I'VE BEEN SPENDING THE weekend looking for places to live in New York, and most of the places I've been looking have been in Upper Manhattan, in the Harlem/Morningside Heights area. The neighborhoods up here are fantastic, a bit quieter, and the rents are cheap(er), which is a plus. I'm really glad I decided to go to school uptown instead of downtown.
Upper Manhattan has a bad reputation among some people for being unsafe, which - as far as I can tell, and from friends who live in the area - is no longer warranted. Still, when I went online to look up descriptions of neighborhoods, everything I read talked about how Harlem is a neighborhood in transition, an up and coming address, and all about how "vibrant" it is.
Let's add vibrant to the list of words we don't use. Here is the deal: vibrant = black. It's a code word that white people use to tell other white people where the black people live, while still trying to sound like they value "diversity." It's like the word "articulate," which white people use to describe black people like Barak Obama, who they are inexplicably surprised to hear can throw a few nice sentences together - a skill they apparently believed was reserved for them. Vibrant is to black as cozy is to cramped windowless hovel.
Furthermore, how absurd is it for people to say that a neighborhood like Harlem is "getting better," and that you can "actually live there now"? Hello! There are people who live here already who may like it just fine, vibrancy and all!
What the neighborhood description was really saying is, "Harlem is still distressingly 'ethnic,' but fear not: in eight years, college interns, Jersey trash, and East Village hipsters will be stumbling all over Frederick Douglas Boulevard, and you'll be able to get a low-foam latte whenever you like. Move in while rents are still cheap! Manifest Destiny, honkies!"
Catherine Tate - Tempura
"Chinese, basically."
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