I live in what’s called, by real estate agents, an aspiring neighborhood. It’s a racially, linguistically, economically mixed neighborhood. In the Guatemalan or Salvadorian or Peruvian bakeries, restaurants, and stores on my neighborhood’s main street, most folks smile indulgently when I sputter out the few words of Spanish I know to try to convey that as a white woman I recognize I am the interloper here. I like it when they laugh in my face at my efforts. Usually it’s good-natured, but even if it isn’t, theirs is exactly the right attitude. I hope they’re thinking, and saying among themselves, “Learn the damn language if you’re going to live here.”
I drove down my main drag recently, which is less than a mile from the public college where I teach, and the college itself is now a covid testing site. Every person, big and small, tiny and tall, every person, to a person, was wearing a face mask. Of course, over 40% of the covid positive tests in RI are from the Latinx community. Another significant percentage is from the African-American community.
I had to be on the upper-crust East side this week too, around Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design, where stately homes, fashionable restaurants, and the beautiful “Boulevard” reside for the joy of predominantly white folks. I found myself raging that, to my eye, 95% of people on the very-peopled East-side streets couldn’t be bothered to wear face masks.
“What, do they think, their spit don’t stink?” I raged. “What, are these too-cool-for-public-school richie-riches waiting for their goddamned, diamond-studded masks to be delivered to their doors by one of the front-liners working for Prime?”
“Put on an effing face mask!!” I shouted through my car window.
Neighborhoods matter. Neighbors matter.
–KLB