Spinning racism as conservation

The New York Times has a startling article centering around a shuttering ice cream shop, The Great Divide, that unflinchingly presents the racist views of some residents of a rapidly-changing Queens community as some latter-day version of Jane Jacobs:

The closing of the beloved neighborhood spot strikes many residents as simply the latest sign of the death of old Bellerose. The bowling alley, another local hangout that some considered the beating heart of Bellerose, closed a few years back, to eventually be replaced by a Staples, among other stores. Several years ago, the nearby movie theater closed, and the building now houses a martial arts supply business.

There have been other changes, even more unsettling to some residents in this neighborhood, long a mostly white enclave of families of Irish, Italian and German stock. ...

The transformation has come as a shock to many of the neighborhood’s earlier settlers, some of whom say they wonder whether magazines tucked into seatbacks on flights between Mumbai and Kennedy Airport advertise homes in Bellerose.

And many residents are not surprised that the developers who plan to tear down the Frozen Cup are Indian immigrants. Some of the same developers recently opened a Quality Inn down the road in Floral Park, an establishment, Mr. Augugliaro said, that “stands out like the Taj Mahal.”

Nice start; nevermind that the shuttering of long-time neighborhood institutions is normal in all neighborhoods -- where was the Times when the bowling alley and movie theater closed. Or was that not a story because it wasn't bought by the same people who created the Taj Mahal?

And yeah, let's call it a divide and morally equate the people on either side; nevermind that one side is racist against the other. Let's just call it a he said, she said thing.

While New York is often praised as a gorgeous mosaic, ethnic tensions are hardly unknown in the city, especially in neighborhoods that undergo rapid demographic shifts. Sometimes tensions are expressed overtly; other times, they lurk under the surface, revealing themselves in conversations that can be heard in local bars and living rooms.

That is the case in Bellerose.

Yeah, racism is presented as two-sided ethnic tensions! And note the understated language -- "ethnic tensions are hardly unknown in the city". Ha! The killing of black kids by whites, the killing of Sikhs by whites, the killing of hipsanic kids by whites -- just tensions that are hardly unknown.

Harshad Patel, who lives with his family in Floral Park, immigrated to the United States in 1981. Before entering the hotel business, he worked as a restaurateur, a metal lathe operator, a water plant operator and a sewage treatment worker. He also ran an electroplating business.

He said he was perplexed by the veneration of the Frozen Cup.

“If they have so much feeling,” he said of the establishment’s devotees, “let them buy it. Let them run the Frozen Cup if they want to.”

But the business would not survive, he insisted. “Nowadays,” Mr. Patel said, “there are so many flavors on the market and so many places to go.”

To drive home his point, he made a public offer. If someone wanted to run the Frozen Cup for the next 10 years, he promised to sell the place at a $100,000 loss.

“Let me see,” he said with a grin. “Who is coming forward?”

See, Patel's views aren't the centerpiece of the article, because it's what some white residents think that really matter. So there's no response to what Patel says in the piece, the Times just quotes him and moves on.

As officers of the Queens Colony Civic Association and members of other community groups, Angela and Michael Augugliaro have been among the most vocal opponents of the plan to replace the Frozen Cup with a hotel.

But as they sat in their living room, they expressed unhappiness with what they see as other undesirable changes in the neighborhood: street vendors selling halal gyros; traffic congestion near the Indian and Pakistani grocery stores on Hillside Avenue; newly created mini-mansions, many of them occupied by extended South Asian families.

“They’re turning the neighborhood into a third-world country,” Mr. Augugliaro said. “We don’t want it over here to look like Richmond Hill or Jackson Heights,” he added, speaking of Queens neighborhoods with sizable South Asian populations.

As he spoke, Ms. Augugliaro shook her head in disapproval at some of his remarks, and he seemed to pick up on her unspoken criticism.

“I’m not a racist,” Mr. Augugliaro quickly added. In fact, he said, he was tired of the subject of race coming up so often. “What does race have to do with it?” he asked.

The couple later recalled a morning years ago when they saw an old man in an orange turban walking on the sidewalk with a curved sword slung from his waist like the one they remembered from the Ali Baba cartoons.

The man was a Sikh, and the object was a Kirpan, a sword carrying religious symbolism and worn by some adherents of the faith, though often a smaller version of the Kirpan is worn on a necklace under a shirt. The couple laughed as they recalled the scene.

“It was like a total shock,” Ms. Augugliaro said.

Yup, he's no racist.

Many of the South Asians who live in Bellerose have only good things to say about the neighborhood. On a snowy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Francis Thomas, the Indian-born owner of India Kitchen, a restaurant on Braddock Avenue, stood at the counter and said relations between the races in Bellerose were good. “They’re tolerant,” Mr. Thomas said of the people of Bellerose.

Yes, because tolerance is the highest value we aspire to here in America; it's weird for the Times to insert this paragraph, when so much of the article shows the residents aren't tolerant, and that'd it'd be weird for any South Asians to think that.

Instead the Times takes ordinary politeness, an unwillingness on the part of South Asians to speak ill to a newspaper about their neighbors, as a 'there's nothing here to see, move along' sentiment.

Next door to the India Kitchen, however, at a pub called Fuzzy’s Bar, where a grill called Wolf Dawg serves burgers and “hot dawgs,” patrons griped about their immigrant neighbors as “Jeopardy!” played on two small television sets.

“Everybody wants to bring their country here,” said Bruce Holloway, one patron who lives in Bayside, Queens. “They don’t want to look like Americans, they don’t want to dress like Americans, and they don’t want to speak English.”

“But they do come for the benefits,” volunteered his drinking buddy, who gave his name as Franco and said he grew up in Bellerose and used to go to the Frozen Cup for strawberry ice cream with chocolate sprinkles. And of the South Asian grocery stores, he added, one of which opened a month earlier down the block and had the word “bazaar” in its name, “It’s not the kind of store an American goes into.”

Of the newcomers, a group he describes simply as “the Indians,” he said, “They change everything that’s been here.” And he wondered aloud, “Where the hell do they get the money from?”

This is one of the things that drives me crazy about the Times -- they habitually think it's okay to use white as an euphemism for American. So the article is structured so that quotes about how no 'American' would go into a store, that South Asians don't want to look like 'Americans', aren't juxtaposed by a different view, they just float by.

Imagine if the guy was saying Jews aren't Americans or no American would go into a Jewish deli; it wouldn't be buried in the midst of a paragraph, there'd be an expert talking about how this kind of anti-Semitism is engrained among certain subcultures -- there'd be some sort of overt recognition that this statement isn't normal or correct.

But for the Times, apparently it's normal and no cause for alarm that an established, declining ethnic group is racist toward neighbors who are saving their community.

Heck, maybe racism really is just the new family values!