Recently I attended a two-day symposium leading up to the opening of an exhibition at the New Museum by Carlos Motta titled We Who Feel Differently. I wrote a piece for Hyperallergic about the symposium and the ideas behind it. The symposium focused not only on the question of how we embrace difference, but also pressed for an articulation of the value of difference—literally, how do we explain why difference is not only important, but the precise way in which it adds something to our lives and experiences of the world. In the piece I wrote for Hyperallergic, I offered this thought, culled from the discussions and thoughts of the speakers at the symposium: “Difference shows us that there are other ways of living and being.” And I haven’t stopped thinking about that idea ever since.
Since attending that symposium I went to a screening of the documentary, The Interrupters, held by my community association. It’s a film about a group of people trying to find ways of stopping violence in the exact moment in which it is about to happen. And the people who are attempting to interrupt the violent actions are people from within the community—not police officers, not city officials, not people who have sat outside the situation and divined a solution, but rather people who have lived in those neighborhoods, who have lived with violence for much of their lives, and some of whom have committed or been an accessory to violence themselves. They literally walk into these situations, trying to catch them before they start to erupt, trying to interrupt the thought process of the person about to take action—offering them a chance to think differently about the situation and so take a different action. Certainly it doesn’t work in every instance, but it seems that it does work a good amount of the time. At base, it is a person-to-person attempt to have people respond to their feelings (of hatred or being wronged or injured pride or desperation and fear) differently.
More than anything, this documentary illustrated for me the deep importance of allowing people within a community to suggest and try out their own solutions—solutions that are typically quite different from those implemented by people holding positions of power within hierarchical structures that prevent them from ever being directly affected if things don’t work. This is something that I keep hearing over and again, particularly well-articulated in two books I’ve read this year: Wangari Maathai The Challenge for Africa, and Jared Duval’s Next Generation Democracy. We need to provide structures for those directly impacted by the problem in order to help solve it.
A couple of days after seeing that documentary, I stopped by St. Mark’s Bookshop to hear the writer and historian Sarah Schulman read from and discuss her new book, The Gentrification of the Mind. Again there was a specific emphasis on the importance and value of difference. In this case it was her clear and pointed discussion of the way that urban settings force us to live amidst difference, and also that the lives of each of us, within an urban setting, are lived in front of one another. This idea leads me to think of all those encounters I have on a daily basis, living here—the couple slow-dancing in their kitchen on the second floor, visible through their open window; tens of spent bullets littering the street where a woman was shot sitting on her front stoop a few blocks from my building by police officers pursuing someone else; the daily greeting between me and the super who manages the co-op two doors down; the so-called “Straight Pride Rally” that took place on the corner of my block when controversy erupted around some violently homophobic lyrics in the songs by a group of West Indian musicians; the Jehovah’s witnesses smiling quietly and offering their hellfire-covered magazines for free; all those that gather to sit and watch the fountain and people passing by in front of the Brooklyn Museum. I can’t help also thinking of the way that each of these things takes place seemingly in isolation. Without the memory of those who stay and who notice, these events would be random, un-related occurrences—like the West Indian Day Parade, that is swept away with barely a single trace left less than 24 hours after it finishes.
It seems clearer and clearer that you can only see the differences if you choose to acknowledge them in the first place instead of ignoring or washing over them. And that seems to be Schulman’s point. As the city changes to mimic the cloistered, gated lives of those who live outside it, we risk shutting out the very thing that reveals the humanity of a seemingly inhumane place.
