Trouble at Home

This past week, a very good friend of mine who lives in Oakland posted a Facebook message that stopped me. She had gotten word from a neighbor that another man would be hosting a neighborhood barbeque, and that everybody was welcome. On the day of the barbeque, the chef was shot and killed, possibly in a robbery attempt. With a mix of shock and anger, my friend posted that she was getting weary of such incidents. She was growing disenchanted with home. "I don't know that we can continue to live in a place where things like this happen," she wrote.

Unfortunately, we're used to stories like this, used to a narrative of violence and a certain chaos framing the mostly black urban cores of cities like Oakland, L.A., New York. But this violence has a somewhat different context. My friend and her husband live in an urban core that's theoretically in transition. Their smallish but very charming house sits in the middle of a once-tough neighborhood that's been gentrifying as a more affluent, upwardly mobile, and notably less black demographic moves in. I wrote about my visit there last year, and one thing I said was that I was struck by the genuine harmony that seemed to exist between longtime black residents and the new population. I don't mean a kumbaya kind of harmony in which people avoided each other and pretended all was going according to some grand post-racial plan.

What I felt in the neighborhood was real cooperation, a covenant among neighbors to watch out for each other. The watching out was based on the realities of the neighborhood, but the covenant was also to not let those realities rule. During my visit my friends and their neighbors held a kind of multi-block party featuring food, live music, and mostly camaraderie, that started late one afternoon and lasted well into evening. Everyone came out of doors for that, including parents and young kids, and nobody seemed the least bit wary or self-conscious or self-congratulatory.

I was frankly amazed. I couldn't imagine such a scene in South Central, or Silver Lake, or anyplace here where gentrification means power struggles that tend to go on behind the scenes, or in city council meetings. People talk plenty here about building community, but few actually get out in the streets to try and connect as equals across color and class lines. Not that West Oakland is some Shangri-la; overall, the community vibe, impressive as it was, was more pragmatic than altruistic. I got the sense that people believed that getting along is good for everybody's property values, good for a quality of life that the newbies hope to cultivate for themselves in a place that was attractive chiefly because of its central location and relatively low housing prices. Of course, they want to change things. But by being willing to work on that transformation, and by treating the neighborhood like home, which includes accepting it on its own terms, they were modeling something encouraging. Perhaps, I thought, the displacement of the old neighbors that's an inevitable part of gentrification, as things improve and housing values rise, wouldn't happen this time. Perhaps there could actually be coexistence.

I was likely being naïve. In her Facebook message, my friend sounded notably discouraged. She had no illusions; incidents like these, while not routine, were not unheard of in this part of town. It came with the territory and was part of the deal (and, in some way, the ideal) at least for a while. The difference between her and the long-time residents is that she and her husband have resources to go elsewhere, while the longtimers likely do not. They don't have what I've heard sociologists call an "option of exit." That lack of options is what created the political apathy that in turn created, and then sustained, the chaos. The new neighbors are challenging the chaos, trying to disrupt it.

I feel my friend's weariness with the place she calls home. For me it's more personal. Inglewood has many charms, which I know intimately and over time because it's more or less where I grew up. I know the good things about the place that most people don't know, but I also know what to expect. I'm continually caught between affection -- really, I love the community here in a way I never could in other places I've lived, like mid-Wilshire and the Westside -- and frustration with the low bar of civic development. Middle class as it is, the mostly black and Latino residents here accept a certain amount of incompleteness and chaos because, well, we're black and Latino. When a shooting happens or graffiti appears, we complain only mildly, clean it up and move on. We long ago settled into crisis management. That's not good enough, and we know it.

I hope my friend and her husband stay where they are. There's no doubt I'll stay where I am. But then, I have no choice.