Race Relations

Remember how in the first blog post I promised that there would be some hate-filled rants coming your way?  This is one of them.

Washington Heights is what it is - a truly residential neighborhood that is sometimes gorgeous and usually drab and dirty.  Living here, you quickly learn to appreciate the neighborhood's pluses: some of the best and cheapest rotisserie chicken ever, proximity to the cloisters and other pretty parks, very polite cat-calls (God bless you, mami), and the sense of community on summer nights when old men sit at card tables on the sidewalk playing dominoes while everyone else hangs around and music floats in the air.

One unexpected quirk of the blocks around 168 is that every winter, thousands of high school and collegiate athletes migrate to the area.  Suddenly they're everywhere! Thirty spandex-sheathed, lean-legged long distance runners speed past you in the snow. A group of sixteen sixteen-year-old boys in running shorts invade your favorite tiny pizza shop. Moms and dads with mascot hoodies roam the streets looking for the lone rumored Starbucks.

The New Balance Track and Field Hall of Fame and its Armory Track is what brings them to this place that is at once New York and yet not the New York they have imagined.  This weekend they came in droves for the New Balance Nationals Indoor 2011, and one particular pink-bowed, ponytailed part of those droves drove me insane.

I saw them when I approached to cross Broadway at 178. At least seven of them.  Noisy in that desperate for attention girl-pack kinda way.  I jogged to get in front of them so I could cross the street in peace and beat them into the Rite Aid on the corner it seemed we were all headed for.  It was a good move.  I already had my item in hand and had gotten in line by the time they finished crossing the street and made int into the store.  Horns blared outside.

I got my first good look at them when they came walking in the door.  Six with long, straight blonde and dyed blonde hair. Identical Ponytails. Identical Pink Ribbons. Athletic pants and mixed t-shirts from various past races.  All lean and straight in that slightly butch, under-developed high-school athlete mode.  I hated them on sight.  "You know she slept with the long distance coach," one of them said.

Then havoc. Cacophony. Contempt.

These 15-17 year-olds scattered, took products off the shelves, and ran - chasing each other around the store, spraying at each other, and at no one, and at us (the innocent bystanders in line) the body mists and hairsprays they had no intention of buying.  Two girls literally pushed through the line where I was standing behind an elderly woman with a cane and a group of three young girls.

The big security guard in the corner said "Oh Shit," as if he were an old almost-retired sheriff in a peaceful town who suddenly had an outbreak of serial murders to deal with.  Please remember that we are in WASHINGTON HEIGHTS  - the neighborhood of the easy drug score and the ugliest prostitutes on the East Coast.  This security guard had never had to deal with anything as taxing as this female track team.

"You can't run in the store."
"Put that back unless you're gonna buy it."
"Stop yelling."

He tried to aim his voice at the girls, but they were hard to pinpoint.  For one, they barreled through the aisles. For another, their adolescent shrieks and screams defied acoustic principles.  The noise was inescapable, ever-present.

"Sorry sir!" they yelled back in a patronizing southern twang. Feigning ignorance! as if this is exactly how they behave in all drug stores in Kentucky!  The sole chaperon ignoring everything as he loaded himself up with as many bottles of Mountain Dew as he could carry.

I wanted to scream.  I wanted to shake them.  I wanted to get out of line and criticize Mt. Dew Dad.  But the one thing that I've learned from living in Washington Heights is to mind my own business.  So instead I shot them dirty looks and tried subtly to impress upon the other bystanders that I hated those girls.  That I was nothing like those girls. That not all females with white skin and long blond hair were so rude, boisterous, and clearly  motivated by a sense of superiority and entitlement.

I went home and spent the next hour debating writing a letter to the Athletic Director of the school I was pretty sure these girls were from.  In the end, I decided against it.

It would have soothed my anger, but now I seethe.

I'm considering standing outside of the Armory next year with a sign saying
"White Girls Go Home. You're destroying the neighborhood."