Photo Credit: "Jazz" by csutton on Photobucket
“Race is an idea, not a fact…Each person shares 99.99 percent of the genetic material of every other human being….People from the same race can be more different than people from different races”…and race differences are often determined “by individual taste and political need,” Nell Irvin Painter writing in The History of White People (Norton).
Add psycho/social/cultural norms and expectations to the list of determining factors and I am with her. I had Painter’s book in my tote bag when I went to this party in Harlem where race is the political issue and race/sex is the subtext. Her words resonated in my head.
Dressed in an impeccably tailored pale linen jacket and dark pants, his shaved head gleaming in the soft restaurant lighting, Dard was the natural focal point at the private cocktail party introducing the renovated Setti Pane to the hoi polloi of Central Harlem on a Friday night in late March. Everyone knows him or at the very least knows of him. Martha Stewart and France’s La Nouvel Observateur have called Dard the “Prince of Harlem.” A former model and friend of Sean John, Bobby Brown, Whitney Houston and Tyson Bedford and playboy lover of hundreds of women, Dard chose as his Princess, the equally beautiful but pale and blonde Jodi, a former teen beauty queen from Pennsylvania. She is the angry black woman’s poster girl of The Enemy—but they pretend to love her around Dard. You can read the pretense in their eyes. A re-imagined Setti Pane, its bakery counter now a bar, is a natural setting for this Harlem power couple.
Nearly all the invited guests angled for the opportunity to slip into the space beside him and wait hopefully for recognition to be conferred upon them. The people who don’t go above 125th Street were all there: the new white professional couples with babies, the whites who came uptown before it was cool, the edgy interracial couple in the arts—he in dreds, she wearing a black Fedora over straight blonde hair—Munir, Moroccan owner of MoJo’s restaurant and lounge, the middle-aged white photographer whose African wife never seems to leave their West Village home to be with him uptown where he has his studio, the younger (and not so young) single black men who judge women by their shoes—yes, their shoes!—a smattering of French residents, well-dressed older African American women, long-time residents, a few gay designers and music promoters, Billy, who has lived in the same rent-controlled huge apartment for decades and B, the new face of the slum landlord, accompanied by her tall African husband.
B got her brownstone under the generous auspices of the Clinton Empowerment Zone plan, neglected the trash in the backyard, including a rotting sofa, ignored the rodents the junk heap nourished and encouraged inside, ignored the mold in the cellar that worked its way upstairs—until a white tenant took her on in court. The longtime African American neighbors sided with B as she railed against the tenant (also a party guest) who put rent in an escrow account, demanding lease termination. The adversaries sipped wine and stared each other down. Perhaps because the former tenant—in a black lace skirt, expensive white cotton shirt, denim jacket and kick-ass heels—was way better dressed (and certainly had the better shoes) than the landlord—attired in old black flats, a shapeless black dress and an over-sized gray sweater—the black male opinion subtly shifted to the tenant. By the end of the evening, the landlord’s marriage and sexual persuasion were in whispered speculation.
The new white couples were oblivious to the dramas swirling around them and surely went home rhapsodizing about the sophisticated mélange of people—all getting along, side by side!—drinking wine and sampling gourmet appetizers in a lovely renovated downtown-worthy space in the “new” Harlem. They don’t realize that each little group resents, if not hates, the other—with Africans being particularly contemptuous of African Americans—and that their entry into the ‘hood might have been far more problematic were it not for men like Dard—property owners who, in sleeping with white women, have done as much to promote gentrification as anyone short of Willie Kathryn Suggs, the “Real Estate Queen” of Harlem. Black women may not like the social contract but they pay public respect to the men they privately trash. If all the prosperous black men dated black women, racial tolerance uptown would take it on the chin.
I too rhapsodize about the sophisticated mélange when I am trying to encourage downtowners to come up and patronize the restaurants my friends own. Stay in Harlem long enough and you are part of the spin. Not spin but very interesting, The History of White People is not the book you think it will be. Tracing the idea of whiteness back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and other early American philosophers who believed only Anglo-Saxons were truly white, Painter, a professor emeritus at Princeton, is an African American woman who brings the highest scholarship to the endeavor.
copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime
Comments