“My Philadelphia story...”

The following was written in response to the "Being White in Philly" article which appeared in Philadelphia Magazine in March 2013 and sparked heated debates in The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, Fox News and MSNBC.

I've heard that everyone who has lived in Philadelphia has their own "Philadelphia story." Well, I am no exception. In 2012, I began living in northern Philadelphia, directly across from a major university. Every day, the locals lingered around and bugged the students for spare change. Except for

a few females with bleeding hearts, most students ignored the requests. But one day, a female friend of mine decided she wanted to help. As she reached for her wallet, the local who had asked for assistance took her wallet and bolted down the street. 

Later that year, a student who was also living across from the university was shot dead. The incident happened just a stone's throw from armed security guards who are employed by the school. Nobody knows why the student was shot, but he died before the security guards could come to his aid. That year, between January 1 and May 31, a person was shot dead, on average, every twenty-four hours and ten minutes in Philadelphia.

The following year, I moved to the other side of campus. One day, I walked out my front door and noticed that one of the cars on the street had been gutted. Not only had somebody tried to steal the car stereo, but the hubcaps and the rims on the car were gone, too. 

One day, somebody broke into my apartment. I was upstairs in my room working on a term paper when the break-in occurred. Here I had been under the impression that my bike would be better off inside than chained up on the street; apparently that was not enough, however, and I should have further protected my bike by chaining it to the furniture in my living room. The reason being, that same bike ended up being stolen during a break-in, along with stereo equipment.

That year, another friend who was living in Philadelphia experienced a break-in. Her computer was stolen, along with a few other things. Luckily, the thief was easy to track down. Why? Well, much to the amusement of the police, the thief had left his phone inside the room, where the computer had been. Apparently, the thief had set the phone down after taking a call and had forgotten to take it with him.

As the year continued, so did the chaos. One day, I realized locals had smashed my kitchen window and stolen two packs of freeze pops from the freezer. To be fair, it was a hot day. But what came next blows my mind to this very day. I remember it like it were yesterday; two friends were over. The one friend, a future special-ops soldier, had just graduated from the university; the other, a mammoth of a man, had just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. It was my birthday, and we wanted to celebrate in Center City Philadelphia. So we left my place and headed to the subway station. As we were walking, I heard something whiz by our heads and connect with the back of my skull. Rubbing the spot of the impact, I turned to see a young black boy, no older than ten or twelve, throwing stones at us that he picked up off the pavement.

"Did you just throw that?" I asked the boy.

I already knew the answer. Needless to say, the youth just stood there, grinning. I shook my head and we continued on our way. I couldn't see the logic in a physical confrontation with a young boy who came up to my waist.

But just then, I heard another stone hit the pavement and something struck my back. The stand-off continued as the boy went on provoking the two military men and me. I turned slowly and began sprinting towards him. He turned the corner and ran away. I guess I was lucky the kid didn't have a gun.

One morning, I woke up and looked down from my loft to see a young first- or second-grader with my i-Pod in his hand. I had never seen the kid before in my life. 

"What the HELL do you think you are doing?" I thundered down at him.

Now imagine you're a child who has quietly crept into a foreign home to snoop around and potentially steal things. You are completely alone; suddenly, an angry voice booms out from above. The silence is shattered, and so is your sense that you are alone and not going to get caught. What do you do?

“I’m repairing your window,” he said with a smirk.

Again, I did not know what to do. I debated whether to call the police, but then I'd have to kid-sit until the police showed up to write a report. The boy was calm; I didn't want him to turn aggressive and topple things in a mad rush to the door to block my path. Or risk he'd grab something on the way out. I also knew that, if things escalated, the kid had a reason to tell his siblings, cousins or friends - surely, not from far away - to come back for revenge. As these thoughts raced through my head, I decided to merely tell the young boy he was lucky I was going to let him off. I escorted him down the stairs and out the door and told him not to do that again, or it wouldn't end well. No wonder the locals target white out-of-towners.

Some time later, my mom was on the phone with a friend of hers who asked about me and how I was getting along in Philadelphia. When my mom relayed the story, I figured it was just small chat and my mom had probably told the friend who phoned very little. Most likely, it was just another person blissfully unaware of the chaos that lurks within city limits. But as it turned out, the person of the phone was well aware, because her son had just been to Philadelphia on a visit from his lily-white student town in the suburbs.

I imagine that, like most people my age, the boy had come to Philadelphia with a head full of 'thug life' lingo and knew all the gang gestures that made him feel cool. Well, shortly after arriving in Philadelphia, as it turned out, the teen had been robbed at gunpoint. A little over an hour later, when the teen found his friends to catch a bus, he must have realized they were the only white people on board, which may or may not have been awkward for them; but what certainly was awkward for them was spotting the same thief on the bus who had robbed them earlier and seeing him reach over and demanded that the boys hand over their phones so nobody would get hurt given they knew what he had. It was a truly ballsy move by a hardened man of the streets. Ironically, the teens' phones were probably loaded with hip hop .mp3s glamorizing urban roughness. 

Cool as "thug life" was, two locals living that lifestyle murdered a friend of mine from another Philadelphia university. They entered his apartment, barged in the door and shot him in the face. To be fair, the friend was not entirely innocent. Behind the scenes, he was a 'hustla' just like the locals who had killed him - pushing drugs, not unlike many students who emulate "thug life" to afford the high life. But in Philadelphia, faking that you are hard isn't going to save you from those who are hardened. Philadelphia is, as another friend once put it, "a concrete jungle". And, in this jungle, the friend who got shot had overstepped his own drug-selling territory and was taking business from a more-hardened, native Philadelphian fellow.

Oddly, this terrible city is home to some of the best universities on the planet. U Penn, for example, is a world-class, Ivy League school that ranks number one in the country for business studies and seventh for law. Donald Trump is a alum, among many, many others. 

Drexel University has a renowned engineering program and Temple University is consistently ranked in the top fifty US schools for law and medicine.

As you would expect, each school insists that its students are safe. To support its claim, for example, Temple boasts that, "every ten seconds", students will be able to spot a police car circling campus. Indeed, all day long, the police drive around that campus perimeter, which is gated in parts and even lined with barbed wire. Watchtowers stand about a thousand meters apart all along the campus boundaries. Furthermore, there are blue emergency poles scattered about, both on this campus and the campuses of the other Philadelphia universities; with the push of a button, the pole immediately signals to the police to rush to the site and help students in distress.

All of Philadelphia's universities boast about the level of diversity on their premises. But the loudest proponents of diversity, by and large, were not at one Philadelphia university or the other. It was the white out-of-town people at all of these universities, specifically. Ask around, and they will likely tell you that the opportunity to not be with their 'own people' and 'own' kind had value to them; but, for many Black and Latino students, you will rarely hear this answer. In fact, race sometimes forms the cornerstone of their identities and became a semi-conscious source for strength and inspiration. They tend to appreciate the diversity for another reason, and you can see this in their tendency to keep to their 'own'. I found this odd. It was not 1960, where hatred and discrimination had put racial awareness front and center. In fact, as I have established, most white students looked forward to the diversity!

At my school, some Black students joined the all-Black fraternities and sororities. I don't know a single white person who was invited to any event they held. In fact, the all-Black fraternities and sororities appeared only once for a "public event" - and that was to protest that their school, in spite of its reputation for diversity, "did not have enough black professors." I know this because I had to weave through the demonstration to reach where I was heading for a meeting. It was an odd experience. I felt the all-Black fraternities didn't want me there where they were protesting, yet I felt guilty for not standing outside there with them, like I was therefore one of the "bad guys" who would not have a reason to. This puzzled me. But in time, I began to understand it. And there were several key developments which pushed me to that point.

In the classroom, certain topics always came up which were political and racially-charged. There was seldom controversy, however; students generally spoke from the same basic perspective. Typically, we were critical of corporate America; we felt bad for "minorities" because of the past; we hated those opposed to immigration, and we all shared the same general understanding of history. In time, I came to realize that these core ideas sub-consciously determined what was said and when, all the while influencing how students interacted with each other. Dissenters, if they existed, were silent.

Once, during a pre-class discussion, I found out what happens when you go against the status quo even unintentionally! It was election season and I was explaining to a classmate that there were political parties on the presidential ballot list that I had never heard of. These parties, I noted, had not received time to explain their platforms during the live debates.

"What was one of the parties on the list?" the classmate asked.

“Well, there's the Constitutional Party and...”

Before I could finish, a classmate with a gay pride patch sewed on her shoulder bag turned to me and went ballistic.

"Whaaaat?? Racist Republicans vote for them!! You want slavery, too???," she thundered.

Predictably, her loud reaction had caught the attention of the room, including the Black students. They had stopped talking and were staring at me with suspicion. I suddenly found myself on the hot seat and wanting to make it clear how I felt about the past, the African-American community and its healthy celebration of identity and culture. But I found this superfluous. If anything, I wanted to defend my view that the political process should not be biased towards the Democratic and Republican Parties. I didn't want to talk about the other stuff and it felt unnecessary to include in my preface.

Needless to say, the experience made me think twice about the "educated" liberals who I was associated with through my politics. I didn’t like how the girl with the patch had polarized the world with sensationalism to validate her opinions. It was a common theme that I saw over and over again among my classmates. At the same time, I realized that even I could be made to feel like the racist backwater that I myself despised if something I said came close to putting me at odds with the politics of my liberal colleagues. It dawned on me that it was predetermined what I could say without prefacing everything and I resented that I felt like I was in a cult.

One day in another class, we were talking about our favorite lecture topic: racism. Somebody mentioned Jean-Marie Le Pen, the politician in France who had been “dangerously close” to winning because the French were "anti-immigrant". Looking at the faces around me, I could see that some people were visibly upset. The next few minutes involved an outpouring of vile commentary about French "bigots" and "bastards". I even heard the suggestion that "we should bomb those European Nazis." I was shocked by the level of aggressiveness and the inhumanity of the suggestion. But nobody seemed shocked by it; everybody seemed shocked that France did not share our "one world, one human race" ideology which I thought was supposed to be anti-war, and about human compassion.

Incidentally, believing everybody at the university had been on the same page about "one world, one human race", one day I presented a poem that focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how tragic it was that humans were in hive mode and endlessly fighting to hold sway over a tiny strip of desert land. In the middle of my presentation, I was attacked - by the professor - for “being disrespectful." He demanded to know my intentions, and I suddenly realized Israel was sacred to him. I learned soon thereafter that he had been born in Israel.

One time, a Jewish student from the class was talking about Al-Jazeera News Network's expansion into the Americas. The student saw the expansion as part of a trend where people from the Islamic world migrate and bring their ideas with them. He believed these trends extended to Israel's borders and threaten the survival of Jews as a cohesive people. It dawned on me just how controversial his point would have been if he were talking about the survival of, for example, French customs and community in lieu of immigration. This is not to say that the student was wrong to feel the way he did - he wanted to preserve the Jewish community, culture and way of life. But if his people were right in taking the steps to protect their identity within a state and shape the state to reflect their identity, why were the French called such ugly names and "deserving to be bombed" for doing the same thing?

At a later date, the professor decided to incorporate an Israeli “anti-war” film into his lecture. It was an odd film, filled with sad and emotional close-ups of the Israelis suffering in the desert element under enemy fire. One student, a Muslim, suggested that the film only drew support for Israel’s struggle and was a pro-Israeli sympathy piece. I felt this, too. It occurred to me that the film never portrayed the faces of those rapidly firing rockets at the Israelis. They were hidden in the shadows. I could hardly believe it to be a coincidence. But the Muslim's remark did not lead to debate; a salvo of thunderous, angry cries came from Jews who had stood up from their seats. They began trying to talk over one another and the Muslim. The Muslim started shouting back and some girl stood up from her seat and began cursing at him. Another person tried to speak up but could not be heard and neither could the teacher or his assistant as they started pleading for everyone to calm down. Ironically, it was "culture day"; everyone had brought 'their people's' food, music or some other novelty to class.

It was a huge fail for multiculturalism; but multiculturalism had failed that day for another reason: with the exception of one girl in the class who was a second generation immigrant from Russia, every single white person of Euro-Christian abstract had not brought an ethnic food to share at the event. Unlike the Arab-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Latino-Americans or African Americans, these "plain Americans" lacked a connection to their roots and could thus only taste and sample what the others had. Of course, they themselves were generally excited about this - about tasting and sampling, about seeing diversity and celebrating other people’s identities. And I had been, too; taking the view that Arab-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Latino-Americans and African Americans had once been mocked or ridiculed, I liked seeing these groups taking pride in the ethno-culture groups they identified with. I also enjoyed sampling the fruits of those cultures. But I was not hooked on the euphoria to the point where I couldn't separate myself from it. And I saw people who couldn't stop saying enough positive things about food that hadn't really tasted all that special and wasn't really so different from anything else. It felt forced, and I was starting to become aware of what was probably driving it: that feeling I had initially experienced, about sampling other cultures, was supposed to be so intense and rewarding that I was at least as excited at all times as others were celebrating themselves and their inherent identities. I was supposed to be a multicultural junkie. But I had gotten my fix.

Outside of "culture day", I observed that those who could marginally check the box for Asian, African, Mexican, Indian, Jewish or Muslim never seemed able to separate themselves from the fact; I cannot begin to tell you how many student films I saw, selected for campus screening due to their "courageousness", which concerned the question: “who am I as a [insert ethnic group here]?" It was like they were in a constant struggle to define themselves and it occupied their entire lives.

Around the same time that the aforementioned events took place, I had to read a text for a cultural anthropology class. The text contained a passage explaining how certain Native Americans, removed from their tribe, were rejected once they were freed and reunited. They could not fit in with their former tribe because too much had changed. Desperately, they cried out and developed a dance to plead for the gods to restore what had once been normal - to restore the connected feeling once known in the tribe. The passage left me with a tragically sad mental image of feathered tribesmen crying out in anguish, engaged in a futile struggle to bring their souls back from the dead. I could not shake it. From this - and the constant observation of people who felt strongly connected to their own or the quest to regain that feeling - I started to wonder about the reality of the so-called "post-racial society". 

But there was something else that caught my attention: Whites who could not, in terms of their background, check certain identity boxes were made to feel awkward when they tried to bounce to the beat - sometimes, literally - of the cultures associated with certain boxes. The clearest examples concerned hip-hop and rap, which were both seen as a "Black" thing. At the time, both were getting a huge push from Hollywood and the music entertainment industry. So, to be cool, White males would try to dance, talk, dress and act like "Black" hip-hop acts. But “Whitey” often became the butt of the joke for doing so - either among White peers, or as Blacks reacted in such a way to show that they disapproved. On several occasions, I had even seen the Blacks getting into the music almost as if they were demonstrating that it was their culture to claim. This made the White girls hot for them, because they were dominating their mastery of that which was presented as cool. So, you had the culture telling people what was cool, yet that person could at any second be written off as a loser because they weren't Black. It was an odd dynamic: how could cool be so uncool, and how was this not racist?

Experiences with this sort of thing also seemed to carry over into the club scene. I remember one time I was on a date with a female colleague who thought hip hop was fun, but seemed at least moderately aware that it was somebody else's thing. For us, it was just something to check out. So, at some point in the night, we entered a packed club where hip hop was playing. We danced nevertheless and at some point she did that bump-and-grind thing on me, and I just went along with it. Maybe we looked like we were having too much fun - perhaps even in jest, which could perhaps be interpreted as a cultural insult of sort. Because the next thing I knew, I saw a pint of beer whiz by my head, which I ducked and heard smash into the wall. Suddenly, some black guy was trying to get in my face and screaming. According to him, I had had my eye on some other girl he may have been with. He was already being tossed out by security before I could make any sense of it.

Another mind-shaping incident happened while I was walking to class with this girl from some lilly-white rural location that was maybe a four-hour drive away. She was talking about her academic experiences, and I said something about her being smart. Suddenly, she declared that she had a confession to make. I listened carefully as she told me that, at first, she had been rejected by the university initially, so she did not feel she was so smart. When I asked how she had gotten into the school, she told me that a classmate of hers in high school, with his "terrible grades and test scores", had been accepted over her and she had found out. She went on to tell me how she had called the university and complained. The university had replied that they could not find her application and, if she wanted it reviewed, she could resend it. She did, and, later, she was accepted. I asked her what the ethnicity of the student with "terrible grades and test scores" was.

"African-American. Why?" she replied.

She looked puzzled. I proceeded to tell her exactly what I had come to realize: that her case was not the only one I knew of its kind, and maybe they didn't lose the application after all. I explained that there is a quota system in place to “promote diversity” and to thus reverse any potential inequality in the past in terms of access to academic opportunity according to race by leaving aside opportunities for only those from certain races. What this means is people like her can be tossed aside in favor of students with inferior grades and test scores. I told her not to feel dumb that she was not accepted, because perhaps what I had explained was exactly what had happened. But he only emotion she seemed to be feeling was rage - not at me, but at the school. She explained that the kid with bad grades was not even from an underprivileged family. At that point, the conversation moved to whether those with wealth who had recently migrated to the United States for the value of a degree in the US were also likely to get in for the same reason as the classmate, even with lower scores. But it came to an abrupt halt as we reached the door to Subway (the sandwich shop) and had to quiet down. I could not help but feel a little awkward; I had forgotten to mention that my roommate had refused to reap the benefits of this racial quota system and withheld his "Mexican" race when he applied. Nevertheless, the system used by thousands of universities and employers alike is blatantly discriminatory. Strangely, nobody dares challenge this status quo for fear of being called “racist.” Imagine: being “racist” for fighting against a system where people who are smart are replaced by dumber people who just happens to be of a certain race. 

Of course, being where I was with the views I had come with, my transformation to even be able to see these things was slow. Initially, I had only seen the poverty and inequality in opportunity. It made me sad and I wanted to help. These feelings pushed me to volunteer to help the local community wrap Christmas gifts and to hand the gifts out to Philadelphia children. But I left feeling terrible. The children had pushed into the room and cussed about the gifts they had gotten. Then, they fought each other and hit each other with the items. Who were these people? Why was I volunteering to prepare gifts for them? 

At least they were not all like that, I said to myself as I organized my work area. It was at that point, however, that I noticed two very small boys quietly inspecting me. To them, I was one of “those people,” not at all like their classmates. I was one of the others - “the organizers” and, on a deeper level, one of the people who “made things happen.” But I quickly realized was that these little boys, Black as coal just like the other children, were actually focusing on was my light features. I was like a mysterious wizard to them and they had never seen such a thing. It was awkward. More importantly, I felt guilty that I was me in my position and they were them in their position. I wanted to encourage them to work hard at school so they could be in my position, but they quickly left. And so I left feeling depressed.

Leaving depressed was already a feature; every day that I walked home from my classes, I'd see low-class Black children playing in the playground or in the street. They’d stop and stare and I’d feel guilty that I was going to the university; I’d feel guilty that I had a family and my family could afford hot dogs on the Fourth of July. I'd feel guilty that I even existed and I started to hate myself - even more importantly, I started to hate white people. I had become anti-White - and in a so-called "multicultural environment", no less. It took all the experiences I have written about here for me to even see this and begin to question myself, who I was and where I had come from. I remembered that I had not been born into wealth, either; my father was a metal worker. His ancestors, and my mom's ancestors, had all arrived to till the land by hand - too late to have owned slaves even if they had wanted to. I remembered how hard I had worked to get to where I was academically and that, unlike the criminals on the street, I had applied myself to get there. I began asking myself: was I really to blame when they were the ones running around killing people, getting sucked into drugs and stealing things for fun? Was I to blame for their poor efforts in school, when, thanks to years of the quota system, all they needed to do was stay inside, open a book, study and pass in order to get into top-rate schools over me? Were top performers not also pressured by their peers to go outside and slack off on their studies? And what was to be said about immigrants who come here and, on account of their being white or not being white, are being judged differently?

From this understanding, I could no longer understand a world where I was expected to feel guilty for things I had not done, where I was expected to give opportunities to people who had done nothing to achieve anything and had, under their own power, stolen, attacked and killed. I could no longer understand what my generation was being groomed for if Whites had to be multiculturalism junkies and guilt-ridden post-racialists while everyone else is groomed for ethnic identification and hyper-racial pride. But perhaps that is why the "diverse" universities of Philadelphia even worked in the first place; they were filled to the brim with White multicultural junkies who appreciated other cultures and people from other cultures who appreciated their own culture. Add in the fact that many Philadelphia universities are suitcase colleges and you can really begin to see why the gears can turn: every week, people from all backgrounds come together to listen to a lecture or take a test for a few hours before disappearing into their own lives and friend circles. After four years in this environment, I left a changed man. And I no longer believed in the sociology that had drawn me to Philadelphia in the first place.