Hi,
My human self is writing this from Philadelphia (by the time you get this, I’ll be well on my way back home to Lagos), where it is warmer and wetter than I anticipated. I have a suitcase full of layers I don’t need, but no umbrella. I’m great at writing, but at packing? Not so much.
As I ran errands this morning in my temporary neighbourhood, I pondered on the social and economic differences that I couldn’t help noticing. I don’t walk around always thinking about structural injustice, but the housing situation in America never fails to strike me. On the pavements outside the Philadelphia Convention Centre (which I was told is valued at over a billion dollars), several people slept on duvets or cardboard. The sight was especially poignant because I came here to speak, at that very Centre, to a few thousand management professionals about the need for solidarity with the urban poor.
"The urban poor." That label, like any of the other labels that people use to quickly and easily make sense of others, is an over-generalisation, tarring a huge heterogenous group with a clumsy linguistic brush. Walking through Centre City to grab dinner with other conference attendees while thinking about what to write in this newsletter, I was struck by how easily I labelled people, making inferences about their income levels, physical or mental health, and social or cultural inclinations.
I decided to get a manicure at one point, and as my hands got pampered I listened to the women talk to one another in a lilting language that had almost no hard consonants or glottal sounds. I wanted to know what it was, but congratulated myself for resisting the urge to ask where they were ‘originally from’. In the Uber back to my lodgings however, I got asked that exact question after wondering aloud if New Jersey was an hour away. “What?!” my driver replied. “Camden is only three minutes away. You don’t know Camden? Where are you from?” I told him I was Nigerian, and he complimented my English. When I told him English is Nigeria’s official language, he complimented my accent.
“You sound like a real American, it’s nice!” Then he told me he was originally from Albania. “I followed my son to America twenty-four years ago. On my first night here, I asked the boy to take me to see the Rocky steps.” Because of his accent, I heard something else. “What’s rockisteps?” He made an exasperated sound. “Come on! You don’t know Rocky?!” I told him I did indeed know the movie, and he took that as his cue to tell me every story he knew about the steps. His favourite was about a man who’d come from Argentina with his two sons, all of them dressed in grey hoodies, and been disappointed by the statue. We laughed all the way to my destination.
I spent part of my only free day in Philadelphia walking around, taking slow steps so I could soak in the half-empty, brand new apartment blocks next to empty construction lots, next to tired old buildings, next to more brand new apartments. I stepped gingerly past the stretches of littered pavement dotted with signs about camera surveillance and prohibited loitering, thinking about some of the conversations about gentrification I’ve had. I wondered about the people who had spent most of their lives in this visibly rundown neighbourhood; the ‘urban poor’ who no longer lived here, or who were possibly on the brink of being pushed out. I wondered how they felt about their new neighbours, and how their new neighbours felt about them.
Throughout my time on West Girard, I tried to pay attention to how I involuntarily codified the people I walked past: Gentrifier. Old time resident. Visitor? Homeless person. Student? Do-gooder. Addict? I found myself thinking of people as safe or unsafe, friendly or hostile. I noticed when I reacted favourably towards certain strangers, and when I kept my eyes straight ahead. I paid attention to my own thought processes, thinking back on the contributions to my first article that highlighted how we all make snap judgments about other people. I tried to unpack the split-second categorisations I was doing as I navigated an unfamiliar city, keeping Kia Vanderlaan’s words in mind. “I think we should all start out by accepting we all ‘other’, in other words, discriminate. By accepting it you take it out of a forbidden zone and can start working on it.”
It is a powerful ideal to strive towards fully embracing human complexity. In practice, however, things aren’t quite so smooth. On my last full day in Philly, someone I’d never seen before in my life hugged me. She had started to reach out to me, then stopped herself, exclaiming, “My goodness, you look exactly like my sister-in-law Angie!” We laughed about it and I assured her I wasn’t Angie. Then she hugged me anyway and instructed me to tell my girlfriends over drinks about the “crazy stranger” who squeezed the breath out of me in the middle of an empty street.
As I walked away chuckling to myself, I felt a small sense of wonder at what can happen on the other side of the barriers between people. It occurred to me that such an interaction would likely not be possible with a stranger who wasn’t, like me, a black woman. I didn’t dwell on that thought, though; I wanted to just enjoy the moment.
In all, my time in Philadelphia reminded me of something many of us already know: othering is an inevitable part of the human condition. It’s just that we can grow when we accept it, interrogate it, and allow ourselves to forge connections and understanding beyond it.