The Atlantic - Latest Comments in To New Haven and Back Again

Re: To New Haven and Back Again

Alyssa Rosenberg — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:10:56 -0000

Jonathan,

Please don't worry. I'm not offended. I've heard this criticism before, and I fully accept it. All I mean to say is that New Haven influenced me in profound ways that I'm grateful for and still struggling to figure out. The folks who took me into their lives for a couple of years did me a tremendous favor in treating me like someone who was genuinely interested and invested in their city, rather than automatically discounting me because of where I went to school. I'm very well aware that I don't own New Haven--they do, and you do. I appreciate you sharing it with me for a while, and giving me a chance to learn things that still affect me as a person and a journalist.

Alyssa

Re: To New Haven and Back Again

Jonathan Gray — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:58:56 -0000

Xica

What Alyssa wrote was tangential to the Ricci case, which she admitted and that i acknowledged in my post. I was actually responding to her initial rhetorical question "Why am i qualified to talk about New Haven?" I always tell my students to beware posing a rhetorical question because you never know if there is someone in the audience that might decide to answer it.

But i will admit that perhaps I was unfair to Alyssa. I guess growing up in a Black community that was viewed chiefly as an abstract problem to be solved so that Yale could go about the business of being Yale and not an actual collection of human beings with real world concerns leaves me touchy on the topic. Tone is also notoriously difficult to ascertain on-line, but mine was meant to be world weary resignation that yet another Yale alum was going to speak for the Black and Brown community that produced me and thousands like me. That's why I referenced Johns Hopkins and B-more at the end of my post. I think TNC would rightly mock someone who professed to know his city from four years of college there. But, as this blog constantly reminds us all, race and history mark us in unfortunate ways.

Re: To New Haven and Back Again

Xica_da_Silva — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:20:00 -0000

Wow, Jonathan, that was kind of rude...and I think you kind of missed Alyssa's point which is that New Haven is indeed a very complex place that's difficult for an 'outsider' like her to understand. She obviously felt humbled by the experience. You shouldn't dismiss her experience(regardless of how limited) out of hand without debating the merits of what she actually wrote.

Re: To New Haven and Back Again

Jonathan Gray — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:18:27 -0000

Miss Rosenberg

While i appreciate the insight you attempt to share, your post does nothing but frustrate me. I'm from New Haven. Its more to me than an earthy and interesting place to attend college. Indeed my family has been involved in New Haven politics and have been fighting to improve the Black community and repair relations between the Blacks and Whites there longer than you've been alive. My uncle was an alderman in the 60s and 70s and has run the Dixwell Neighborhood Corporation for more than 30 years. My father worked for the New Haven public housing authority at the height of the crack era in the 1980s, trying to clean up the same Elm City Homes on Dixwell that my family grew up in 40 years before.

Since you evince a familiarity with the churches in the Elm City I'll share that I grew up attending St. Luke's and then Bethel AME off of Goffe street. I learned to play ball at Goffe street park with Super John Williamson's son Maurice, where the firefighters who worked at the nearby fire station would walk by us an make ape noises on their way to work. The history of discrimination in New Haven is something I'm well versed in as a matter of both personal, family and local history.

There is much more to this case than meets the eye, starting with the fact that the white firefighters in the Ricci case received notice about the upcoming exam months before the minority firefighters. That's why the dyslexic firefighter Ricci had the time to have things transferred to tape. This is the reason, unspoken of course, why the City felt the need to throw out the test results. Ginsberg makes an oblique reference to this in her dissent. Certifying those results would have resulted in a lawsuit by the Blacks denied promotion by a test that bears little relation to the real-world responsibilities of fire-fighters, one of which is community relations.

But that's neither here nor there, and was not the point of your post. But I would ask that you refrain from representing yourself as an expert on New Haven. That would be like a student from Johns Hopkins calling herself and expert on Baltimore. While that never seems to happen, countless Yalies feel empowered to declaim about a city they have at best only a tangential relationship with.

Re: To New Haven and Back Again

pete from baltimore — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:04:59 -0000

Miss Rosenberg

Thank you for your interesting post.Like yourself i am no expert on legal matters.

But I would like to say that one thing that I have noticed from reading about this case is that unlike in the movies there is no evil bad guys in this case. Some people here might disagree with me . But of the white and black firefighters that have been qouted in the newspapers , all have seemed to be good people

.I think that is the problem with these cases nowdays.It's a lot simpler when theres a Bull Conner in the situation.No one has accussed MR Ricci or the other firefighters of being racist .I myself do not think that a perfect ending for this story ever existed.

Re: To New Haven and Back Again

Alyssa Rosenberg — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:48:24 -0000

A lot more folks than you might think. I certainly dove into politics in New Haven thinking I was going to solve something, as do a LOT of young people working in policy, no matter the context. I think it's very easy to see the people who might benefit when you make a particular policy--in the context of Ricci, folks who have been systematically denied jobs in fire departments and discriminated against once they--without thinking about the tradeoffs, again in the case of Ricci, folks who will bust their asses, and because of a well-meaning policy, find themselves denied. There are no policies that don't come with cost. I went into New Haven thinking that things could just be right or wrong, and left thinking a lot more about price in funds, opportunity, relationships, etc. If I was naive to have to learn that lesson, well, I accept that judgement on myself.

The only real point I wanted to make is that New Haven has a lot more going on than the Ricci case, and that being absorbed in that dynamic was really good for and important for me. New Haven's been a guinea pig for so long, that I'm sorry to see a fascinating city where tough discussions happen get reduced to a lawsuit.

Re: To New Haven and Back Again

Gramsci — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:14:24 -0000

" we ought to try to do right by everybody all the time, but we should be aware of the chance we'll fail."

With all due respect, who needs that point to be made? And how, in the particular case of Ricci, do you find it to apply? No disrespect to your experiences, I'm just not getting where you're going by recounting them.