June 7
 

Again, I can't imagine why I'm yellow, the bag's yellow, my hair's yellow.  Wait.  The bag, it IS yellow.  My hair?  Also yellow.  I, myself am not too yellow.  I show you this picture because I wanted to show you the other thing I bought in California.  A Julius backpack.  I love it, but because it's sort of tiny, I feel as though I look like a water buffalo with a throw pillow tied to my back.  I DO.  Well, I'm just saying...
 
 
 
 

Okay.  This recent little flux of me writing daily entries won't last forever, and I don't exactly know why I keep doing it other than I keep finding things to talk about that are amusing to me, so rather than being normal and only sharing them with friends and/or loved ones, I share them with all of you, who are, now that I think about it my friends and loved ones.  So, there you go.  I'm feeling chatty.
 

Ugh.

I was watching TV a few weeks ago and this commercial came on.  Two women sitting at a table, supposedly in Paris, speaking with these retarded French accents and eating something called either "Cafe Crisps" or "Cafe Chips".  They're all:

"Zeeze are zee mozt delightful chips ever! Magnifique!"

"Oui! Zey are!"

and they're oohing and aaahing over the damn things when suddenly the sweet music stops and one says to the other (and remember, I'm paraphrasing, because I didn't happen to memorize it)

"Betty?"

"Whattt??"
 

"Weeah frum BROOKLYN!!"

"NOOOOO"

Then, the camera pulls back and we all get to see that ha, hah! They've been sitting outside of, apparently, some little place called "Ed's Bistro" or somesuch bullshit, assumedly in the champion of New York's boroughs.  This commercial pisses me off enough that I was halfway tempted to write to the company (but only halfway, for I am too lazy to actually figure out who the company is) and complain.
 

Being from and growing up in Brooklyn is somewhat of a double edged sword.  I can't imagine not being from there.  When I hear where other people are from, it's puzzling and almost unthinkable.  You needed a car?  To get to school?  You DROVE?  In HIGH SCHOOL?  Bagels?  From a BAG?  Pizza in a box?  No subway?  Wha?  It doesn't compute.  People who grew up in houses, not apartments.  People who had basements and backyards and swing sets and IHOP and Duncan Donuts.  People who know what a tornado looks like.  People who have never had to go to a Salumeria to get roast beef (a theme?  you tell me!)  who've never seen a Scandinavian deli.  Who never went into Manhattan the night before the Thanksgiving day parade and watched them blow up the floats.   Who've never seen the ocean.

On the downside of that is the glaring stigma against Brooklyn and the people who live there.   I went to junior high school with the guy (name long since forgotten) who killed Yusef Hawkins.  When I was looking for information about that (because I am certain not all of you know what I'm speaking about), I came across this paragraph, which clearly demonstrates what I mean:

"A sixteen year old black youth Yusef Hawkins was in Bensonhurst in 1989, a white neighborhood filled with racists, to look at a car that he saw an ad for. A gang of drunken  whites mistook him for a youth who they had fought earlier in the evening and shot him down  in cold blood.

 Sharpton organized demonstrations in Bensonhurst demanding that the killers of Yusef  Hawkins be convicted. They were met by mobs of white racists who behaved identically to  those in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1960s. They threw watermelon at the demonstrators  and chanted "niggers, go home."

(For your information:  this article was written as an anti-Al Sharpton rant, not something about bad Brooklynites)

I remember this so, so well.  People were horrified.  Al Sharpton* on the news?  Telling us all that we hated black people?   Telling me, ME that because of my address, I and my family would never be anything but pretending to like black people?  That it was some fear in myself  that I hadn't yet come to grips with which would some day come to a head and make me sit up and say "Wow! I DO really hate black people!"  And why stop there?  I could finally come to grips with some hatred I'd been harboring secretly for Asians, and Puerto Ricans and Mexicans and Indians.   That because of Al Sharpton, I'd finally wake up and say to myself "Dana, you are a WHITEY! You shall, from this very moment on, like and trust ONLY THOSE WITH WHITE SKIN!!  Gosh, thank you Al Sharpton, even though you are a shiftless black man!"

(*Note:  all kidding aside, I can not stand Al Sharpton.  I think that you'd be pretty hard pressed to find more than a handful of people who'd have anything really glowing to say about him.  Normally, I am all for people who stir shit up, which he does, but I don't think he does it in a way that's even remotely constructive or positive.)

Bensonhurst, a primarily Italian poor-to-working class neighborhood is a place, quite honestly, I have no love for.   It's a place where I'd walk through with my shaved head and a black friend and all, all we'd hear was "FREAK! Lookit, look a the fucking freaks!"  It was a mantra.  It was ignored.  Think Saturday Night Fever.   Think Barbarino in Welcome Back Kotter.   Think any stereotypical portrayal of an Italian-American male.  Mother obsessed, Virgin Mary loving, pizza parlor working chooch.  These guys were stupid.  Really, really stupid.  Criminally stupid.  There is no doubt about that.  They were ignorant, absolutely, but to condemn an entire neighborhood as "full of racists" is so, so typical of how people see Brooklyn.

I also remember the demonstrations.  The riots.  Everyone was wrong.  A life was lost, and that, that is what mattered.  The focus was pulled away from "A boy was killed for no reason other than he had the wrong skin color and he walked into a nest of white frightened, machismo fuckwits.  Let's concentrate on the tragedy and put it back together"  No.  That's not how it played out.  It played out like "everyone from Brooklyn is a knuckle scraping racist!"  because the gang of Italian guys were unwilling to say that their friend had done anything wrong, and the Sharpton group kept playing up the "this is just how it went down in the 60s!"  Untrue.  To every one person saying one thing, there were three saying the same thing about the other race.  The thing to bear in mind here is that EVERYONE WAS WRONG.

The parents of Yusef Hawkins were right to grieve.  They were right to be furious and hurt and wanting revenge.  They were wrong, however, to want to continue the cycle of violence with a protest.  There is no such thing, and you may disagree with me on this, there is no such thing as a nonviolent protest over something this inflammatory and painful.  There is no way an angry group of black people will ever march into a poor white neighborhood and NOT clash.  It will not happen.  This is not because people from Brooklyn, or even Bensonhurst are racist.

I'm not quite sure where or why this started.  Where Brooklyn became the punch line and the inhabitants the joke.  The downside to where I'm from is that, when people ask it, and I answer, there's almost always a pause, and I see this, this, I don't know what- but something going on in their heads this thing where they go down some mental check list of people and things they know about Brooklyn.  They're all "Beastie Boys.  John Travolta.  Funny accent."  every, every time, the first thing people say to me is:  "You don't have a Brooklyn accent!"  like it's a great thing, like it's some relief that I don't.  I could.  By all rights, I should.  I don't just because I never did.  I don't know why.  It could be me sitting around that cafe all happily eating chips screeching "Filomena! We're from BROOKLYN!!" as I wait for the B4 bus to bring me to work.  It could be me returning to my parent's house at 30, because I still live there, because it's expected, I could  be lying down in the same twin bed I'd slept in since I was 9.   The same bed where my boyfriend, Richie or Vito or Tony and I dry humped for the first time when my parents were off at Casino Night at Regina Pacis.

It certainly could be. But it's not.  And if it was, there would be nothing wrong with it.  If I'd had a Brooklyn accent, my options would be dramatically more limited.   In Connecticut?  With a Brooklyn accent?  I'd be like a little pet. A toy.  A novelty.  People would gather around and be all "Muffy, Muffy, listen to her say "sandwich!"  listen to how she says "ask"!  Isn't' t that a HOOT?"  Go on, say  "forget about it!* Wah hah hah! That's the most!"

(Joe Pesci, a loathsome little toad of a man can pull it off.  I can pull it off.  People from Jersey? They can pull it off.  You, there, from Atlanta?  You, from Maine?  You have your own retarded-accent related catchphrases.  Don't do "forget about it".  It's been done.  Way too often and way better than you could ever.)

These commercials piss me off because it's perpetrating some idea about a place that is so, so big, so full of opportunity and different cultures and races and religions living, for the most part, peacefully side by side is a huge disservice to something incredibly vibrant and hard to pin down.  To sum it all up as
a place where intolerant, racist people with funny accents live and get all happy about low calorie French style potato chips (what is a french styled potato chip?  Why french?) is just as stereotyping as Al Sharpton did with Bensonhurst.  In 1990, there were more than two million people living in Brooklyn.  Two Million People.  Think about that, commercial making people who've probably never actually set foot out of Manhattan, the next time you choose to use that good old Brooklyn accent schtick to get a few laughs.
 
 
 

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the downtown trains are full with all those brooklyn girls
they try so hard to break out of their little worlds
well, you wave your hand and they scatter like crows
they have nothing that will ever capture your heart
they're just thorns without the rose
be careful of them in the dark