The Stranger has an article up about the gentrification of my neighborhood and the divide between black and white. It’s interesting, the white people move in, the police respond to crime, the black people feel targeted and hey where were those drug busts before the white urban pioneers started taking over?

I have lived in this neighborhood for the better part of 7 years. I lived for a time across the street from Deanos, before there was a Safeway and a Starbucks. I remember one morning being entertained by a pimp chasing a woman around the block with “Bitch where’s my money”. Her response included a word that I can’t even type.

There has been a learning curve to living in this neighborhood. I have to examine my prejudices (does that guy giving me the look up creep me out because he is a creep, or because he is a black guy?) and I have had to learn that boundaries are different here.

Neighbors regularly ask to borrow the phone, bus money, a few minutes of internet time, booze, my vacuum cleaner. I am horribly dull in that I am the neighbor who borrows eggs or a cup of milk. But more than in any other place I’ve lived, my neighbors look out for each other (and me too).

There are things that I know they can help me with better than I can do on my own. For example, when a couple of kids tried to rob my Kid two years ago, it was my neighbor Karen who knew exactly where those kids came from and is the one that put the fear of god into them, rather than the limp response from the police. I like to think that one of the few good things my white privilege does is that when Karen got in a fight with a family member that resulted in her being thrown into my door, my statement to the police helped her get her side of the story out.

I am aware of my privilege. I know that if I were to be fucked with on the streets in my neighborhood, the chances that the police would give my story more credit because of my skin color are pretty good. I have had a couple of encounters with pushy men who were incensed that I don’t have the white women’s fear of the big black man. Maybe that is true, maybe if it were white guys harassing me on the street (which doesn’t happen as often because of where I live, not because white guys are better behaved) I wouldn’t be as brazen at calling them on their shit. I hope that’s not true, but I do have to consider if it is actually bravery when I stand up for myself or knowledge that I would have the upper hand if things escalated?

But then again, I do call white men out on their shit pretty loudly. I think it’s that I encounter white men in different situations than I do black men. I have told a white man who was my boss that if his hand “accidentally” slipped onto my ass one more time it would also be slipping into a lawsuit. I have made a 6’4″ former marine stutter apologies when I told him it was sexist to call me “dude”.

The point is that to live in this neighborhood and be a good neighbor, you have to actually interact with the people who have been here before you and you know, be neighborly.