by David Winner
I’ve heard older generations of white Americans refer to Black people as “the Black,” and I will take that on myself. I am “the white,” and the prejudice discussed here will be my own, white on white.
“Fucking whites, motherfucking whites,” I mutter all too audibly not exactly under my breath as I walk Ava, our Great Pyrenees mix puppy around my block, which lies in the far eastern corner of a neighborhood called Kensington in a city once known as Flatbush in Brooklyn, New York. I’m mad about the trash all over the street, which distracts Ava from her sacred duty to relieve her bladder and vacate her bowels. Many delicious distractions from rubber bands to chicken bones end up scooped into her snout (and sometimes out her rear end) before I can do anything to prevent them.
Why do I imagine the white is responsible? I don’t know that I’ve actually witnessed trash being tossed onto the sidewalk, and, anyway, why can’t I just be annoyed by this minor inconvenience? Why do I need to specify the race of the perpetrators?
It’s the primal nature of prejudice. We, the white, don’t have to deal with racism. I’ve never been deprived of opportunities because of my race, and while I may have occasionally looked sketchy enough to get followed around a store, all I would have needed to do was change my clothes, shave and get a haircut. But the white along with the Black and the just about everyone else has experienced prejudice whether it’s because of our height or build or accent or our education or lack thereof.
Concerning the white, there are two types of us on the block. Thirty-five odd years have passed since I made my way from Charlottesville, Virginia to Brooklyn, but I am still a transplant, a Johnny come lately, what I will call the white white. Decades ago, Angela, my wife, interviewed teenage Italian American girls working at the Court Street Bakery in Carrol Gardens for a webpage called Brooklyn Profiles. The bakery girls complained about the “whites” moving into the neighborhood: outsiders, yuppies, homegrown immigrants. Their skin may have been white, but that was not how they defined themselves.
Most of the white on my block (with the exception of some Italian Americans and Irish Americans pushing eighty who did not join the white flight of the seventies) are also the white white. Coming from elsewhere wherever elsewhere may be, we populate the two large apartment buildings on either side of the street and some single-family homes though some of us (Black, South Asian, Latina/o) are only white in that old Carrol Gardens bakery girl sense.
None of the aforementioned are the white that I curse out, the white who allegedly litter the neighborhood.
The neighborhood habitues least likely to throw shit on the street are the congregation of the large Nigerian church on the corner. Mostly living in Long Island, they come into Brooklyn either to worship or to run a massive food pantry (now we are getting to the guilty parties) which feeds thousands, over a million over the last decade.
After the last people are fed and the Nigerians have returned to their homes, the block is littered with: yams, carrots, cans, rice, and sugar despite the plethora of trashcans provide by the church.
And who are the recipients of the food and the dispensers of trash, these so-called whites who I curse so bitterly. I have not polled them, but I have a general idea. Some are surely Asian or Black or Latina/o but most are indeed white or maybe white-adjacent from various corners of the vast country once called the Soviet Union. Their ethnic and linguistic identities are complex and hard to parse. One man explained to me that he speaks a version of Farsi spoken by Jews in Azerbaijan. These trash-tossers are the least easily categorizable group of white people that I can possibly imagine. And endangered, despite their ostensible whiteness, immigrants (some of them Muslim) in Trump’s America.
On better days when my temperament is calm, I pull Ava away from the street delights and keep going and going until she was no choice but to do her so-called business. On other days when headaches, belly aches, the terrible global news test my patience, that unpleasant formulation grows in my brain like a less lethal cancer. The trash on the street turns from prosaic reality to a crime for which there must be perpetrators, those fucking whites.
Both my parents, very different people one from the other, suffered from the same malady, failed sotto voce. They would voice their annoyance with people surrounding them ostensibly under their breath, but all too easily heard, pieno (full) voce.
At least once, twice, several times when no one was in obvious earshot, it felt cathartic to curse aloud, making anyone who might happen to pass worry about the middle-aged man with the wild dog, cursing out members of his own race for no apparent reason.
In search of streets with fewer delectables, I move through various other cultural zones, our neighborhood Queens-like in its diversity. There were Chassidic Jews, Banglas, Uzbeks and other Central Asians. But there are no long stretches of sidewalk lacking smells and objects tantalizing to puppies. And if I were true to my credo, I would be cursing them all, the way I curse the so-called whites.
And truly my issue is not chicken bones, rubber bands, rotting bananas or even the putrid tomatoes and dented soup cans and whomever may be responsible for tossing them onto the street, but anger and frustration at everything that bothers me in life. Ava, the trash, the whites become a means to an end, clearing my psyche of the bile that builds up inside me all too quickly living today in our world.
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