It's the not so little things...
This Easter evening, as I was sorting through my Google Alerts, I came across this superficially benign neighborhood profile on Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, "Elegance is Abundant; Groceries Are Less So." That the article's discussion of the neighborhood's alluring features, including a survey of the real estate market, was targeted towards white yuppies was not surprising but the blithely covert manner by which that was communicated was disturbing. In the article, under the subheading, "WHAT YOU'LL FIND," reporter Gregory Beyer broke down the neighborhood's demographics:
A stroll through the neighborhood -- about three-quarters of a square mile, from Flushing Avenue on the north to Atlantic Avenue on the south, from Vanderbilt to Classon Avenue -- reinforces its claim to racial and ethnic diversity. (The Department of City Planning, drawing on census data, estimates that of the more than 20,000 residents, 60 percent are black, 15 percent Hispanic and 5 percent Asian.)
Now, you'll notice that the percentage of whites was not mentioned; strangely whites, in Breyer's telling, don't count towards the ethnic diversity of a community and worse yet are in their absentia (and relative minority) the presumed, the unnamed, the control, if you will. But what's even more grating was what Breyer wrote next,
There is also the whiff of impending change.
"People with money are coming into the area," Ms. Neinast said, and developers have responded. On Myrtle Avenue, the Absolute, a five-story glass condominium at Steuben Street, radiates luxury. Nearby, on Classon Avenue, is the Azure, a six-story glass building that bears signs reading, "Cool Contemporary Condos" and "Join the Brooklyn Evolution." Reuben Pinner, the developer, said it would open by summer.
It's clear that the impending change Breyer refers was white gentrification by not naming white's residence in his earlier description of the neighborhood and by his decision to follow that assertion with a quote from Ms. Neinast (who coincidentally is my former landlord) that "people with money are coming into the area."
Reading this fanned my longstanding concerns about audience and exclusion in mass media. Like many music magazines, particularly within male dominated genres, imagine their readers male and address them as such, most American mass media outlets imagine their audiences white. So reading mass media publications is a persistently taxing and annihilating endeavor as I'm constantly reminded of my own insignificance, invisibility. It's not just who, what, when, where, why but to whom, by whom, for whom.
In this instance, what was inferred is in part what is insidious and poisonous about being Black or any other 'other' in America, a country founded in and persisting in white supremacy (and be advised: white supremacy extends behind the hood. There are plenty of books and articles on the subject. See your local library for more info.) People like me aren't inferred in mass media. People like me aren't normative. That's why media talks about the woman and the black woman or the man and the Arab man. The unmodified individual is almost always white.
Photo source: The Box Tank via Urban Cartography
Tags: Brooklyn, Journalism, Media, Race, Writing
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