cute guy in tight jeans and a blue v-neck quietly moseyed over in my direction, gently smiled, and started up a conversation.  It turns out that he was from exurban Indianapolis (a few rungs up from the middle of nowhere, but only a bare few) and was also a recent arrival to New York.  Another vodka in and I’m realizing that he’s actually a very attractive guy, and not a bad conversationalist on top of it…

“So what country are you from?”

My reaction to his question is somewhat akin to what my reaction might have been had he spontaneously begun to speak in Klingon.  While I prefer my vodka on the rocks, surely I’m not that drunk yet.  “What county am I from?”, I furtively suggest.

“Country” he says again, with a slightly elevated emphasis on the ‘r’ sound this time, to make himself clear.  And then there is awkward silence for a few seconds before I proceed to burst out laughing.

“I’m American silly!”, I laugh, my slightly-impaired brain not able to quickly enough get to the root of precisely why that question was just asked.  It takes a few more seconds before it clicks.  Here I am, with an American accent bland enough to give Central Illinois residents a burst of pride, wearing a button-down Tommy shirt, tight denim jeans, and $65 Rainbow flip flops.  Short of munching down on a hamburger or opaquely asking “What’s a country?”, there’s not much more I could do to be more quintessentially American in this particular instance.

Oh.  And then how obvious it becomes.  A casual 360-degree glance reveals the one thing that I have long ago learned to stop paying attention to: save a bouncer, I’m the only black person in this establishment.  I may be in a hip New York City neighborhood, but purely by invisible societal forces this bar is just as segregated, effectively, as a shopping mall in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1950’s.  Here I am, flirting with a white guy from the small-town Midwest, and not realizing yet again that while for me that’s a rather prosaic, been-there-done-that experience, to him it must be like something distinctly other-worldly.  Here I am chatting to a 20-something from the rural Midwest, undoubtedly overwhelmed by his new life in the nation’s largest city and chatting it up with a young homosexual man of not just another race, but of that particular race.  The exotic one.  Or, depending on your societal lens, the dirty one.

Like the specter that refuses to die, it follows me, no matter where I go.  No matter what I do.
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And what do I do?

Above all else, I grow rather weary of dealing with what to me has always been an issue that amounts to damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  I grow weary of, after more than twenty years of being dismissed and rejected wholesale by mainstream African American culture as “white-acting”, “Oreo”, etc., going into social settings – LGBT or otherwise, though it seems particularly notable in LGBT-oriented venues – only to be firmly snubbed by a rather large contingent of the white population whom I supposedly so efficaciously imitate.  The young gay white men who, through their averted eyes and attitude that says “Sorry, honey, not chatting with you”, seem to reflect some sort of acute paranoia that perhaps they will catch AIDS or The Ghetto from my mere presence.

The coterie of the American population with an oversized affinity for Fox News and conservative talk radio – assuming any of them read this blog, which is quite unlikely – would likely roll their eyes at that last paragraph.  Here we go again, they would say of me.  Here we have yet another one of these young, black liberals who has been treated quite well by this country in terms of education and income, and yet can’t resist the urge to spit in the face of America at every possible opportunity.  They’ll say that this boils down to another case of “playing the race card.”  And as usual, these folks are quite wrong.

Why they are wrong is because of what I do, myself, on the other end of the spectrum.  For you see, at the same time that I make comments like those in the paragraph above, I deal with a long-term, biting cognitive dissonance that I have learned to suppress, but perhaps will never be able to explain away – a cognitive dissonance rooted in the fact that the population of the men that I have dated and with whom I have had sexual contact demographically resembles the population of Bennington County, Vermont.  In the mentality of the young gay white men to whom I have always been immensely attracted and who have always formed the base of my contact in the LGBT community, I can see myself as I maintain a de facto policy of racial exclusivity that could easily rival many of theirs.

One particularly embarrassing, shameful incident comes to mind.  Shortly after I had finished my Master’s degree and moved to suburban South Florida in early 2010, I went out by myself to a large gay club a few miles north of downtown Fort Lauderdale.  About halfway through the night I was approached by a young gay black man, who introduced himself and started to flirt in a very effective manner.  This guy, to be sure, had a hell of a lot more game than I do.  On top of that, he was well-spoken, clearly educated, and objectively quite attractive.   But of course – more than several drinks in at this point – the two decades of bitter antagonism between myself and the larger black community rules the night.  After he gets a tad more aggressive and tries to buy me a drink, I finally blurt it out:

“Sorry, but I’m really just not into black guys.”

I have to catch my senses.  Did I really just say that?  Marsha Harpool is probably doing aggressive maneuvers in her grave.

Other than exchanging a few more awkward pleasantries, our conversation largely ends there, and he moves on.  And who would blame him?
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To a very large extent, the mainstream black culture and I have been effectively divorced since the middle of the 1990’s; by the time that I arrived on the University of Florida campus in August 2005 I could not claim a single close black friend, and that situation had barely been ameliorated when I finished my studies there in May 2008. 

As I have exhaustively chronicled here before in numerous posts, this divorce was certainly not initiated by me, and it was likely brought on by several factors.  That my parents weren’t particularly religious and thus that I did not spend much time in church, which is the primary organ for socialization in the black community.  That I would become a full-blown atheist by my early teen years – a position as morally repugnant as that of a child molester to many in the black community – didn’t help the situation.  And in particular, those stinging memories centered on the fact that to virtually every single black kid to whom I was exposed growing up, there was always something wrong with a certain facet of my behavior:

-          Adam, why is your best friend white?

-          Adam, why do you talk like a white boy?

-          Adam, why do you listen to all that white music?

-          Adam, why don’t your folks go to church on Sunday?

-          Adam, why do you let your hair grow out like that, you tryin’ to act white?

And on and on and on.  When that type of interaction becomes the framework in which 98% of your interaction with the black community is based, it is quite easily to see where aversion and, yes, even a certain degree of bitterness will develop.  Slowly but surely as a kid I pulled away from those things that I saw as “too black”; in other words, an implicit rejection of black culture based innocently enough on how my family lived had metastasized, by my teen years, into a rather explicit, intentional one.  Beverly Daniel Tatum, a famed author on social justice and race, wrote a book entitled Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria?  Clearly, Ms. Tatum did not speak with me circa 1999; I might have rattled her worldview quite substantially, as by the end of my middle school years you were about as likely to find me doing crystal meth as you were to find me sitting at a predominantly black cafeteria table.

Near the end of my freshman year at UF in 2006, I wrote a 10-page research paper on racial preference in relationships for a human sexuality course.  At the time, I remember struggling with questions of whether affinity for a certain race, as it relates to culture and things like close friendships, relationships and sex that flow from that cultural base, was rooted in biology, sociology, or a mix of both.  There is not an ounce of ambiguity in my mind regarding that question now, and I find it quite silly that it was once hard for me to answer.  If biology does play a role, it’s a rather negligible one.  Out of all the ethnic diversity in the world – and in this City itself, a true microcosm of global society – the chance, purely on the basis of biology, that I would just so happen to be predominantly attracted to the race that was always portrayed in a positive light as a kid, the dominant race in this society, is one in a million.  Like attracts like.  

To a certain extent, I of course expected all of this inner tension to follow me to New York City.  What has been interesting is that, in certain ways, life in the City has served only to seemingly slice open again the old wounds, the old divisions.  Here on the Upper West Side, I live in a Census tract that is 80% white, 4% black.  I never feel out of place.  Yet the moment that I were to step on the 1 line heading Uptown, exiting at any point north of 125^th Street, my level of comfort would plummet like a heavy stone cast into the sea.

My overall exposure to other black people – quasi-non-existent in South Florida and before – has certainly increased here, thanks perhaps to the dense fabric of the city coupled with my heavy, heavy use of public transportation.  And yet even there, what I see saddens me and speaks to every salient point of my cultural divorce.  Why is it that not a single one of the beggars in the subway is not an ethnic minority, it seems?  Or sitting next to the young black men around my age with pants practically dragging the ground, underwear visible for all to see, speaking rather loudly what can only be categorized as a broken English despite having been raised in this country, often the only one blaring his music so loud that others halfway across the train can make out every one of the profanity, homophobia, and misogyny-laced lyrics in which he is indulging, lyrics in which “nigger” is so commonplace that it almost seems to have taken on a grammatical role as a subject pronoun.

Exposure to professional blacks?  Quite oddly, even less here in New York City than in Miami.  Those days of going to office parties and client meetings, as the only black person there, and a 20-something black male on top of it – this exotic sort of being from another planet – have certainly not vanished in New York City.  No paradigm shift in the least.

Oh, let me assure that all of this irks my liberal conscience in ways that you cannot begin to fathom.  I want to scream in rage, and I want to blame.  I want to blame the Baby Boomers, who might have accomplished some fleeting good deeds in their youth but in their mid-years and senior years seem content to grow fat on the emoluments of acquired privileged, progress in society at large be damned.  I want to blame an American society that, in the 60’s and 70’s, only did a half-assed job – at best - of attempting to integrate newly enfranchised African Americans into the middle class, before abandoning those efforts wholesale under Ronald Reagan’s conservative agenda in the 80’s.  I want to blame the small town where I grew up for warping my viewpoint due to a dire paucity of educated, middle class blacks; I want to blame New York City for bringing it all out into the open again.

But at the end of the day, we all know there’s just one person I can blame.  He gazes back at me in the mirror every morning, wondering if I am about to become just another cog in yet another generation so overwhelmed by these problems that we collectively shrug and pass them down to our progeny.   If my social democratic, left-wing mindset will soon cease to care about what happens there, in those parts of the City, so long as I have my peaceful Upper West Side existence.   So long as I can dive into the 95% white scenes in the East Village or Williamsburg, make out with the cute white guy at the bar in the size 29’s, and pretend that I look like everyone else who is doing the same - how long will I continue to care, or to notice, that my story, and my history, is actually so, so fundamentally different from theirs?
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Just over a year ago in this blog, I recorded a post in which I declared that I am “damaged by a damaged society.”  For me, a notoriously verbose person who sees little need to be to-the-point in my writings here, it was a beautifully succinct and eloquent phrase.  It also raises an interesting question, one which I at least partially tried to address then – if I acknowledge that I am “damaged”, what precisely am I going to do to repair the damage?

The answer to that question is now also succinct – I simply don’t know.  And I’m no longer embarrassed to admit that.  For me to suggest that I have the solutions to problems that have plagued our society for hundreds of years would be an ever-so-grandiose display of sophomoric hubris.

But what I do know, and what I am damn proud of, is that I live in New York City because I ran to diversity, not away from it.  What I do know is that, even if it may include almost no African Americans, my social and professional circle is diverse.  What I do know is that even if I may in some ways be a part of the problem in our society, I am at least cognizant that our society does have a rather large problem and – unlike some folks, particularly those on the cultural right – my values continually push me to work for change, even as painfully incremental as that change might be, even as I don’t know how to bring about that change myself.

What do I do? I continue to grow as a person, in the context of my life in one the world’s most dynamic cities.  I continue to challenge my own perceptions.  And I recognize that, as a human being, I will make mistakes – including some big ones.  I’m going to embarrass myself, and at times make a mess of my own tidy little reality.  Oh well.

That’s all that I can do, after all – and I’d be willing to bet that I have no shortage of company, of the 8 million souls in this city, who are doing exactly the same.
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This post deserves some final words – certain thoughts that occurred to me after I finished composing the main text.

In a very peculiar sense – and to be blunt – my time in New York City has pushed me even further away from what one might perceive as mainstream black culture, and even closer to the mainstream gay culture dominated by well-educated, liberal white men towards whom I have always felt a strong affinity - sexual, cultural, and otherwise.

Some people likely scratch their heads when reading paragraphs such as that, asking themselves “Why are those two cultures mutually exclusive?”  They aren’t – but the intermixing between the two is negligible at best.  The things that most strongly define my personality and lifestyle – my level of income and education, my secularism and disdain for religion, my preferred music and leisure activities, even seemingly trivial things such as my manner of dress and my zip code – all of those things are quite normal for one of those communities, while making me an anomaly of anomalies in the other.

It is true, to be sure, that I probably fret far too much about the stark paucity of black people in my social network – particularly when it has generally been other black people snubbing me because of my culture and lifestyle, and not the other way around.  But the reason that this state of affairs causes me so much inquietude doesn’t really have to do with people, but with culture. 

You see, probably one of the largest philosophical differences between myself and those on the cultural right is that I don’t believe that individual actions define one’s destiny.  They play one hell of a large part, to be sure.  But so does childhood nurturing.  So does one’s environment during youth.  So do the quality of the schools that one attends growing up.  And so many other factors.

If I am, as I believe, “damaged by a damaged society”, fixing my own damage would be great, but it is hard to imagine accomplishing that noble goal separate from some serious repairs to the culture at large.

What would those repairs look like?  Stay tuned, as I intend to discuss that topic at length over the next year of blogging.

I’ll close with a story from my newly adopted city which illustrates the challenge we all face.  A few days ago I was coming back from suburban New Jersey after a mentally grueling 14-hour workday.  My bus arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and, despite being rather late at night, the atmosphere was as frenetic as ever.  I darted for the subway exit, en route to the C train.  Walking extremely briskly, I looked down into my wallet to pull out my MetroCard.  As I looked back up, I noticed that at an extremely rushed pace, another guy is walking straight at me.  And then, wham!  Like any resident of New York I’ve had my fair share of collisions in the subway tunnels, but this one really is quite spectacular.

Still, I’m not bruised or even sore, so in my irritated and tired state I simply voice “Could you watch where you’re going” and keep moving to the turnstiles.  As I’m filing in queue to pass through one of the turnstiles, I get a hard tap on my shoulder and turn around.  Standing behind me is a young black man – just about my age, I would estimate – who seems to exemplify every single attribute that I see as decaying in our culture.  His jeans are about 10 sizes too big and judging by the amount of underwear he’s showing, I would judge him desperately in need of a belt.  Do-rag.  Unshaven.   And yelling at me in an English so rudimentary it could embellish even the purest of ebonics with a certain veneer of elegance:

“Nigga’ what yo fuckin’ problem is?”

I’m a bit startled, seeing as I typically avoid these miscreants like I avoid the plague.  So I turn around and head again through the turnstiles, when this guy pushes me, a bit brusquely, and then walks away, voicing loudly “Betta’ fuckin’ watch yo’self nigga! I’ll knock the shit out yo’ ass!”

I walk away – the wise choice – not willing to complicate my spotless criminal record and comfortable Upper West Side middle class life due to a conflict with a common thug.  But as I am walking away, two very different versions of Adam Harpool are engaging in a war in my head.

One is bitter.  Fucking bitter.  This is the Adam who grows orders of magnitude beyond tired of getting the strained “oh boy…” looks when I sit in First Class on airplanes/trains next to old, fat men who didn’t make a third as much money as I make, inflation-adjusted, when they were my age.  The Adam who grows tired of getting the dropped-jaws expressions when people realize that I can actually speak English flawlessly, as if being raised in an Anglophone country and having a Master’s degree from an Ivy League-quality school should not serve as an indicator of this.  The Adam who, yes, feels a bit of his dignity stripped away when the cute white boy at the bar won’t even engage me in conversation because of the tone of my skin.  The Adam who, fundamentally, is sick and damn tired of having a rather large chunk of our society automatically equate me with the thug that I encountered outside of the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

But while I cannot deny that this Adam has some valid points, it is the other mental Adam that wins this argument and is ultimately right.  This is the Adam who can look at that “thug” and recognize somebody who might have been raised by a teenage mom in the presence of an abusive or absent father.  The Adam who knows that this “thug” could have easily grown up in a neighborhood such as Brownsville, Brooklyn where shootings are simply another facet of quotidian life.  The Adam who knows that, but for the (metaphorical) grace of God, I could have easily been on the other side of our little confrontation.

Unfortunately, as our society has prioritized the allocation of resources over the last 40 years, it has been the equivalent of the first Adam who has won the argument far too often.  Count it as another thing I intend to do – making sure that the other Adam - the Adam who can see the big societal picture - receives the attention that he deserves.