Gentrifying Harlem in a Time of Crisis
A farewell for a white-passing journalist covering race in America
A police cruiser parked sentry on 134th street in the nights following a fatal shootout that transpired on 135th after police responded to a domestic violence call in early February.
The year 2022 is off to a rolling start, no matter where you live. Increasingly, however, it’s becoming clear that any given person’s “internet neighborhood” is really what’s driving those day to day changes.
My corner of the internet is one of both curiosity and contradiction, and those questions are all you will find should you decide to read any further. It’s my last semester at Fordham University and I’m now currently living out in daily reality what likely would have been my biggest fear freshman year: gentrifying Harlem. Added to that I believe, somehow, that I’ve actually become a lower-case-c conservative as well.
It’s a platitude we’ve all heard since second grade: “we live in an era where people are more ‘connected’ than at any other point in history.” Since 2020, it might be fair to add the clause “but we are so harmfully divided today” to that sentence.
Labor and Liberty
The false choice of right-and-left political division aside, America is at its breaking point with respect to a number of spectra. What interests me as I walk the streets of Harlem, presenting outwardly to my neighbors as a white young professional, is economic inequality. In the last two years, several measures of economic inequality, including both wealth and income, have peaked at the greatest levels they have ever been in the history of the country, deepening an already-massive gulf between rich and poor. As far as I can tell, the only question about economic conditions now compared to the rest of American history is how one might adjust slavery for inflation.
The next great social inequality is here, and it is already sewing consequences for a white-collar America that is eagerly trying to “get back to normal.” As billionaire industry titans contemplate leasing out our bodies on space debt while the planet burns, I find myself engaging more deeply than ever before with things worth conserving, like forests, vegetables and even the odd nugget of religious wisdom.
That being said, I’ll never cast a vote for the Republican party as long as they’re promoting the America that Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump see reflected back at them through the light-up display on their personal little black mirrors.
Economic inequality is a global phenomenon, worth dozens of articles as we stare down a potential long-term boom in sectors adopting the technology that made the FAANG companies so rich, but those who have ever studied any sort of labor economics are beginning to see how automation has already gotten too good at making money. In 2022, it’s a shocking truth to confront the fact that 5 top-level coders at a well-endowed firm can write algorithms and self-writing code capable of doing more with a 40 hour workday than 100 average coders at a small firm.
Double onto this the fact that a college education is still treated, economically, as a great privilege. When there are so few professional degrees and so many advanced problems, one begins to fear what will happen to those without the skills to live in a world where computers have replaced low-income workers.
Yet one doesn’t need to look at technology in emerging markets across the globe, receive two years of complex technical education or finagle massive libraries of data with advanced statistics to understand how the pandemic has exacerbated wealth inequality: recent violent crimes in New York City, in the streets I consider my neighborhood, show very clearly how poverty, desperation, and unmet needs become fuel for future tragedies. For New Yorkers already suffering through decades of grinding inequality, this pandemic has provided the reason to commit any number of offenses, from smuggling unregistered firearms to randomly attacking commuters on the subway. However, it’s not just New York’s least fortunate that are being set up to fail.
A statue of Harriet Tubman, a hero in the quest for liberating Black bodies from unjust economic systems, stands between lower Harlem’s police precinct and an armored cruiser — two structures in Harlem that frequently keep Black bodies in chains or behind bars.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of New York City’s highest-achieving Black intellectuals today, has frequently spoken about how wealth inequality leaves behind bright minds from underdeveloped communities. Researchers at MIT have recently taken to calling this cohort “Lost Einsteins” and did a robust analysis of the negative economic impact made by a social system that routinely impairs low-income and low-wealth talent from overcoming adversity and socially integrating into the high-skill workforce. (Fordham… take note.)
What they found was that decades of shortcomings in addressing public education, systemic racism, and endemic poverty have made the U.S. fall behind other developed countries in preparing young adults to enter the workforce. Perhaps more surprisingly, those same researchers at MIT found that, due to sheer inaccessibility, educational outcomes in the U.S. are now lagging behind even some developing countries. There are some, like myself, whose life experiences would have them predisposed to believe this factoid isn’t-all-that-surprising.
Even still, in 2018 there was fierce debate between “left” (Ezra Klein) and “right” (Sam Harris) about statistical representations of skill, wealth, income, and race. Those debates primarily focused on bringing in historical information about IQ, scientific racism and labor policy. If those conversations sound familiar, it might be because, during the pandemic, most universities around the country dropped their standardized testing requirements, which measure IQ (either directly or adjacently). In the Supreme Court, right now, is a landmark case about admissions and affirmative action.
Two years ago, in an effort to commemorate Black History Month with a unique story, I wrote a piece about Fordham University's complex history with development, colonialism, and antiracism in South Africa. This year, I am attempting to write a story about New York’s history between Black people, labor, and wellness, and what all that might mean for the future.
In West Harlem, early modern apartment buildings from the previous century clash, both architecturally and economically, with late modern complexes built in the last decade.
This is not a story about me, however. This is a story about my neighborhood, Harlem, and the city I call home. This is a story about social division, this is a story about race. This is a story about Black History at a time when it is actively being banned from schools. (Another relic of what I hope to be the death throes of Trumpism). One might also consider this a story about the challenges faced by Mayor Eric Adams, and the contradictions that polarize his support in mixed-income neighborhoods, like Harlem, between low-income supporters and high-income professionals touting “educated” takes on social media.
This story being mine however, someone who is in no respect Black, demands a level of introspection and honesty that is typically missing from what we consider to be “journalism.”
Gifts, Generosity, and Gentrification
If I told you I was a genius, would you take me seriously?
It’s something that two presidential candidates, Kanye West and Donald Trump, have declared about themselves, though those that took them seriously tend not to be the most reputable sources of information. What makes one a genius? And further, what is it to be “reputable?”
To be “genius” is a function of IQ, which is itself a function of statistics. One’s “intelligence quotient” is a statistical analysis of one's “mental age” compared to that of their peers, where a score of 100 is the mean, or “exactly average.” Mental age itself is another abstract and complex topic from the halls of academia, but perhaps you’ll take my word that I can carry quite a bit of it — I am often described as an “old soul,” after all.
Or maybe, also like myself, you’re suspicious of any sort of broad generalization about intelligence whatsoever, and find the history of scientific racism, eugenics, and genocide to be quite enough for an understanding of psychological statisitcs. Such a sensitive take to the suffering of others might mark you as someone with a high “EQ,” or empathy quotient. Suspicion and distrust of science might indicate that you have a history of traumatic experiences with manipulation or miseducation. (Trauma here being a relative term).
Because IQ is a statistical measure, just about 2.3% of the population, at any point in time, has an IQ at or above 130, which is three standard deviations of 10 away from the mean. Experts disagree if the cutoff for genius starts at 131, more frequently called “gifted” individuals, or if it is worth only calling “genius” the higher echelons of intelligence at 4 or 4.5 standard deviations, IQs of 140 and 145, respectively.
I don’t know what my IQ was when I was tested in kindergarten, but I was enrolled in gifted education my first year of elementary school. I do know now, however, that my parents frequently emotionally manipulated me into turning down opportunities for exposure to other high-IQ individuals on the presumed basis that it was elitist and unfair. My mother had severe schizoaffective Bipolar Disorder, and my father has a long history with racism and paternal abuse. Neither were particularly fond of the way probability and psychological statistics had shaped society.
I also realized, while writing this article and lamenting my poor grades in mathematics courses at Fordham, how my high school had decided to do away with gifted education altogether, leaving me open to particularly disruptive bullying in my statistics class when I was 17. Maybe there was a recurring reason that I ran away from Psychology and International Political Economy and chose a major with a smaller math requirement (so I could later double-back on that choice and dump all my bad grades into an Econ minor).
I do know, however, that the last time I took an online IQ test during the grinding lockdown days of the Summer of 2020, I tested somewhere below 125.
I was too high at the time to take the test result seriously and chucked my phone across the room before I memorized or wrote down the result.
It was my addiction to cannabis and news about racism, however, that enabled me to access and process most of my memories from early childhood and adolescence that I’ve shared above. Substance abuse and “trauma porn” are often chided by those with means as vices that catch the feeble-minded before swallowing them into a lifetime of trouble.
Could such corners of reality also be transitory, adaptive traits for someone overcoming trauma? Do our neighborhoods, both physically and digitally, give us the tools to escape those cycles? Or do they predict a path of perpetual poverty and push us along?
Showman’s, a local Jazz Bar, claims to have been open since 1947 on its banner. I’ve never seen it open.
When I decided to quit after about two years of daily smoking, I had become well and truly addicted. Like I was listening to the Velvet Underground in reverse, I started traveling downtown from my apartment in Harlem to buy weed from a dispensary on 5th Avenue, committing the most blatantly gentrified action I have ever engaged in. When I felt comfortable spending more time sober, facing my intellectual curiosity once again instead of filling all my time with space for my emotions, my intelligence came back very slowly, requiring sustained lifestyle changes that center around wellness activities like mindful eating, meditation, and exercise.
Even now, I find myself constantly asking Siri for definitions of words I don’t know how to use but that I feel pop into my head, and struggle to rein in my most powerful emotional outbursts. Officially, I have the statistically rare diagnoses of Complex PTSD and Substance-Induced Bipolar Disorder. I am, unfortunately, an exception — and I am also trying to climb America’s economic ladder at a time when the rungs are furthest apart. Those gaps are spaces that I am frequently reminded of when I see the abject suffering of mental illness, poverty, and withheld opportunities in Harlem.
Is it any wonder that the loon on the D train shouts, to no one in particular, about the messages he receives from the devil through the TV and God from his cell phone? About the way information can keep you down or build you up, if only you listen?
It’s statistics and access to information, in my day-to-day experience, that causes most of the issues I see in my neighborhood. Its statistics and information that prefigure my biases and judgements toward my neighbors, the majority of whom are Black, as “potentially schizoaffective” or at “high risk for heart disease.”
Might such judgements also be a tie of compassionate concern to my mother and father facing the same statistical outcomes?
History, Herstory, Hierarchy, and Hermeneutics
When I was drafting my photo essay for Fordham’s Black History Month 2020, in South Africa, I had built up the idea in my head that publishing the piece in time for February was an urgent priority. In the process of pushing my article through the editorial pipeline, however, I alienated my colleagues in a way I can only regard in hindsight as (actually) living out one of my greatest fears. Eventually it was published — on Feb. 29, 2020 — leap day, two weeks before the world shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Similar to the liberal demonstrations that would drive the American right to a level of violence not seen since the Civil Rights Movement, my words to my fellow journalists — fired off between drinks at 1 AM South African time on March 1st, combined years of personal angst, internalized racism, and belligerent media narratives into phrases that drove a wedge into the beautifully functioning association we had built together.
While I will still defend that I had a valid point over my editor, that it was indeed “Black History” to tell a story about Fordham’s faculty, students, and clergy who had a hand in shaping South African educational politics after apartheid, I will never be proud of the way in which I sacrificed our relationship to get that story published. I still haven’t spoken to many of those colleagues since those emails.
In seeking to justify a desire to write a story of Harlem through my eyes, a white-passing university student whose very presence in the neighborhood is a consistent force of gentrification, I can only vaguely invoke the work of the late Joan Didion, whose remarkable contributions to the first-person style of New Journalism have deeply influenced not only my own intellectual worldview, but also those of some of the minds I most respect, including the ex-girlfriend who introduced me to Didion (before a similarly bitter falling out as that with my editors due to my propensity for inflammatory statements and resolute stubbornness.) Perhaps a shocking admission for an article about labor in February, but one I’ve elected to include given that it is not only the month of Black History, but Valentine’s Day as well.
In myriad ways, my more “objective” journalism has always been shadowed by psychological patterns and existential afflictions I was ignorantly — oftentimes defensively — unaware of. That unawareness served me well as a journalist, lending my angry mouth ears at tables in 30 Rock, pitching takes on race and politics for NBC News/MSNBC. (To any writers with an audience feeling uncomfortable at this moment, I encourage you to read the work of Oliver Burkeman, a journalist-turned-psychologist from London.)
This is not to say that there is no such thing as objective truth, everything is a lie, and that my time there was misspent. It is a demonstrable fact that there was a shootout between Lashawn McNeil and Officers Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora several blocks away from my front door, and that former co-workers of mine at NBC News covered it.
It is also an objective fact that I, as an individual human being traveling to a therapy appointment after several months off the clock as a journalist, walked through Officer Mora’s funeral procession in midtown. And equally so an objective fact that, in the time I spent walking, I struggled to piece together why I felt it was unfitting the procession be held nearly 100 blocks south, when the officer had been killed uptown.
Police vans, cruisers and barricades lined each intersection of 135th street for several nights following each public instance of gun violence in the neighborhood.
I followed those uncomfortable thoughts with more, that it would be just as unfitting that the police might walk, some armed, all in uniform, through the streets they then occupied each night.
Because for as simple as it might seem to write off Lashawn McNeil as deranged, mentally ill, or dangerous (he is dead, after all, and so would have no argument in opposition), the story of the perpetrator of any crime could never have been so simple.
Certain decisions cause irreversible harm: the bullet leaving the barrel of a gun; the momentum of one body pushing another into the subway tracks; the words leaving the mouth of an angry young man. What drives us to make them?
Albert Einstein only became “Albert Einstein” because he was able to work his way up. Not feeling the opportunity of a “German Dream” in a country increasingly taken with Nazism as a Jew and a genius, he acquired Swiss citizenship, but was kept out of the country’s mandatory military service by his irritable physiology. His time as a patent office clerk in Bern, Switzerland came after a few wayward years of drifting. He had to ask his friend’s father for an in with the hiring manager, unable to integrate into the Swiss workforce himself. Social anxiety and irritable bowel syndrome, perhaps? Impossible to know for sure.
It is certain, however, that Einstein’s son Eduard had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and was committed several times for unexpected and unusual behavior. It is also certain that Einstein himself struggled with his sexuality and romantic relationships, frequently veering into inappropriately cordial relationships with women other than his wife, Mileva Marić.
Many feminist scholars believe that Marić is not appropriately recognized for her role as Einstein’s intellectual equal and a catalyst for his published work. Can a journalist writing one hundred years after the fact, with nothing other than a personal connection to the label “Lost Einstein,” speculate on pathologies of one of the greatest intellectuals who ever lived? Can a scholar? We can go to Princeton, New Jersey, but we cannot go to the former home of Einstein and know what happened to that family in between those walls.
Eduard Einstein was committed to psychiatric treatment for life after finding himself unable to cope with the grief of his mother’s death. He was heavily sedated with antipsychotics until his death. Plastic pills that dull ones’ ability to ask questions are very effective at preventing negative emotions before they form. Eduard may very well have been the first Lost Einstein (or the second, if you believe the hypothesis that Albert Einstein had and abandoned a baby girl in his early twenties).
What causes our world to lose an Einstein? Where might Eduard have been found, after being lost? Where was it that he was lost? Could he have been saved, between the sexist grips of masculine socialization in America and Europe, the horror of comprehending Albert’s relationships to the world-altering events of the holocaust and nuclear war, stuck feeling like the exception in a culture that manages problems by way of power and majority.
So too, must a gentrifying mind wonder about the schizophrenic man speaking to himself of Jeff Bezos across the street from Whole Foods on 125th Street. One must have at least a bit of knowledge in order to make such a connection.
Where lies the lycanthropy between “lucid” and “lunatic?”
Schizophrenia is also a statistical distinction. In fact all mental illness diagnoses are merely statistics-based measures of behaviors and attitudes in comparison with other people. One might see the higher prevalence of mental disorders and lower prevalence of high IQs in America’s Black population as a sign of racial inferiority, as was popular in academic circles — including the halls of Fordham University — exactly one hundred years ago.
Others might look at how mental illness has become widespread in the United States, with diagnoses of depression and anxiety three to five times higher now than they were before the pandemic. The most optimistic among us might hypothesize that we are at the nadir of intelligentsia before the next great zeitgeist, millions of brilliant minds adrift without the tools, academies, or corporations to put creativity into action.
Others still, though perhaps a little more pessimistic, might see walls, halls, and gates as instruments of oppression themselves, and shout at buildings or security cameras. For nearly two decades now, their lives have been invaded by digital tools that know more about them than they know about themselves. Digital tools, in many instances, designed by young men who looked to Einstein as if he was a god.
Is it any wonder that we human beings now live together in dense urban cities, Eduards wandering the streets for meaning and Alberts forcing guilt down to their bowels? Is it any wonder that Mileva sits forgotten alongside the scholarship on emotional intelligence?
It feels, in 2022, that we tend to approach issues of racial equity through the lens of anger, outrage, fear, or distrust.
What might we be capable of if we took the time to slow down and approach the issues with individual compassion?