The Atlantic - Latest Comments in Seattle

Re: Seattle

M-M-F — Wed, 20 May 2009 06:21:50 -0000

This thoughtful post, another reason I keep coming back for more TNC.

Re: Seattle

black yank — Tue, 19 May 2009 23:10:57 -0000

Johnn999,

I think it's the latter, rather than the former. There isn't any place any more diverse than New York City, and most other eastern cities are diverse, too. Even midwest places like Cleveland are diverse, just highly segregated. But I think the newness of the land out west, and the fact that the latino influence is "in on the ground floor", so to speak, contributes to freeing the mainstream from a confining dichotomy.

Re: Seattle

John999 — Tue, 19 May 2009 11:10:54 -0000

I wonder if it's that in the South and East people are confined by the black/white paradigm and all the history there. Out here in the west, One, there are many different races, Two, it's the new land where everyone is just trying to improve themselves and not obsess over history or what their neighbor looks like.

Re: Seattle

mattfugazi — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:49:22 -0000

I was reared in the Washington, DC, area, but spent my entire adult life in New York City. Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco are simply gorgeous and very friendly. But...

1. The smug cultural superiority, unlinked as yet to the sort of significant cultural achievement attained in New York, really does get to you a few days into any visit.

2. For a Northeastern urbanite, the glacial pace makes you want to hang yourself with your own shoelaces.

3. It has to be said: I'm not Jewish, but if you want to see some real ethnic disdain spew forth, say anything positive about Israel in any large Northwestern city, and watch the spittle fly.

Re: Seattle

black yank — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:36:02 -0000

Another East Coast product here. Grew up in Norfolk, Virginia with parents from Virginia and Delaware. Got my first taste of the west coast at the age of 21 when I interned in Oakland for a year. It is different. Totally different. And Oakland is different Seattle, too. There is a cultural newness, if you will, in those cities that allows large parts of them to feel like they have advanced beyond a simple black-white narrative on race. In fact, you are much more likely to hear the term multiculturalism, which is certainly more apt.

The only sad thing I would say about it is that when you get down to to the low rungs on the socioeconomic ladder, racial conflict gets every bit as intense of the west coast as it does back east.

Re: Seattle

black yank — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:29:56 -0000

If you think it's different out west, try coming to Australia. When Chris Rock performed his stand-up down here in Sydney, he started the show by saying "I see all 9 black people in Sydney are here tonight." He was exaggerating about the numbers but only slightly -- and I think all of us were really in the crowd that night!

It's interesting observing and even adopting the different perspectives on race here. For example, it dawned on me one day that I'm not really black to Australians, regardless of their background, because I'm American. That's how they see me, as an American. They do realise that I'm black, and that leads to stereotypes about hip hop and basketball but they have so little first-hand knowledge of black culture that when they meet me, it is my nationality on which they focus. They feel like they have a context for what an American is. They really aren't sure what an African American is.

And when they say "blacks", they mean Aboriginals.

Re: Seattle

Katherine — Tue, 19 May 2009 02:56:56 -0000

People came to Boston because their families were starving in Ireland.

People came to Seattle because it was the jumping off point for the Klondike Gold Rush.

It makes for a completely different attitude toward life and your neighbors. It's a culture of abundance, not a culture of scarcity. And much of the West has a similar history.

More recently, enormous numbers of Seattle newcomers are highly educated professionals, with backgrounds from all over the world. Being openly racist toward the people who pay your salary is generally a dumb idea.

Re: Seattle

ST — Tue, 19 May 2009 01:15:42 -0000

"...your answer pegs you in the social order"

As a naive young westerner I headed off to Cornell - huge culture shock in any number of ways, but a really odd thing I noticed was that when I met people they didn't ask what I was studying, they asked what school I was in. (Cornell is part private and part state-supported; the state schools cost considerably less than the private colleges.) I couldn't figure out why people were more interested in what seemed to me to be an administrative detail than in knowing what I was there to pursue. I finally realized that the first thing people wanted to know about me was my status in the Cornell social order.

Re: Seattle

DaveinHackensack — Tue, 19 May 2009 00:06:11 -0000

Pete,

I take your word for it (I've been to Baltimore before, but just the nice parts), but just one clarification: I'd seen white beggars before (e.g., in San Francisco). What was different about the ones I saw in Denver and Seattle was that they were so young and almost normal looking, like they had run away from home yesterday. Put it this way: if it were a TV show or a movie, and these kids were cast in it as beggars, I would have thought it a phony casting choice. The white beggars I saw in San Fran were older and dirtier -- more like career homeless.

Re: Seattle

pete from baltimore — Mon, 18 May 2009 23:22:45 -0000

MR DAVE

If you want to see white drug addicts begging for money, you did not have to go all the way to denver. You could have come to Baltimore.Especially the Pigtown neighborhood ,and my neighborhood ,Highlandtown .

I think it is wierd when the media talk about all of the problems in the black neighborhoods. They don't seem to realise that crack and heroin destroyed a lot of white blue collar communities as well. And meth has destroyed a lot more white lives than black ones.

It was nice of you to give them your bag of chips.

Re: Seattle

Ta-Nehisi Coates — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:57:31 -0000

I think your misreading most of the comments here. I don't think anyone is saying there aren't any racial issues. To the contrary, if you read through thread there are some pretty elegant explanations.

You're free to disagree with them. But you should consider the arguments in their fullness, and find--specifically--what you disagree with.

Re: Seattle

eric k — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:55:43 -0000

San Diego and Orange County aren't the rest of the West Coast, The rest of what you describe (CO, AZ and UT) are very different, the Mountain West is Goldwater Faux libertarian country. Though CO is becoming more like the West Coast.

And even with Reagan and Nixon country CA also elected both Browns.

Oregon is hardly Reagan/Nixon territory, we had Mark Hatfield and Tom McCall, the kind of progressive republicans who don't exist anymore. WA was defined for decades by Scoop Jackson and Warren Magnuson hawkish yes but also solid New Deal democrats, they also elected a woman governor long before most states. And yes there were a lot of issues with discrimination against Asians, but that is pretty much gone, for example I haven't seen any other state elect a Chinese American governor.

One telling sign is practically every athlete who ever spends any time in Seattle comes back to retire there, Bill Russell, Slick Watts, guys from the Midwest, the South, CA, even Germany (Detlef Shrempf, Christian Welp) guys who can live anywhere and they all come back to Seattle even if they only spent a couple seasons there. Portland is the same way, guys like Kermit Washington who played a season or two stay forever.

Re: Seattle

Jordan — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:03:50 -0000

Ballard used to the Scandinavian neighborhood. Celebrated Norwegian independence day every year. You could actually buy lutefisk. Now they've all died out and it's being turned into another condo ghetto. Sadly it was probably inevitable after the reconstruction of Fremont back during the Dot Com bubble.

Re: Seattle

Jordan — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:01:36 -0000

I was an APP kid as well, so I know what you're talking about.

I think part of my attitude may come from the fact that during my public school years, SPS was pushing fairly hard to make each school have something distinct about it. Garfield was the place for AP classes. Rainier Beach had a lot of money thrown at it to build a new theater and the associated drama department. Ballard got a lot of technical programs, like the then new biotechnology class. My brother ended up going to Meany Middle School because of the magnet program (unfortunately a flop).

With the push towards standardization, maybe that will matter less. But I also know that even if I'd had the same teachers at, say, Ballard or Roosevelt, it wouldn't have been the same experience that I got at Franklin.

Re: Seattle

M.C. — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:43:53 -0000

Following this discussion has made me realize that everyone should really have three basic experiences when it comes to group differences:

1. Being with their own in-group, where everyone knows the same code and can communicate without any kind of inter-group barrier;

2. The exchange student experience of having to learn some other group's code, whether with a different group in the U.S. or by going abroad; and

3. The cosmopolitan experience, where people from different backgrounds come together to create a new way of doing things.

Most people here seem to have had one or two of those experiences and to be looking for the missing one(s). I don't rank them. If you've always been an exchange student or cosmopolitan, cultivating in-group solidarity might be really important. But I'm after the cosmopolitan thing because I've always been either way too in-group (claustrophobic) or way too out-group (alienating). And so I look for groups based on common interests rather than background or birth.

It's kind of why I hang out here.

Re: Seattle

PhoenixRising — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:40:41 -0000

My multiracial family has been living in the West for 10 years now. We notice race differently here, largely because the grades of brown are so much subtler than back home in the Midwest. My kid is never the darkest or the lightest in her class, although she is often the only self-identified mixed person.

Kids have last names like Jaramillo and look like Barbie, the original white model. Or the kid has an Apache surname even HE can't pronounce--and his mom only talks to him in Mandarin so that he's able to speak to her relatives in China.

What race is, is just different. My brother in law, who lived in the area for a few years, was constantly looking for (other) black people and declared the unbearable whiteness of the West to be intolerable. He saw what he was looking for and not looking for, as we all do.

My kid's godmother was the first black girl at Seattle's historical private girls' academy back in the day. Her parents brought her and her 3 siblings up there from Alabama via Los Angeles, and they had no compunctions about sending their children to integrate whatever and wherever if that got them a scholarship. I referred her to this post and she hurt herself laughing at the very idea that Seattle doesn't focus on race.

Re: Seattle

DaveinHackensack — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:00:37 -0000

Your comment reminds me of a minor culture shock I experienced in Denver and Seattle: getting hit up for money by young white beggars (homeless drug addicts and runaways). One time in Denver I was accosted by two girls (one of whom had a big black eye) and a guy. I was walking out of a Subway so I gave them my Sun Chips.

Re: Seattle

Mocha Dem — Mon, 18 May 2009 20:57:50 -0000

It'd be nice to just live a little

It's quite a release to let it all go. For me it happened gradually, until one day I realized that most of the debate is over for me. Race is not my problem. It may be problem for someone else, but I let them sort it out. I'm busy with other things. I have lived out west for 15 years, after a lifetime in NYC. I ponder race issues mainly when the number of African-America faces seem to dwindle in the workplace, communities, etc. I've never had a black neighbor since I moved here.

The real trip is when you head back east. I remember landing in BWI and thinking I've never seen so many black people. And then I wonder.

Like you I started my travel experiences relatively late in life, but it taught me I could make a home anywhere.

Re: Seattle

baltogeek — Mon, 18 May 2009 20:49:49 -0000

I've lived out west. I went to college in San Diego and lived there for nearly a decade.

I just don't see the west as better. Different yes but not better.

There isn't the same kind of black-white tension which I think gets mistaken as meaning racial issues aren't a problem in the same way they are back east.

As an African-American it was nice to not have my race be a constant issue but I quickly learned that just because folks weren't focused on me that didn't mean other folks weren't catching hell.

It's almost like whatever difficulties Native Americans, Asians and Latinos face aren't considered as bad or something. It's only racism if it's anti-black racism.

And for a country that is becoming more brown each year the idea that the kind of discrimination folks face every day being overlooked doesn't make me admire western culture any more than I would expect folks to admire the history of discrimination that exists in the east.

And the reason I brought up Reagan et al. is because it seems hypocritical to me that people will hold up western culture as superior even in the face of the fact that same culture can produce cretins like the people I listed.

If Nixon and Reagan were from some southern state, southerners wouldn't hear the end of it. Instead we get fed this idea that Cali and places out west are forward thinking when they have exactly the same faults as places in the east.

Re: Seattle

??? — Mon, 18 May 2009 20:40:13 -0000

Good deal. My friend was intending to do that from Boston to Portland (and I intended to join her on the Empire Builder leg) this summer. The situation's changed, but I still think we'll meet up in Portland, and then take the Cascadia up to Seattle to go to PAX.

Re: Seattle

??? — Mon, 18 May 2009 20:34:39 -0000

Weird. As I write this, a friend of mine is moving to Seattle to live there, a product of Chicago. She gushes about it. And I might

I myself...I'm a New Englander. Or rather, a very specific kind of New Englander: The Rhode Islander. I swear, after a certain distance, we get looked upon like we're some national artifact. And it's not without reason: You grow up, and you come to realize that anything you could possibly want is within 30 minutes driving distance. Haute couture? The shops in Newport. Livestock? West Greenwich, parts of Scituate and Foster/Gloucester. Turf? Exeter (good hell, I lived next to a turf farm my entire childhood). A high-end recording studio? Pawtucket has a few. And, of course, there's Providence, which during the so-called Renaissance era, had a nice art and music scene, including the legendary Fort Thunder. So, needless to say, it was like living in a nation within a nation.

But who's to say you belonged there, even if you live there your entire life? I certainly didn't feel that way. And after spending three years at school in Boston, I still felt out of place in New England, let alone Rhode Island. I headed out to another city.

But I didn't choose New York, like many of my college friends have. To me, that would have been like my first year of college at a state school: Seeing so many familiar faces, it would be obnoxious to a degree. So I bucked the trend and bailed to Chicago.

When I realized I was in Chicago, it felt...amazing (I'm certain randomly crossing paths with Kobe on my first day may have helped). In many ways it was this vast city like New York, but it was also many other things at once that wasn't New York. Sometimes I walk two or three blocks and neighborhoods dramatically change EACH BLOCK. It's a patchwork, but a beautiful patchwork. And it feels unique in that way. It makes me feel sad that, in order for me to make any headway in my field of work, I'm having to move elsewhere soon. Maybe I'll come back one day...

Of course, where I'm going should be just as interesting.

Re: Seattle

JTHC — Mon, 18 May 2009 20:23:16 -0000

Yeah, but the West is also a lot more than that. It's where no one gives a crap what your great grandfather did or whether you were at the right eating club in Princeton.

Pointing to a few personalities and institutions in the West isn't very enlightening--shall we start listing up the bad men of the East coast?

And you shouldn't presume it's not a better way of life until you try it--better food, better weather, less of that stultifying class and race friction, and overall friendlier people with less attitude and more open dispositions. What's not to like?

Re: Seattle

JTHC — Mon, 18 May 2009 20:16:32 -0000

I wouldn't say that race issues are nonexistent in the west, but they do seem less pervasive and important in day to day interactions. I lived in DC for several years and I could never get over the incredible segregation in the city, or the fact that virtually all the service workers downtown were black.

In SF, you see more Hispanic faces, more Asians, and race just doesn't seem to be as important.

On the East coast I find that the first question put to you is "What do you do?" There's overt scrutiny in the question, because your answer pegs you in the social order. You may as well throw in who your parents are and what famous people you rub shoulders with. Here in CA, the more pertinent question is "What do you like to do?" No one gives a crap what you do unless it's interesting. People I meet are far more interested in the music I'm listening to or the great hike that went on last week.

Finally, I feel like this is partly an outgrowth of the fact that people here, for the most part, don't judge you based on how you look or how you're dressed. I can go to some of the nicest restaurants in SF in blue jeans. That scummy looking guy in the corner of the coffee shop might be dotcom millionaire. That hipster chick might be a corporate attorney, that black skateboarder might be a Genentech scientist.

Re: Seattle

pete from baltimore — Mon, 18 May 2009 20:03:13 -0000

I am Glad you enjoyed it . I hope I will too.

Re: Seattle

Joel — Mon, 18 May 2009 19:41:49 -0000

Are there even Italian-Americans in Seattle?
Mario Batali is from Yakima. His dad owns Salumi - one of the best delis you will ever see - in Seattle.

Seattle is an awesome place, although it has its weaknesses. I like the generally non-authoritarian nature of the police department, but there are areas (such as the University District) where non-enforcement has cultivated an unexpectedly dangerous atmosphere.