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my dad grew up on 67th street between 17th and 18th Avenue. what is the ethnicity today?
As of 2010 census from projects NYTimes.
48% Asian
40% White
10% Hispanic
2% Mix
I will think Asian population probably increased even more since 2010. You can't make everyone like each
other, it's all good as long as you mind your own business and leave other people alone. If you really can't
stand your neighbors, you can always move, no one ethnicity owns a neighborhood. It's always changing.
I'm Italian. I haven't seen any overt racism on Christopher Columbus Boulevard, but I'm not going to claim that it doesn't exist.
And yet this thread is about the mean Italian racists who don't enjoy Chinese interlopers ruining Brooklyn's Little Italy like they did Manhattan's Little Italy. I hear no complaints about Latino hostility towards Chinese in Sunset Park, or even Cantonese-American hostility towards Mandarin-speaking immigrants.
Racism is everywhere. This isn't about racism. This is about nostalgia and wanting a place for your family.
I was born in an Italian neighborhood that is now Russian. We didn't have anything nice to say about them, and they're white.
I grew up in an Italian neighborhood that is now black. Racism was a two-way street there. My mom still goes into Canarsie all the time and gets dirty looks and glared at like she doesn't belong.
You see the commonality? No-one wants to lose their neighborhood, whether it's to the same race (Chinese vs. Chinese, Italian vs. Russian) or another (white vs. Asian, white vs. black).
Nostalgia is a weak and vague excuse for accepting, and borderline condoning, racism. There is no neighborhood to lose or gain. How can anyone or any group be entitled to any neighborhood? To base an inflexible idea of what someone thinks a neighborhood should resemble, on a precarious notion of a memory that one associates with something as vague as nostalgia is irrational and immature. Everyone wants a place for their family. Period.
Just because people who don't look like myself live in other houses on my block, doesn't make my house any less of a home for either me or my family.
So, I'm pretty sure you don't mean to say that a place that used to stir in you good feelings is enough grounds for discrimination.
Nostalgia is a weak and vague excuse for accepting, and borderline condoning, racism. There is no neighborhood to lose or gain. How can anyone or any group be entitled to any neighborhood?
Nativity. My family has lived in Sheepshead Bay since the 1920s. I was the fifth generation to live on my street. My great-great grandfather built his house. I still have cousins living there today. That neighborhood is nothing like it was. You make it sound like one should have an emotionally divorced view of things like that, but that's not the way it works.
And in some instances, the government not only condones but embraces an ethnic identity of a neighborhood. One would have to be extremely naive to think that the powers-that-be in New York City would be apathetic towards the Chinese being replaced by another ethnic group in Chinatown. It'd be very bad for business.
I'm not saying that it should be illegal for people of any ethnicity to move wherever they want, but I'm saying that it's ridiculous to be mad at the natives who have lived there for their entire lives because they dare to have hostility directed at at the interlopers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ws3111
To base an inflexible idea of what someone thinks a neighborhood should resemble, on a precarious notion of a memory that one associates with something as vague as nostalgia is irrational and immature. Everyone wants a place for their family. Period.
As I've said in previous posts, while the Sheepshead Bay that I was born in is very much dead, the traditional Bensonhurst isn't dead yet. That's why the Italians who are there have every reason to feel the way that they do, as if they remain vigilant and stubborn the neighborhood may very well survive intact as the Little Italy of Brooklyn.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ws3111
Just because people who don't look like myself live in other houses on my block, doesn't make my house any less of a home for either me or my family.
Easy for you to say. Your house is still your house, but your street isn't your street and your neighborhood isn't your neighborhood when the signs are in an alphabet you can't read, you smell rotting fish as you walk down the street at night, and people look at you like you're the foreigner.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ws3111
So, I'm pretty sure you don't mean to say that a place that used to stir in you good feelings is enough grounds for discrimination.
Depends on what you mean about discrimination. If people who were born and live in Bensonhurst don't like Chinese people, I think they're fully entitled to feel that way. If you're a restauranteur and you refuse to serve Chinese people, I think that's wrong (not to mention illegal).
When you own your home and another group takes over your neighborhood and the property value goes down, how are you supposed to feel about it? That's the reality in Canarsie, where I grew up. It's dirt cheap to live there now, but it certainly wasn't 20 years ago.
Depends on what you mean about discrimination. If people who were born and live in Bensonhurst don't like Chinese people, I think they're fully entitled to feel that way. If you're a restauranteur and you refuse to serve Chinese people, I think that's wrong (not to mention illegal).
I don't agree with this statement; ignorance is never an entitlement. It's like saying "I don't know you, and because you don't remind me of me, I will not like you." It's conceited.
Also, it's poor judgment to believe that it's justifiable for someone to categorically not like an entire ethnicity (any ethnicity) just because they were born and raised in Bensonhurst, or anywhere for that matter.
There's the perceived real world. And then there's the real world. Bensonhurst isn't the epicenter of the human race and shouldn't be used as a barometer for how people should treat one another.
And if a restaurateur grudgingly serves someone (in an effort not to break the law) because of their ethnicity and gives them bad service and a bad dining experience, because they feel entitled to not like them because of their ethnicity: that's racist. And that restaurateur should rethink trying to make a career in the service profession.
I don't agree with this statement; ignorance is never an entitlement. It's like saying "I don't know you, and because you don't remind me of me, I will not like you." It's conceited.
I'm not for Tom Cruise in Minority Report, or 1984. Thoughts aren't crimes. People are allowed to think whatever they want, it's when they physically act out on it that it becomes a problem. That's why nazi and communist and KKK parties are all legal in this country, even though the average American deplores those viewpoints. That's why people are allowed to burn a cross on their own property, but spraypainting a swastika on a synagogue is rightly illegal.
Conceited is saying "too bad" to these people who lose everything that they've ever known and are forced to live elsewhere or be a prisoner in their own home, because their feelings don't fit in with your point of view.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ws3111
Also, it's poor judgment to believe that it's justifiable for someone to categorically not like an entire ethnicity (any ethnicity) just because they were born and raised in Bensonhurst, or anywhere for that matter.
You call it poor judgement. I call it reactionary. We live in a country where immigrants are not allowed to be President. Nativity matters.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ws3111
There's the perceived real world. And then there's the real world. Bensonhurst isn't the epicenter of the human race and shouldn't be used as a barometer for how people should treat one another.
Bensonhurst obviously doesn't mean anything to you, but if you've lived your entire life there, and your family have been going to the same restaurants for 50 years, and you know all of your neighbors, etc... you lose the idealistic elite liberal viewpoint where all human beings are exactly the same and how dare we point out otherwise.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ws3111
And if a restaurateur grudgingly serves someone (in an effort not to break the law) because of their ethnicity and gives them bad service and a bad dining experience, because they feel entitled to not like them because of their ethnicity: that's racist. And that restaurateur should rethink trying to make a career in the service profession.
I agree that bad service is inexcusable, but I don't agree with your dismissive, elitist point of view that someone who is prejudiced should not own a restaurant. Many of these restaurants in Bensonhurst are family-owned and have been open for generations, so the proprietors don't know anything other than to own a restaurant. They're not qualified to do anything else. But to you, all that seems to matter is that you see a bad racist person.
When I go to a Chinese restaurant, I don't get the same menu a Chinese person does, and often I get a receipt written in Chinese that I can't decipher. Is that a bad dining experience? I would say no, but some would say yes.
i'm not exaggerating. and a new "dollah" store opens all the time complete with grand opening signs. like, what's the draw???
it's true, people think i'm making this stuff up too... when my husband and i met with an agent in chicago he looked at us like we had 3 heads each - same with our new landlord. our questions we asked - he was like, "are you for real?" because we're used to landlords going through garbage (seriously, i bet you can identify, but everyone is obsessed with garbage and recycling and how you put it on the curb. i had a lady pick up my garbage bag and dump it all over my stoop bc i left it by her garbage on the curb (to be picked up by garbagemen like 20 mins later). it is like a bad acid trip down here. all the creepy old men who stand and scratch their balls with their wife beaters on and stare at you when you do ANYTHING - unload groceries, water plants, take out above mentioned garbage. and the skinny chinese guy across the street who walks around in his boxers with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. uggggh.
i swear we must have been separated at birth. is your spouse from this area too? my husband went to school in sheepshead bay - he lived in williamsburg then starett city. he's equally disenchanted and finds your posts so right on he cracks up.
i have seen a lot of these low class asians in asian emclaves throughout nyc, which you seldom find in other states. that is the basis for my conclusion that nyc draws a lot of low class third world behaviora from all cultures. but i wonder how these eople got through the us xcustoms in the first place. don't they have any quality control on immigration?
I'm not for Tom Cruise in Minority Report, or 1984. Thoughts aren't crimes. People are allowed to think whatever they want, it's when they physically act out on it that it becomes a problem. That's why nazi and communist and KKK parties are all legal in this country, even though the average American deplores those viewpoints. That's why people are allowed to burn a cross on their own property, but spraypainting a swastika on a synagogue is rightly illegal.
KKK, THE BLACK PANTHER, any other hate group may be legal, but they are still racist. Just because its legal doesn't make it right. Your admitting to being racist and saying its OK because hate groups are......
bensonhurst is very racist. i honestly resent what it is and always will be! don't move here - i'd look in sunset park honestly - closer to city and not as ignorant, narrow minded, etc - still more affordable than other areas.
How is it racist? I've spent a lot of time in the area when i first moved to NYC and never seen any racism in Bensonhurst
OP, Bensonhurst is a very solid area, please don't get discouraged by everyone saying that it's racist
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