Shaker Heights
I've been so distracted and disturbed thinking about the New Year's Eve incident in Shaker Heights that I've decided to just stop trying to do my work and see what kind of sense I could make of it. Probably not much.
My experience with Shaker Heights began in 2002, when I was hired as the YA librarian at the Shaker Heights Public Library. Mostly I worked in the Teen Center on the 2nd floor of the main branch at Lee and Van Aken. I grew up on the West Side, and didn't have much experience with the East Side. After about a month, I'd concluded that the rich were richer and the poor were poorer and they lived in closer contact with each other and that often didn't work out too well, same as all throughout history.
From 2003-4, I lived at the Ashby stop on the Blue Line, close to where this poor fellow got beaten up. I walked around there in the dark all the time because I worked evenings and thought it was silly to drive to work when the drive time was quite literally 20 seconds. My first thought while reading about the incident was not Dick Feagler's "phew! Thank God I moved away" but "I wonder if I'd recognize any of those kids." Because the library was full of kids.
Shaker Heights was one of the weirdest experiences of my life. There were old white ladies who used the word "colored." There were white yuppie moms who did their kids' homework for them. The kids who used the Teen Center, 100% of whom were black, probably didn't respect me because I was a lousy disciplinarian rather than because I was white but when I yelled at them to be quiet or stop hitting each other they'd laugh and say "little white girl thinks she's black." When my assistant asked some kids to leave because they'd been tearing up magazines, I got a call from an angry parent who told me that "the library was racist." I didn't know what to make of that. I still don't.
I liked a lot of the kids, but I also couldn't stand a lot of them, not because they were black, but because they acted like jerks. Not that I'm oh-so enlightened (Jim and I say that our kids will have good hair but probably be dumb as fenceposts), but I have a feeling there are some white people who think they don't like black people but who really just don't like jerks (who does, really) and so when they see a black person acting like a jerk they glom onto the blackness and not the jerkishness as a justification for their dislike. To take an example from the world of catty womanhood, it's like, when you don't like someone's attitude, and that someone happens to be fat, you make mean comments about their fatness even though you might have a really good friend who's also fat.
[Once, though, I overheard one of the kids I couldn't stand the most say to his friend, "that lady's nice. She helped me with my homework last year." So I didn't know what to make of that, either.]
There were a few patrons, white and black, whose antics were more than enough to make me flee to New Jersey (where there were more awful patrons of a different kind waiting for me). Most patrons, white and black, were pretty kind and asked engaging questions and said thank you when we gave them answers.
My coworkers, white and black, were awesome. We were one of the few public libraries that hasn't succumbed to the evils of centralized collection development, and we put together a damn fine collection of books.
I thought Shaker Heights was a good place to live. I'd live there again. I'd send my kids to school there, if I had kids. I didn't realize I liked Shaker Heights until I lived in Queens, and on summer evenings I'd get off the F-train 4 stops early so I could walk home via Forest Hills Gardens, which reminded me of Shaker Heights. I hope people who live there, white and black, like it enough to fight for it.
I don't really have a conclusion. Feel free to criticize anything I've written here. It's just a slice of my life experience.
My experience with Shaker Heights began in 2002, when I was hired as the YA librarian at the Shaker Heights Public Library. Mostly I worked in the Teen Center on the 2nd floor of the main branch at Lee and Van Aken. I grew up on the West Side, and didn't have much experience with the East Side. After about a month, I'd concluded that the rich were richer and the poor were poorer and they lived in closer contact with each other and that often didn't work out too well, same as all throughout history.
From 2003-4, I lived at the Ashby stop on the Blue Line, close to where this poor fellow got beaten up. I walked around there in the dark all the time because I worked evenings and thought it was silly to drive to work when the drive time was quite literally 20 seconds. My first thought while reading about the incident was not Dick Feagler's "phew! Thank God I moved away" but "I wonder if I'd recognize any of those kids." Because the library was full of kids.
Shaker Heights was one of the weirdest experiences of my life. There were old white ladies who used the word "colored." There were white yuppie moms who did their kids' homework for them. The kids who used the Teen Center, 100% of whom were black, probably didn't respect me because I was a lousy disciplinarian rather than because I was white but when I yelled at them to be quiet or stop hitting each other they'd laugh and say "little white girl thinks she's black." When my assistant asked some kids to leave because they'd been tearing up magazines, I got a call from an angry parent who told me that "the library was racist." I didn't know what to make of that. I still don't.
I liked a lot of the kids, but I also couldn't stand a lot of them, not because they were black, but because they acted like jerks. Not that I'm oh-so enlightened (Jim and I say that our kids will have good hair but probably be dumb as fenceposts), but I have a feeling there are some white people who think they don't like black people but who really just don't like jerks (who does, really) and so when they see a black person acting like a jerk they glom onto the blackness and not the jerkishness as a justification for their dislike. To take an example from the world of catty womanhood, it's like, when you don't like someone's attitude, and that someone happens to be fat, you make mean comments about their fatness even though you might have a really good friend who's also fat.
[Once, though, I overheard one of the kids I couldn't stand the most say to his friend, "that lady's nice. She helped me with my homework last year." So I didn't know what to make of that, either.]
There were a few patrons, white and black, whose antics were more than enough to make me flee to New Jersey (where there were more awful patrons of a different kind waiting for me). Most patrons, white and black, were pretty kind and asked engaging questions and said thank you when we gave them answers.
My coworkers, white and black, were awesome. We were one of the few public libraries that hasn't succumbed to the evils of centralized collection development, and we put together a damn fine collection of books.
I thought Shaker Heights was a good place to live. I'd live there again. I'd send my kids to school there, if I had kids. I didn't realize I liked Shaker Heights until I lived in Queens, and on summer evenings I'd get off the F-train 4 stops early so I could walk home via Forest Hills Gardens, which reminded me of Shaker Heights. I hope people who live there, white and black, like it enough to fight for it.
I don't really have a conclusion. Feel free to criticize anything I've written here. It's just a slice of my life experience.
posted by Christine at 12:12 PM
2 Comments:
Christie,
I like your points here. I am living in rural VA for a job at a college, and believe me, your sentence about how working at Shaker was strange totally hits home with me. I also like your point of how some people, when they find they dislike those of other ethnicities, they latch onto the color of their skin rather than their inappropriate behavior.
I lived in Shaker Heights for 26 years and raised three sons there. Their friends were a mix of races and religions, and of various economic stratas. One thing I used to tell my kids, in Shaker, there is always someone richer than you, and someone poorer than you. I felt my kids were getting real world experiences. They all found out in college that it was actually "Shaker's world" experiences. Still, I've always been glad I raised them there, and they are too. One of my sons would never live anywhere else. One lives out of town,and one chose another suburb with lower taxes.
Two of my sons were pages at the main library, of course, they are 30 and 38 now.
When you live in Shaker, you develop city ways of coping. You are cautious, and aware. This is not a bad thing in today's world. I moved to Willoughby ten years ago, sometimes it bothers me when I realize that I've lost that caution and become complacent.
Thanks for an interesting post,
Rene
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