Sheldon grew up in a broken home. The New York Post reported earlier this week that his father is currently locked up in a New York prison and that he ran away from his mother while residing in Florida. From there, Sheldon moved to New York to live with his aunt in the Bronx where he suffered bouts of depression. In the Daily News, his aunt described his friends as thugs, who, according to Newsday, turned him over to police not long after assaulting Minghui Yu, the Columbia Ph.D. candidate fatally struck by a car while attempting to flee. Sheldon, 14, now sits in a juvenile detention facility facing second-degree manslaughter charges.
I cannot claim to personally know any individual sharing Sheldon’s upbringing, but I believe it safe to contend that his story is not the least bit atypical for a young man growing up in a lower income urban area. For whatever reason, one week ago today, Sheldon found himself on 122nd Street and Broadway, two blocks north of our campus and even closer to neighboring academic institutions. That’s where the incident happened, at 8:50 on an otherwise typical Friday evening. As someone who lives just a few blocks away, I was immediately struck not only with the grief of having the life of an extremely dedicated student taken from the community, but also extreme sadness in that the harsh realities of my neighborhood were finally exposed.
Surrounded by soaring iron gates, our Morningside campus is likely one of the safest spots in the entire city. Building access, especially after hours, is restricted to members of the University community, and anyone unaffiliated or causing a nuisance can be removed from campus grounds. There are call boxes and cameras and endless attempts at convincing parents that their children will be attending school in a place where crime is virtually nonexistent. This is the product of a small university-crafted college town that creates a secure fantasy world while ignoring the less fortunate who are mere footsteps away. This great unknown is only acknowledged when it draws first blood. Only then do we hastily move to address issues otherwise ignored out of, in calmer times, fear of sounding the least bit politically correct and even, to some, racist.
New York is in the midst of a great population boom. Earlier white flight and urban decay have more recently given way to economic success driven by the private sector. This success paved the way for rapid gentrification and a return to what are now safer urban areas. With the transition comes less affordable housing, not just for those with lower incomes, but also for middle-income residents, and especially for students. Thus, students that want to live close to the most desirable urban neighborhoods are oftentimes placed directly near low income housing. This is exactly the case in the neighborhood between 120th and 125th Streets, west of Broadway and the towering Grant Houses on the other side of the train tracks.
From there, feelings of encroachment build. Low income residents fear an upper-income resident takeover with an increase in the costs of the most basic services, while the better-off financially become fearful of perceived criminal tendencies on the part of the urban poor. In time, feelings of elitism and entitlement grow alongside disgust and distaste. The end result is something akin to the “racial stalemate” argument recently advanced by Barack Obama. When alone late at night, I do not cross the street to avoid a pack of black teens out of racism, but I do out of justifiable concern that I’m an easy target. It was a black male each of the three times I was physically harassed for money while walking alone late at night. It was a black male on the subway that singled me out for apparently giving off the stereotypical facial characteristics of a Jew. The Arab clerk behind the counter keeps silent while black teens toss racial slurs at him. A female friend in my building tells me she won’t travel a few feet from the safety of her apartment shortly after it gets dark. A gay friend tells me he fears holding hands with his partner in a predominantly black neighborhood. Other friends won’t visit me because I live in Harlem while they live in Morningside Heights.
I don’t think these feelings have anything to do with racism. Each person mentioned, including myself, has great friends of a wide range of ethnic backgrounds. Instead, it’s about confronting perceptions of areas ridden with crime and drawing our own conclusions. Many there will sadly suffer from the vicious cycle of cumulative causation that will rarely allow them access to decent public education, job training, and high-end employment. They will remain fixed to a system perfected to both breed hate and place blame without apology.
If the cheap, grotesque Le-Corbusier-styled projects are indicators of blight, there may never be a sound solution to our coexistence, let alone understanding. The simplest solution seems to be a quiet acknowledgement by already cash-strapped agencies, like the New York City Housing Authority, that can never provide the luxury necessary to help bridge the racial divide in urban areas. Nothing suggests that this won’t continue. If anything, the expansion of an urban upper-income bracket will likely increase this same divide and breed greater hatred on both sides of the coin. It’s already nearly impossible to go into a store without hearing someone voice frustrations with Columbia’s expansion.
As someone who grew up in a totally different environment, it’s impossible to get in the minds of anyone subjected to this type of childhood. Maybe there was anger or jealousy or maybe there a complete misunderstanding. We don’t know because we rarely talk about these things. Every now and then, something horrible will happen, like Sheldon confronting Minghui. Then, for a few moments, we can have our discussion. Nobody has ever made progress by keeping silent.
Jarid Maged is a student in the School of General Studies studying political science. Frozen in the Ninth Circle runs alternate Fridays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com
