Philadelphia Magazine on "being white'

Like most white Philadelphians, I could feel my heart thumping excitedly when I saw the headline on Philadelphia Magazine's March cover story: "Being White in Philly." At last, I thought, they're doing a story about me!

When I'm not editing Broad Street Review, I work the lobster shift at a tool-and-die plant, so by the time I get home there's nothing I like better than to unwind by reading a juicy magazine story about big, muscular, sweaty, drug-addled black men conducting intense intellectual conversations with the cream of our white Philadelphia womanhood.

The thought of all those black and white minds rhythmically pulsating together keeps me awake nights, as it does all decent Philadelphians. In fact, I can't get it out of my mind!

No longer the majority

In the old days, I could find sympathetic ears for my concerns wherever I turned. But as Robert Huber's article astutely observes, whites no longer constitute a majority in Philadelphia. Race and ethnicity, after all, are matters of personal choice, and these days, for some reason, more and more Philadelphians are choosing to be black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American— anything but white.

They think we're boring. And maybe we are. That's why we read Philadelphia Magazine— to get the sort of vicarious racial kicks that are so lacking in our everyday lives.

For me, Huber's portrait of the oppression of white Philadelphians at the hands of blacks was just what my shrink ordered. As Huber put it, "Everyone not only has a race story, but a thousand examples of trying to sort though our uneasiness on levels large and trivial."

Fear and loathing

Here's a small sample of the worst horror stories Huber dug up:

— In Kensington, a white teacher in a predominantly black school was labeled a racist because he called a student "boy."

— In Fairmount, a young black kid, maybe 12 or 13, struck up a conversation with a newly arrived 29-year-old white man and asked if he wanted some drugs. When the white man declined, the black kid moved on down the alley.

— Jen, a white mother in Fairmount, wants to send her kids to the Bache-Martin Elementary School nearby, but she's feeling a lot of pressure from her neighbors "to send their kids collectively" to the Greenfield Elementary School in Center City, where test scores are a bit higher and "it's also not nearly so black."

Surrounded in the pool

— Jen (again) discovered a beautiful public pool in Brewerytown and took her young daughter there, only to find— maybe you'd better make sure your kids aren't reading this over your shoulder— that her daughter was the only white child among 60 kids there, and Jen was one of only two parents. As a result, eight or ten of these wild black kids surrounded Jen, "all wanting to show her how good they were."

— And then there's Huber's own son— the very fruit of his loins— who's a Temple sophomore living in predominantly black North Philadelphia. Nothing's happened to him yet, but that's beside the point. "When I drive through North Philly to visit my son," Huber informs us, "I continue to feel both profoundly sad and a blind desire to escape."

I know what you're thinking: Is this the thanks we get for freeing the slaves? Have these ingrates no sense of all we've done for them?

I mean, no wonder none of the people Huber interviewed was willing to be quoted!

All right, all right— maybe we whites are a little boring. So how do I go about changing my skin color, anyway?

* * *

Footnote to the above: Huber's appallingly obtuse article generated more than 4,000 online responses, some of them from his own colleagues at Philadelphia Magazine, not to mention Mayor Nutter's request that the city's Human Relations Commission investgate and "rebuke" the magazine. (What better use of my tax dollars than to tell me what I should and shouldn't read?) Many of the critics pointed out, correctly, that while Philadelphia may no longer be a white city, it's not exactly a black city, either, thanks to its rising proportions of Asians and Hispanics— a tidbit that escaped Huber's notice.

But is Philadelphia (the city) better off or worse off because Philadelphia (the magazine) published this foolish article? Clearly we've all benefited from the dialogue that the article provoked. As the psychologist Havelock Ellis put it, "The by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product."♦


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