City Kids

Maria Kromidas

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813584805
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Cosmopolitanism—the genuine appreciation of cultural and racial diversity—is often associated with adult worldliness and sophistication. Yet, as this innovative new book suggests, children growing up in multicultural environments might be the most cosmopolitan group of all.    City Kids profiles fifth-graders in one of New York City’s most diverse public schools, detailing how they collectively developed a sophisticated understanding of race that challenged many of the stereotypes, myths, and commonplaces they had learned from mainstream American culture. Anthropologist Maria Kromidas spent over a year interviewing and observing these young people both inside and outside the classroom, and she vividly relates their sometimes awkward, often playful attempts to bridge cultural rifts and reimagine racial categories. Kromidas looks at how children learned race in their interactions with each other and with teachers in five different areas—navigating urban space, building friendships, carrying out schoolwork, dealing with the school’s disciplinary policies, and enacting sexualities. The children’s interactions in these areas contested and reframed race. Even as Kromidas highlights the lively and quirky individuals within this super-diverse group of kids, she presents their communal ethos as a model for convivial living in multiracial settings.      By analyzing practices within the classroom, school, and larger community, City Kids offers advice on how to nurture kids’ cosmopolitan tendencies, making it a valuable resource for educators, parents, and anyone else who is concerned with America’s deep racial divides. Kromidas not only examines how we can teach children about antiracism, but also considers what they might have to teach us.   

1

Sensing Urban Space

“It’s great, because everything is right here,” Fawwaz explained when I asked him what he thought about Augursville.1 He underlined his point by comparing his neighborhood to the one his sister lived in, “where there’s nothing around.” Looking at a map Fawwaz drew of his immediate neighborhood, one is struck by the proximity of the important places that make up Fawwaz’s world.2 The points labeled within a five-block radius of his home include his school, PS AV, two supermarkets, a subway entrance, a playground and public square, a candy store, a pizza place, a barbershop, a cousin’s home, and three friends’ houses. A bit farther out but still within a mile radius are his father’s work, his brother’s house, two highways, his favorite taco spot, two fast-food chains, and the multiacre park. Fawwaz gave excellent directions to any of these or other places of interest. He thought I might find quality espresso at this “Italian bakery,” and directed me to pass “the blue-and-white cart with the souvlaki,” “the mosque that looks like a store,” crossing the street, “yeah, the really busy one” until I would find myself right next to the store “pumping Spanish music.” Fawwaz’s understanding of Augursville combined the formal knowledge of street names and cardinal directions with the sights, smells, and sounds of his personal experiences (McFarlane 2011).

Because Fawwaz, like all my participants, primarily moved through Augursville by walking, he had a sensuous and intimate knowledge about and relationship with Augursville. From the Athenian philosophers to current social critics, architects and urban planners, and writers, artists, and experimental theorists in between, walking has been theorized as key to the urban experience. Prefiguring currently popular ideas about the embodiment of space, the nineteenth-century poet Charles Baudelaire wrote of the urban stroller intoxicated by the “universal communion” with the crowd and absorbing “all the professions, all the joys, all the sufferings that chance presents” (2009, 22). Current scholarship emphasizes how urban dwellers form attachments to place and cultivate sociability with those around them, as well as the link between walking and neighborhood desirability, convenience, health, and environmental sustainability.3 A mode of transportation on their scale, walking has special significance for kids. As John Horton and colleagues (2014, 101) note in their rethinking of the “new walking studies” through childhood, children’s walking is a constitutive feature of their geographies, characterized by rich and intense “sociality, narrativity, playfulness and taken-for-grantedness.” Even when accompanied by an adult or restricted in their range, kids are able to control their pace and attention and suggest routes, detours, and stops in ways that they cannot in cars, buses, and trains. When walking, they have more agency, actively moving through the city rather than being moved through it. Walking allows kids to form an intimate relationship with the city; to inscribe their spatial practices, meaning making, and interpretations on the city at the same time that its sights, smells, sounds, and ambient feel shape them as subjects.

This chapter explores how learning race occurred through the multisensory experiences of dwelling, navigating, and making meaning of urban space. In ways, the point is rather banal: you can’t understand the kids’ cosmopolitanism without taking into account the local setting in which it emerged—amid the rich diversity and dynamism of Augursville. I doubt I need to convince anyone that Augursvillian kids, by virtue of walking about and seeing, smelling, and feeling different bodies, seeing various ethnic supermarkets and places of worship, hearing different languages and feeling the beat and rhythm of various hybridized forms of music, smelling and tasting cuisines associated with different bodies and giving them their different smells, would perceive difference quite distinctly from suburban kids in a homogeneously white neighborhood, driving home from school as big-box supermarkets and chain stores whiz by their view. The analytic task of this chapter is to explore precisely how the dynamics within Augursville enabled and posed challenges to the emergence of the kids’ cosmopolitanism. For not only are urban multicultures spaces of positive intercultural encounter, they can also be spaces of fear, suspicion, hostility, and indifference.

Geography Lessons: Sensing Relationality

Geographer Colin McFarlane describes “learning the city” as the ways adults and children “feel their way through” the built environment of the city, its materials, embedded knowledge, and resources. Through their spatial practices, urbanites produce and transform the city, while the city shapes them as social subjects. In this formulation, the city, or any place for that matter, is not a passive object. Rather, space has agency in its ever-shifting activities, its perpetually contested ideologies, the way it “enters into our unconscious and holds sway over the imagination” (Larkin 2013, 333). Physical space does things. As Jan Blommaert notes, physical space is also cultural, social, and political space: “Space offers, enables, triggers, invites, prescribes, proscribes, polices or enforces certain patterns of social behavior; a space that is never no-man’s land, but always somebody’s space; a space of power controlled by, as well as controlling people” (2013, 3, emphasis original). As such, encounters with space are dynamic and inherently contested. Space is a battleground. Dwelling, moving, playing in, and making meaning of space are never solely practical, but also political.

Geographers are increasingly calling attention to children’s spatial meaning making as “moments of political formation,” where “children [are] recognizing and asserting themselves as particular subjects, in relation to others, and to subject positions that may be imposed on them” (Elwood and Mitchell 2014, 4). The task of tracing how the specific space of Augursville shaped the kids’ racial learning is made complex because kids dwelled in, moved through, and made meaning of Augursville’s multiple semiotic systems differently. Their interpretations and evaluations were shaped by their experiences, memories, spatial biographies, aesthetic sensibilities, and intersecting positionalities. This chapter demonstrates how kids learned race as they decided who has rights and who belongs in particular neighborhood spaces, and which spaces are good, bad, ugly, safe, or dangerous. Through struggles to make meaning of their neighborhood, kids transformed the lived experience of race and contributed to the convivial structure of feeling that was evident but submerged in Augursville.

Models of Relationality

Augursville is a vibrant and bustling “superdiverse” urban neighborhood, and the overlapping relations between different bodies, cultures, and languages constitute its placeness. These relations could be read off multiple semiotic systems at the visual, olfactory, sonic, sensual, and linguistic levels: the built environment; the movements, distributions, and encounters of people; the placement and ordering of visual signs; the sounds of languages, speech, and music styles; the unarticulated yet well-known and contested norms governing behavior in different spaces; and the explicit and implicit everyday discourses of and about the neighborhood and its diversity. The “particular arrangements of bodies, bricks, things, and settings” allow us to trace what Dan Swanton (2010) calls the “ontology of encounter,” how the “billions of happy and unhappy moments of encounters” are structured (Thrift 1999, 302, cited in Swanton 2010, 2341). Infrastructure, the built networks that facilitate the circulation of people, goods, and ideas, is thus practical and poetic, “semiotic and aesthetic vehicles . . . that sometimes can be wholly autonomous from their technical functions” (Larkin 2013, 329). That is, infrastructure can bring people together or keep them apart materially and symbolically.

The relations between differences in Augursville ranged from hierarchical ordering of difference to ways of being separate yet together and forms of comingling and amalgamation.4 Each of these four models was complex and inflected with local meaning. The hierarchical model tolerates and ranks differences according to how they compare to hegemonic white “Americanness.” Some differences are silenced, are ignored, or barely register in this model. Despite the striking superdiversity of Augursville, the hierarchical ordering of differences was evident and could be apprehended in the universal dominance of English on Augursville’s public buildings, civic associations, street signs, and corporate advertisements. Hierarchy was explicit in the spatial marginalization of Augursville’s housing project. Like much public housing in the United States, Augursville’s projects were located at a geographic endpoint of the neighborhood. Although the projects were only about a mile from the school, the subway, and vibrant commercial districts, walking to them was a slow progression into inactivity, industrial buildings shuttered up in the daytime, blocks with boarded-up and dilapidated buildings. The bustling placeness of Augursville is absent; only a few poorly stocked bodegas and a supermarket surround the area. Residents of Augursville who did not live in the projects simply had no reason to be there and did not venture there. More problematic was the racialized suspicion with which Augursvillians perceived the young Black residents in public and commercial spaces. Because the majority of Augursville’s African Americans lived in public housing, Black male bodies were perceived through what Sara Ahmed (2000) has productively described as “stranger danger,” a racialization compounded by spatial and classed fears. As “matter out of place,” Black male bodies were understood as not belonging—loitering in public space and endangering those with spatial rights. While this hierarchical model predominates in public spaces in the United States, Augursville differs because it simultaneously coexists with other models.

The second model of relationality evident in Augursville is the horizontal ordering of differences, a separate and equal model best encapsulated with a variant of the oft-heard motto of polite separation, “we all do our own thing.” Its voicing in local speech ranged in tone from acceptance and enthusiasm for the “live and let live” attitude of residents to guarded suspicion and defensiveness regarding any perceived encroachment that would upset the balance of diversity. Horizontalism easily slipped into hierarchy when adult residents unfavorably compared groups to their own with statements such as “we take (took) care of the neighborhood; they don’t.” This is not to say that any resident, white or otherwise, held one view of Augursville’s diversity. After complaining how newcomers from Latin America were not learning English as her parents’ generation had, Eliza’s mom, a longtime resident of Augursville, extolled the neighborhood because of its diversity in the very next breath. The horizontal model is visually prominent in Augursville, a byproduct of groups’ everyday life experiences and Augursville’s historical status as a receiving point for new immigrants. Diverse religious infrastructure punctuates the neighborhood. On a commercial strip a few blocks from the school, every other business seems to be created by and for a particular group: a storefront offering telecommunication services to Latin America with its large vitrine covered in Spanish signs; a building serving as mosque, madrassa, and Bangla school; a barbershop with a large Dominican flag and map of the island on its vitrine that featured photographs of low and high fades and buzz cuts; and a Greek supermarket with a poster of a smiling woman exclaiming, “We support Greek products and our space” in Greek. But no group lived a separate or parallel existence. Residents regularly visited one another’s grocery stores, restaurants, and travel agencies (one neighborhood in which this business still thrives). There were many opportunities to mix it up in Augursville.

The third model of relationality in Augursville is a patchwork model where differences overlap and abut in shared spaces. This model prevailed in the arrangements of bodies, languages, and things in public and commercial spaces. As one large supermarket proudly exclaimed, “We carry a full line of Greek, Indian, Italian, Brazilian, Mediterranean, and European, organic & natural products.” Inside the market, products were mixed together without any geographical schema. The kiosk-like corner stores that were a key feature of the neighborhood also exemplify the patchworking of differences. Their outdoor newspaper displays had newspapers in at least ten different languages. Every day saw a different paper centered or on top of others, with the New York Times and Daily News often obscured by Spanish, Korean, Russian, Albanian, and Polish dailies.

Augursville’s patchwork of architectural styles marked the spatial mixing of class. Buildings of varying types, styles, and ages occupied the same block. One of my participants lived in a beautiful yet modestly maintained Federal-style wood-frame two-story building over a century old, on the same block as two other fifth-graders, who lived in a sprawling eight-floor apartment complex built in the mid-twentieth century. These buildings face three-story row houses, brownstones broken up into multifamily homes, and squat buildings of indeterminate age covered in aluminum siding. Virtually all of these structures have been modified with little thought of architectural integrity. One brick structure had four different patches of siding, some of aluminum, others of faux stone, each showing its age. Newly arriving professionals found this patchwork of architectural styles disorderly, its “ugliness” a constant source of humor and critique. The cobbled-together model was featured prominently in commercial spaces, perfectly represented by Abir’s Bakery a few blocks from the school. Although Abir had erected a handsome dark green awning with his store name and “halal” in both English and Bangla, the vitrine was also painted with a stereotypical Italian baker holding an Italian flag and the previous owner’s Italian name. Inside, pairuti sat alongside Italian loaves, cannoli, baguettes, challah, and health-conscious multigrain loaves. Was it a Bengali bakery, a Bengali bakery with Italian goods, an Italian bakery with Bengali goods, a Bangla-Italo-French bakery? No one in Augursville bothered to ask, accepting it for what it was.

The last model of relationality is the various modes of amalgamating differences. Togetherness transforms individual parts to create something new, with varying degrees of integrity of the parts. These include youth cultural forms that blend by virtue of interaction and sustained relationships. It is not as visible in the built or semipermanent structures of Augursville, although it does appear sporadically in new fusion restaurants opened by a younger generation of entrepreneurs. It is more visible in the ephemeral syncretized practices of residents—a teenage girl wearing tight jeans tucked into knee-high leather boots and a hijab giggling arm in arm with a girl with “chola-fied” eyebrows and henna on her hands. This syncretic model troubles neat packages of difference. When walking about or staying still on a busy corner, you encounter people whose bodies do not match the language or clothing style you would expect, who eat or worship in places you would not envisage. The ambient sounds of Augursville also form an amalgam, the dizzying array of languages, beats, and lyrics coming out of cars, storefronts, headphones all converge. The subway arrives and the whole neighborhood trembles, the sound of metal on metal temporarily drowning out and uniting all sounds.

These four models of the relations of difference (hierarchical, horizontal, patchworked, and amalgamated) overlap to produce superdiversity’s key feature—complexity, “a multitude of crisscrossing and overlapping features of diversity, packed within a relatively small area” (Blommaert 2013, 112). The neighborhood’s dynamism ensures that these models are not static. Horizontal arrangement of differences can become a patchwork, like the Romanian church that turned into a de facto ecumenical one. Changes are not permanent or unidirectional. Separation can emerge from the patches, as when the ecumenical church turned into a Korean Presbyterian church within a year’s time. Simultaneous class dynamics transform the signature row houses, each with their patches of garden that blend seamlessly with one another. On one block, an absentee landlord illegally renting one of the row homes neglected his plot. Desperate neighbors separated their carefully tended rectangles, one with a short chain-link fence, another with bushes. In contrast, in another row of homes purchased by developers, the emblematic patchworks of gardens altered in a way that seems to please the eyes of the newer professional middle class trickling in to Augursville, with uniform plants by professional landscapers. Superdiversity’s complexity entails not only perpetual motion, but that “layers upon layers of historically conditioned activity” occur at different speeds and with different form simultaneously (Blommaert 2013, 17). Kids had to make sense of this complexity as they went about their business moving through space in their daily lives. In doing so, they contributed to complexity and its ongoing dynamism.

Sensing Augursville from Different Vantage Points

Because all of the kids had ties to other parts of NYC, regularly visiting, having lived in families or visiting kin in various parts of the city, the kids often talked about Augursville, perceiving it in relation to these other places. The kids’ spatial biographies, along with their multiple positions, shaped how they made sense and evaluated Augursville’s dynamics. In general, all of the kids had positive connections to their neighborhood, and like Fawwaz’s introductory statement, signaled Augursville’s density when speaking of it favorably. In fact, kids’ talk about Augursville often flowed into a discussion of diversity and difference and vice versa, establishing how important space was for racial learning. For example, when I expressed surprise when Besnik first told me that he was part Albanian, he continued by discussing the neighborhood. “There’s lots of other Albanians in Augursville. And a lot of Spanish cultures. I’m Spanish too,” he added as an aside, before continuing, “Egyptian, I know, my friend is from Egypt. What else? I forgot, there’s a lot of people here. Bangladesh, India, Korea, Tibet, like Sangmu!” Carly, who had been casually listening, piped in, “Oh yeah, like in my building we have twenty people. We have Greek, Arabic, Yugo, um, something Slavia.” “Yeah?” I asked. She replied, “I’m fine with it. I don’t mind if they’re Chinese, Japanese, French, as long as they speak English!”

Consider the contrast in the two kids’ perspectives on their relations to difference. Besnik’s positive perception of Augursville is partly due to the fact that his daily practices and embodied experiences mixed cultures, races, languages, and religions. His father is a Dominican-born Catholic, and his mother is an Albanian-born Muslim. Part of his enthusiasm for Augursville’s mixity must have also been due to his spatial history, having lived with his maternal grandparents for a time in a neighborhood that was predominantly white and “boring.” We could imagine that there his mixity was viewed if not negatively, then at least as a curiosity. The hierarchical model limits the degree of mixing that it tolerates. On the other hand, Carly, white and self-proclaimed “just American,” perceived Augursville through this hierarchical lens—“as long as they speak English.” It was nearly identical in formation to a white adult resident who remarked about Augursville’s multilingual store signs, “I don’t mind the signs in all these languages, as long as they’re in English too!” But Besnik didn’t subscribe to the hierarchical model. With his considerable spatial autonomy, he and Raiden, a fifth-grader from another class who was “all mixed too” (Japanese and French), would skateboard all around Augursville when school let out.

When I asked ten-year-old Salma what she thought of her neighborhood, the limits she raised were of a very different order. “I love it! Augursville, it’s like a little town, a cozy town.” When I asked her to elaborate she replied, “Lots of stores and lots of friends, it’s kinda like . . . its cozy! There’s hundreds of stores, you can buy anything. Plus, the park is way cool!” She continued to rattle off the places she frequented, excitedly describing Augursville in a sensual manner. I jokingly remarked that she must have a pretty good nose, after her mentioning the aroma of schwarma from her favorite restaurant, or the incense she would try to grab and sniff at the kiosk if her mother wasn’t in a hurry. She pointed out the costs to her sensitivity—she hated the smell of smoke and “the drunk people.” For Salma, the older Europeans were problematic. Her family just wanted to have a picnic in the park, but the smokers aggravated her asthma. Salma often brought up Augursville and the interesting lessons about diversity she would learn just by being out and about. When telling me ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Transcription Conventions
• Introduction: The Transformative Politics of Learning Race
• Chapter 1. Sensing Urban Space
• Chapter 2. Loving Friends and Things
• Chapter 3. The Collective Labors of Conviviality
• Chapter 4. Racist or Fair?
• Chapter 5. Enacting Sex Ed
• Conclusion: Out of the Heart of Whiteness
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author