Bed-Stuy is Brit's Bag, Baby
Bedford Stuyvesant’s ascendency has just reached a new level: Thirty-year-old British designer Sarah Morgan has named an entire line of handbags after her new nabe. The Bed-Stuy collection includes such pieces as the Bedford (shown), the Putnam and the Madison. She says that the designs reflect the diversity of Bed-Stuy itself where her friends are…
Bedford Stuyvesant’s ascendency has just reached a new level: Thirty-year-old British designer Sarah Morgan has named an entire line of handbags after her new nabe. The Bed-Stuy collection includes such pieces as the Bedford (shown), the Putnam and the Madison. She says that the designs reflect the diversity of Bed-Stuy itself where her friends are African-American, West Indian, Italian and Colombian. “The neighborhood is still predominantly African-American,” she said, “but we all feel accepted.”
Bed-Stuy is Brit’s Bag, Baby! [NY Daily News]
Eenamaria.com
Read the post, it refers to a black person being “pleasantly surprised” that they are being treated with respect in a white neighborhood. The point is that people are getting along where she lives, and unfortunately, that is not always the case. Let’s be happy that it is the case and that racist elements from both sides are not ruining the neighborhood.
And I live in central Fort Greene! It was a tasteless comment, no matter where you bought.
Actually I was offended by the Wales comment, but I live in Brooklyn Heights…..go figure.
Boy you Bed-Stuyers are pretty defensive, eh? A little anxious about buying in the hood?
It was brought up as a point because, in this day and age, you’d never hear that kind of statement from a Black person- even though in New York and across this entire country- we are far more likely to be in situations/communities/workplace where we are in the minority.
Why are you “PLEASANTLY SURPRISED” that black people treat you with respect?? Thats the fundemental issue right there. Only some white people say it when they live in predominantly Black neighborhoods- as if to say, even though although this paticular ‘hood isnt progressive enuf to have their fair share of whites, its “still” ok. They still (“SHOCKER”) are nice to me. And Im biracial (half white/black), so no bias here 🙂
If Black people walked around with that attitude, Lord knows what would happen…”race card, etc”.
I think the designer from Wales was just making a point that she was not getting any grief for being a white person in a predominantly black neighborhood. It is a valid observation because a lot of whites feel they would get resentful attitudes based on experience and based on some of the ranting posts about white gentrifiers ruining the culture of black neighborhoods.
A black person could say the same thing about predominantly white neighborhood if they were pleasantly surprised they were treated with respect in such neighborhood.
Let’s not let this degrade into another fighting blog about racism from both sides of black and white society and just be happy that people are getting along in the part of Bed Stuy where the designer lives.
Re: anonymous at 11:25…
There are neighborhoods, aren’t there, where those sentences would be silly?
“Bensonhurst/Howard Beach [and probably Carroll Gardens 15 years ago] is still predominantly White, but I feel accepted.”
There are neigborhoods that are predominantly one race that are tolerant of other races (Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and Park Slope come to mind), and there are other neigborhoods that are less tolerant of diversity (i.e., Howard Beach, Bensonhurst, possibly Bed-Stuy). That doesn’t mean that the less-tolerant neighborhoods are bad per se (though I personally value tolerance), but it does affect how the neighborhoods are perceived by people of the opposite race.
I’ll admit that I don’t have a well-informed opinion of Bed-Stuy, having not been there in many years; things may have changed dramatically over the last decade.
I will say, however, that I don’t think that Bed-Stuy’s negative image is driven entirely by the large African-American population. In my case, I dated someone who lived in Fort Green in the early 90s, when both FG and CH were largely African-American, and I was never afraid to hang out in either neighborhood.
But I missed my stop on the A train once and wound up getting off in Bed-Stuy. As I got off the train, an older man approached me and told me it wasn’t safe for me to be there (presumably because I was the only white person in the station), and then he walked with me through the tunnel to the train in the other direction and insisted on waiting with me until I got onto the next train.
Perhaps he was incorrect and very weird, but this was in the middle of the day, with lots of normal-looking people going about their business in the train station. It was all very strange, actually, but it made me feel that white people probably weren’t very welcome in Bed-Stuy.
Again, this happened more than a decade ago, and racial tensions in the city have declined a lot since then.
All that said, the bit about how “the neighborhood is still predominantly African-American” _is_ offensive. As if the natural progression of neighborhoods is to become less African-American…
The comment about severed heads, while a little too cheeky for my taste, does bring up a good point. Would you want to live in an area where stuff like this happens (regardless of what race happens to dominate this area)? I would not want to imagine my children finding something like that.