Invisible walls help create sense of us vs. them
- Source: Global Times
- [21:47 November 19 2009]
- Comments
A report conducted by the National Fair Housing Alliance in the US in 2006 actually found New York City ranks the highest for Black-White segregation among the country's 100 largest cities and the second highest for Hispanic-White segregation.
Most people who choose to live in a place where they are called foreigners are assumed to be more open-minded and more interested in different cultures than people who choose to stay in their own country.
Although the distance may sometimes stir up an unconscious grasp for our own identity, it still seems illogical to suggest that we traveled many thousands of miles only to live in an environment that we are familiar with and mingle with our own people.
But why do many of us like to slide into such an environment whenever it is available?
Of course, there are many practical reasons. Many times, the homogeneous ethnic territories within a foreign country aren't just a luxury but the only place for some to survive because of language and cultural barriers.
And economic inequality also plays a major role. A coffee shop where a cup of latte costs 50 yuan ($7.32) is clearly not designed for most local Chinese.
Similarly, New York's low-income minority neighborhoods do not tend to be welcoming to white yuppies, partly for fear that they will raise the costs of housing and eventually force the poor out of their own homes.
In this case, heterogeneity is destined to be a twin of gentrification, and trigger conflicts.
In an old episode of the Los Angeles-based sitcom Two and a Half Men, one of the characters took his nephew to a fast-food restaurant in Watts, famous for its 1960s riots. The looks exchanged between the white uncle and the black customers reflects the "your people" versus "my people" mindset that still dominates so often in the US.
And it doesn't only exist in the fictional world. I know Chinese people who speak fluent English but hardly step outside of Chinatown after they settled there decades ago.
I also have friends who, when looking for rental apartments, only focus on Manhattan because other boroughs are not in their "comfort zone."
Yuri Solomko, an Ukrainian artist I met at an exhibition in Manhattan last week told me the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago helped him to establish a basis for his art. He uses maps in almost all his works now because when one wall falls, new walls and boundaries are always erected.
True. But still, it might be a lot easier to break down the actual walls than the invisible ones in our minds.
The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com
