This is absolutely infuriating.
I'm not someone who rails against gentrification on racial grounds (I love how integrated Harlem is now, personally -- I don't love what has happened to Chelsea and the East and West Village and LES, but these are taste issues) but this is outrageous. A young college grad's family member who is a consistently working Hollywood actor tries to help the young grad get an apartment in Harlem to start his life out in NYC and the landlord rejects the application, even though the guarantor is a multi-millionaire, multi-property owner, on the basis that his work is "inconsistent," even after offering to pay an entire year of rent upfront?
What kills me in situations like these -- and I have encountered my share professionally, socially, and otherwise -- is that no matter how affluent or well-positioned you are in life, being black is always an impediment, an obstacle. And the irony is, any time we get any type of advantage (often created to block discriminatory practices) it is perceived that we have a leg up on everything over everybody. In particular, the recent ruling that Suits actor Wendall Pierce (who recently starred on Broadway in the latest incarnation of Death of a Salesman) talks about in the Twitter video link below my commentary makes laws and practices aimed at promoting black-owned business as a way of getting around discriminatory practices that persist in areas like property ownership, bank loans, and other means of upward mobility, are being shot down in our conservative high court(s) on the basis that they discriminate on the basis of race, i.e. by promoting black prosperity in ways that only semantically discriminate against whites. One really would have to willfully obscure their interpretation of American history to see it that way and yet this is what passes today for strict constructionism.
Now, I'm not going to pretend why many people don't like and fear certain demographics of black Americans and don't want them around their neighborhoods and property. The reputation for declining property value, crime, blight -- these are elements of the black lower class that cannot be denied. And I can see why people don't like durag wearing thugs, bonnet brigades of baby mamas, loud-mouthed lace-front Lolitas, mumbling ne'ver do well corner store choruses of chronic smoking, jive talking losers, and all manner of ghetto types of folks. And let's not even get into the epidemic of downright lunatics that have smoked or toked themselves into homicidal madness that roam freely in our major cities attacking all kinds of people for absolutely no reason and seem impervious to incarceration. I don't know why there seem to be more people like this than ever and I have no qualms about saying that I abhor these kinds of people and would happily support their complete annihilation or at least sterilization in the interest of social advancement or the rest of us black Americans who are forced to answer for them by self-consciously demonstrating that we are *not* them. I hate these people. But when we are educated, well-spoken, upwardly mobile members of society and we get treated this way, nothing makes me angrier. It's just so fucking unfair and, while it's nice to know I'm not the only person that occasionally bumps up against these issues even in post-Obama America, it's just so unfair. People should be allowed liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as someone wrote on a certain document. Imagine all the young black college grads who don't have a Hollywood uncle. Now, I have been in a lot of apartments belonging to young non-POC in this city for a very long time and there is no way that these tenants were put under the same scrutiny as this actor and his family member and myself and God knows how many other people. And, in Harlem, no less.
See his interview with CNN"s Abby Phillips here: https://x.com/abbydphillip/status/1798194641902469385
