I found myself getting the world’s most awful panic attack a few days ago. I could hardly breathe. It happened as I was walking down the streets of my hometown. I call Peekskill, New York my hometown although I was born in Jamaica, West Indies and reared in Brooklyn in New York. Peekskill has a long African-American history, but now it looks as if that history is changing because when I look around—as far as the eye can see—all I see are Ecuadoreans.
When I first came to the United States, my family and I had the unfortunate luck of integrating into a formerly all-white apartment building in Brooklyn made up of Jews and Italians. To be succinct, we suffered greatly because of this. We were always finding dog turd on the welcome mat outside our door. Once a Jewish old lady saw me on the street, stopped in her tracks, and spat on my face. It’s left me with a few neuroses—yes, racism does leave scars—and one of them is a terrible fear of not belonging and a fear of being left out. Now I have to face up to a possible future I never dreamed of: the fear of being alone and rejected in my hometown, the fear that my children and grandchildren might not easily rent a house or find a job in my town.
Whenever the white American media discusses immigration, it concerns itself with the extremes: white liberals who are all for illegal immigrations and white conservatives who are all supposedly for a white America. The white liberal media often states, wrongly, that the new immigrants (legal or otherwise) don’t take jobs from Americans. They say immigrants take jobs “Americans won’t take.” Obviously, the white liberal media doesn’t know squat about how poor whites and poor blacks live. Nor do they consider that immigrants come and succeed while the fate of poor whites in Appalachia, Native Americans in Reservations, and blacks in inner cities seem always to stay the same.
Unlike blacks, the typical white person—unless he is Jewish-- doesn't understand the fear of racism and the paranoia a black person feels when a haven suddenly begins changing. The typical African-American, like many a Jewish person, has at least one family member who was killed or lynched within the past eighty-years. Think I'm kidding? Ask your black friend if he has an uncle or ancestor who was lynched or an aunt who was raped. We get nervous when a whole town changes.
I live in one of those typical urban American neighborhoods. The houses up and down my block include Chinese-Thai families, interracial families, a Cambodian boat family, families from Goa in India, Hispanic-Americans who were born in the US, new immigrants from Columbia, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Jamaican-Americans, Chinese folks from Hong Kong, African-Americans, Jewish folks, and white folks. Everyone gets along with each other. Let me restate that: Everyone gets along with each other and speaks with everyone else except for the Ecuadoreans who seem to dislike talking to blacks.
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