The Truth About Integration

NYC, as an example of what it means to integrate.

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When you’ve lived in NYC for as long as I have, you begin to see it for its true colors. You see the patchwork of colors embedded into the sea of columns of skyscrapers. You see the quilt that the city creates with neighborhoods like Chinatown, Little Italy, Midtown, Upper East Side, etc.., in its glamorous piece of fabric. You see the colorful sea of people running across the patchwork of every day as the threads that link each piece of the quilt. You see compartments of spaces connected with a network of roads, tunnels, bridges, and skylines. Each space houses both integration and segregation. Each space is a contradiction of its creation. Adding on technology, you have that virtual replicate of the city connecting its patchwork with a network of functional bytes. These bytes serve, support, and underpin the contradictions that the city creates. The virtual and the real forever preserve the patchwork.

NYC is not exactly a melting pot. To people who have lived there for decades, it is at best a beautiful quilt where squares of people of different backgrounds live and work. It is probably the best example of the truth that we don’t utter.

We are comfortable in our own segregations.

Like any city, NYC tried to use its capitalism for integration. “Gentrification” of underdeveloped neighborhoods yielded floods of people from one ethnicity coming into an underdeveloped neighborhood after another flood of people from another ethnicity leaves for the outer boroughs. The patchwork is replaced with another piece of fabric and another “colored” square. The “blending” we want happens for some time. Then, inevitably, it reverts to the square with outer edges and outlines.

The beauty of NYC is not the true “blending” of colors, shapes, and backgrounds. The beauty of NYC is the possibility of true “blending” of colors, shapes, and backgrounds. In the various restaurants that serve people from each patchwork, for the duration of a meal, that possibility becomes the reality. Then, after dinner, when everyone goes home, they navigate back to their perspective square of the quilt that they came from.

These squares of ethnic origin, culture, and neighborhoods preserve a sense of the “original” against the forces of assimilation into the American culture. These squares of gender, class, and lifestyle preserve a sense of superiority against the forces of capitalism. In each square, we can find people who are struggling to stay in it due to slight differences. In each square, we can find people who are comfortable with the present but unsure of the future.

In these squares of confinement, we preserve our own sanity.

Like any large city in America, NYC is a place of change. The pace of work and our life revolved around it is hectic. We don’t stop to think even when we stare at each other in subway cars. Issues of equality creep up and we deal with them daily. We put bandaids on them as we go. In our workplaces, at our schools, in our neighborhoods, we see these “integration” problems, we fix them for a short time. Then, we go home seeking shelter in segregation.

We haven’t evolved much as human beings. We crave the familiar. We trust people who look, act, and live the way we live. We don’t trust differences. Not really, we have not evolved to trust differences.

How can we trust differences when we have been brought up in our squares of homogeneity seeking shelter in the familiar? In our schools of “integration”, we fill racial quotas, gender quotas, and our achievement gaps. Then, we hang out with friends who live in the same square that we live in. When a thread of people who dare to enter the unfamiliar square, we assess them, then instead of embracing them, we leave them be, hoping they will move to the outer boroughs someday.

This is how the world works. Capitalism and globalization bring some of us into other people’s perspective squares. We live and work there for a while. Then, eventually, we revert to the mean: our squares of sanity, our squares of the familiar.

NYC, like any other large city in America, has a long way to go. As long as America is segregated into patchworks of towns of homogeneity, cities like NYC will divide into neighborhoods of colorful patchwork.

It is both to preserve our sanity as well as to preserve a kind of ignorant harmony.

Rather than asking a city like NYC to lead the way of integration, we should ask ourselves how much do we want integration in our cities. How vested are we in democracy, equality, and people’s real rights? As technology chip away at our humanity, will the outlines of our squares of patchwork become concrete barriers, or do we try to really “hold hands” with people who are different from us?

It is a choice to change our own mindset. It is a choice to embrace the unfamiliar.

While we still have this choice, do we choose to make that choice? Or, do we leave this choice, ignore it, until the hands of evolution force us to make this choice for our preservation?