Racism sucks

[Mythsaje]

I live on Hilltop in Tacoma, WA. There was a time, barely ten years ago, when Hilltop had a terrible reputation as gang central. Its battered and aging houses were half-boarded up and everyone knew where the closest crack house was.

Somewhere in that span of time, on the very street I live on now, but probably another block, a street gang had a gun battle with some Army Rangers. No one was hurt. I take this to mean that the Rangers didn't WANT to hurt anyone. They wanted to send a message to the thugs.

My wife and I are buying a house on Hilltop now and, once we have the funds, we plan to restore it to its former Craftsman glory--or a reasonable facsimile thereof--as has happened to many of the other houses in this district over the past several years.

Hilltop has changed. I was here to watch the beginning of that change...and, even then, it wasn't as bad as it was made out to be.

Now I live on a block that's about 80% black...I have a nodding acquaintance with a few of the neighbors, and pay the kid across the street to mow my lawn on occasion (it's been pretty dry lately--in two weeks it hasn't grown a bit).

I work with a young white woman who lives with a black man out in the suburbs of Tacoma. She's not one of my favorite people for a variety of reasons, but she has this attitude that, frankly, strikes me as a little odd.

She disparages the neighborhood and talks as though anyone who chose to live here (meaning my wife and I, I assume) would have to be crazy. It's full of criminals and thugs to hear her talk. She assumes the same thing many other people assume...that Hilltop is the same place it was ten years ago. It's not.

She's a white girl in a relationship with a black man, and has pretty much adopted the "ghetto" culture in style of dress and speech patterns, yet she comes from what seems to me a fairly middle class background. Her father is a mechanic with his own garage and her mother (they're divorced) just sold her condo.

Her boyfriend is a supervisor at a neighboring company...definitely middle-class. I don't know him personally, but he seems a nice enough guy. What he sees in her I can't imagine, though I'd guess she doesn't show him the side of her that WE see.

Anyway...She acts as though she thinks my neighbors are a bunch of thugs looking to steal from people at the first opportunity, not good people who live someplace because they grew up there or because it's economical. Since the place has a reputation for thuggery, there must be thugs everywhere here, right?

So how much of this is racism and how much of it is classism? She seems to be a very materialistic girl...she seems to gauge herself by acquisition of things as compared to the people around her. She pays no attention to politics that I can tell, and seems to experience no guilt for driving far more vehicle than she really needs.

I'm a bit baffled by this...I honestly can't figure out where she's coming from...though I will say that I often wish she'd just GO BACK there.