Some of Bushwick’s “flavor”: Chinese food dumped in the same spot on Central Avenue for years until a black slick of filth forms. The rats especially love this. — photo by Jeremy Sapienza

A common theme in the gentrification debate is how the newcomers are bland and white-bread suburban stripmall refugees. Some of the older inhabitants who resent the “invaders” complain that their neighborhood is being “sanitized” and “sterilized” and most of all, it’s losing it’s “flavor.”

What exactly is flavor, though? When we talk about diversity, are we talking about how many different ways you can get rice and beans plopped on a paper plate? Are we talking about the dizzying variety of cockroach-infested bodegas from which we may purchase our forties? Certainly we can’t be talking about ethnicity, can we? After all, Bushwick’s newcomers are both natives and descendants of more European and Asian and Latin American countries than you could count on your hands and toes three times over, while it’s extant communities are mostly from, what, two Caribbean countries and the Southern US, whose cultures have been New Yorkized and blended?

It seems to me that upon examination, “flavor” always turns out to be some combination of poverty, rudeness, theft, murder, vandalization, dilapidation, and awful food. I can’t think of anything more bland than the relentless desperation of being stuck in a gray shithole your whole life, looking at the same crummy buildings and filthy streets and aimless people and eating the same shit food until your death of heart disease which the New York Times will blame on “our broken health care system.”

So go ahead, make fun of hipsters and whatnot. They may dress funny, but at least they’re not wearing the same five basketball jerseys every motherfucking week. They may like bizarre music, but at least it’s not their grandparents‘ music or the same recycled crap about some bitch’s bootie. They may not understand what it’s like to be poor, but at least they don’t glorify it. That’s about all you have on them — Bushwick’s newcomers are steeped in diverse and cutting-edge culture, fashion, and gastronomy. They are manifestly NOT “remaking Nebraska” in New York — they are the next generation of talented and creative people that have made New York the amazing place it is.

There is something nice to be said about ethnic enclaves — I have fond memories of celebrating my family’s cultural traditions and feel a connection to the collective experiences of “my people.” This is only natural and we’re hardwired for it. But when someone is so desperate to prove his “otherness” that he incorporates peripheral things, even if they’re terrible, into how he defines his culture, he’s doing himself and his people a disservice. I wouldn’t think people in Puerto Rico are too thrilled with the idea of their culture being synonymous with poverty and trash.

Enough with the glorification of everything bad and wrong in New York by euphemistically calling it “flavor.” You open yourself to questions like, what flavor is that? Ass?

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