Warning: The following is an exercise in half-assed craigslist sociology.
Recently I had occasion to make two purchases from craigslist. This required me to drive about 20-30 minutes from home, to two very different places, to pick up my new stuff from the homes of two strangers. Last Friday I went to a black man’s house in a poorer neighborhood; yesterday I went to a white guy’s house in a richer neighborhood. It’s not the world’s most exciting story, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth telling because the two couldn’t have been more stereotypical and visiting their houses on back to back weekends was interesting.
My first stop was in mixed race, working class neighborhood. It’s a nice place, with kids on bikes and people talking on sidewalks, but the houses are small, close together, and maintained with utility more in mind than appearance. So while one would feel perfectly safe there after dark it’s also the kind of place where few are more than a missed paycheck away from serious trouble. The house I went to was a single story, single family affair that had a small front lawn that looked like it hadn’t seen a mower in a while. A short chain link fence wrapped around the side and the front, but was completely open to the driveway such that it was useless for retaining dogs or children.
As I walked up to the porch John walked out his front door and said a friendly hello. He was wearing only a pair of jean shorts and there were a couple of low budget tattoos on his, shall we say, ample frame. (When I was walking behind him I was treated to several inches of ass crack.) I’m not disparaging the guy, he was very nice, had a good strong handshake, and was happy to joke around a little as we loaded my car. But it’s not the kind of front door appearance one makes if one’s had the status consciousness indoctrination of a middle class upbringing.*
The second neighborhood, in a former “sundown town” that still has scarcely any non-white residents, was equally unremarkable. The streets and sidewalks are in better shape and the cars are newer, but it was just as typically American as it’s less prosperous counterpart. The second home was also a single story, single family house. The lawn was slightly larger and had the uniform context of frequently maintained grass. The house itself was probably 50% bigger and much more prosperous looking in general (fresher paint, more shrubbery, etcetera). The lady of the house answered the door in one of those t-shirts NPR gives to donors and there was an Obama-Biden magnet on the fridge.
Mike greeted me in his kitchen. Just like John he was easy going and had a firm handshake, but he was dressed in standard middle class issue GAP-style apparel. Also like John he was on the heavy side and seemed affable and easy going. So while they’re similar in a lot of ways, they’re also worlds apart in others.
Their differences are perhaps best illustrated in how they carried themselves on-line. John, the first guy, had a text only ad and wrote that pictures were available only by e-mail because he couldn’t get craigslist to upload them. When I e-mailed him and he sent me the pictures it was instantly clear why he’d had trouble posting them, each jpg file was a whopping three megabytes. That craigslist wouldn’t want to upload twelve megabytes every time someone clicked on this add is at least one level above his technical understanding. To complete the profile he even had an @comcast e-mail address with one of those simple name and number combinations used by the technically unsavvy.
Compare that with the second guy, whose e-mail URL was one he’d set up himself for a personal home page and blog. Needless to say he had no trouble uploading his pictures to craigslist and even had inserted a few hyperlinks for good measure. If you were creating these two as fictional characters you might need to tone down these kinds of details for fear of having them seem like clichés.
Now, I’m not doing this only to traffic in cheap stereotype confirmation (though, admittedly, that’s fun), and I make no claim that these two little anecdotes constitute data in any meaningful way. I’m doing this because meeting these two guys in such quick succession was a very visceral reminder of just how varied Americans are. I think it’s far too easy, even if you live in a place with a pretty healthy cross section of people, to keep your head down and not really think about all those other people out there. It is an almost trivially saccharine point (think of other people!), but it feels rare to have it so vividly illustrated.
None of this is exactly news. There will be no newspaper headlines that scream in giant type “Shocking Development: White Guy Lives in Ritzier Neighborhood Than Black Guy”. But the two experiences were useful reminders, requiring the participation of no Harvard professors or police officers, of just how vast a menagerie Barack Obama is attempting to govern and that yes, race still matters and, yes, it will still matter long after Obama has handed his job off to someone else. The term “post-racial” was bullshit when media people started echoing it last year and it’s bullshit now. It was never one of Obama’s themes for precisely that reason.
I highly doubt this will be the last time such a goofy, byline brigade fueled, racial incident takes place. Oh well, we’ve still got craigslist.
*As I was driving out I passed a skinny white guy in a red convertible (probably a Trans Am), baseball hat backwards, gold chain, also with no shirt on. Stereotypes have abounded these last few weeks.
