(This is part of an ongoing series. To find previous editions, copy and paste “Is American Urban Culture Beyond Repair?” into the search function at the top of your screen.)
Examining the deleterious impacts of modern urban culture on the American social fabric and its future prognosis.
To the extent that such a thing as a neoliberal “melting pot” utopia could feasibly exist, my early childhood in the suburbs of Atlanta came the closest to realizing it.
Within my neighborhood, there lived — and these were just the kids in my grade, who were my friends — a Chinese, a Korean, a Pakistani, a Jew, an Armenian, and a Tanzanian.
In retrospect, the Tanzanian kid, named Adil Rawji, was actually, although I never asked, I think, a member of the Indian diaspora in Tanzania whose family presumably fled to the United States.
Following decolonization, numerous African countries purged their Indian and other minority populations on the grounds that they were too economically successful and productive.
For instance, the Africans of Rhodesia, rebranded as Zimbabwe, edged out the whites who propped the economy up virtually all by themselves, including through violence.
Anyone could have predicted the resulting economic collapse.
But at least they liberated themselves from the evil white man.
In any event, I never knew the personal history of Adil’s family, except that they immigrated from Tanzania but definitely weren’t black.
He was also Muslim, and his family went to mosque every night.
However, in every other respect, these people were fully Americanized.
I drank lots of Coke at their house, and we watched reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and played soccer in the yard for an entire summer.
In other words, unlike the migrants of today, they fully bought into the assimilation paradigm that used to be the default expectation.
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My Armenian friend’s family immigrated from the Soviet Union right after it collapsed around 1993. The mother was a doctor in her home country, but her education and training weren’t recognized in the U.S.
So she worked as a waitress, learned English but never lost the accent, and studied to pass the medical exam over a ten-year period. I have since lost touch, but last I knew, she was a working physician in a Kansas City hospital.
These were all very American stories.
Everyone got along swimmingly in this friend group, even with the wildly divergent backgrounds. It’s crazy to say, but true: I honestly never thought about race for the first twelve years of my life. Of course, I was aware that racial and national distinctions existed, but I never seriously considered the implications, and there was never any racial friction.
To one degree or another, most of the kids in my vicinity were poor. Perhaps not in poverty, but definitely shy of the threshold to be considered middle class.
Yet, in this relatively insular circle, we had a social harmony that defies the “poverty causes crime” narrative, which is the theme of this series.
But here I am perpetuating some version of the allegedly bigoted “Model Minority Myth.”
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Anyway, we had all gone to an elementary school called Evansdale, located in DeKalb County, which is, for the most part, heavily urbanized, but on the extreme north side of the country, not far from the Gwinnett County border, where suburbia more or less starts.
There were a few black children in my grade from far afield who were bused into Evansdale Elementary through a post-segregation social engineering program called “Majority to Minority” (M to M), championed by the NAACP and foisted on the DeKalb County school system via lawfare.
They stood out, for sure, but the black kids in my class at Evansdale were a significant enough minority that they didn’t cause any problems.
Then came Henderson Middle School — a whole different animal, if you will.
Evansdale was just one of something like a dozen elementary “feeder schools” that dumped students into Henderson — feeder schools packed with urban Americans.
The very first day of middle school, in 1999, in gym class, I laid my neatly folded gym clothes on the end of a long and empty bench in the locker room.
A black kid came in.
He could have placed his clothes anywhere on the long, empty bench, but he instead looked around, walked over to my neatly folded items, pushed them onto the floor, aggressively, and placed his in the same spot.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Shut up, white boy!” he yelled with a feigned lunge. (The black students called this gesture of hostility “bucking.”)
Later on that day, I heard him remark to his friend: “I punked that white boy out in gym class.”
The next two years were more of the same, and school became more like a county jail than any kind of school I had previously experienced.
Thus, my racial consciousness was, at long last, born.
From then on, no amount of BLM-style propaganda could countervail my own two eyes.
