This audacious duo stopped by a Make the Road NY BBQ (which they call a gay organization) demanding entry and food — and were denied. They charge racial discrimination. I think it’s because they’re CREEPY. The Russian stopped my friend in front of his house a few weeks ago and asked him for free clothing. Also denied.
The one consolation is that this is labeled as “comedy.” Maybe cultural differences have me wincing instead of laughing.
I have been hard on Bushwick community organization Make the Road NY, and we do disagree on many important points. I think their point of view on certain economic issues is more characteristic of the beginning of last century than this one. That said, I appreciate their immigrant advocacy services — the idea of a person’s very existence in a particular place on earth being “illegal” offends me on a fundamental level. The other day I realized we have something else in common: opposition to the anti-child hate crime that is our heavily armed and armored public school system.
The net effect of making a big deal of consensual and peaceful but illegal business transactions is that such transactions are made more difficult to carry out and even those perfectly content to have entered into them are prevented from doing so in the future.
It’s my first thought when I see that, yet again, Make the Road by Walking has organized a march down Knickerbocker to “shame” and point out businesses who do not pay at least minimum wage to all employees, or overtime pay. They pay special attention to the Associated supermarket on Knickerbocker and Starr, where, to quote the Brooklyn Eagle, “some employees are not paid any wages at all.”
Think about that last bit. Why would anyone work for free? How could a business compel people to do something that seems so unprofitable at face value? They can’t, but no questioning or critical thinking from the likes of our local media — they just repeat whatever a random activist type tells them. According to a friend who is a very close neighbor of the Associated, as he understands it, undocumented immigrants ask to bag groceries for tips. Baggers are not a job for which the store would otherwise hire — the cashiers do it. Obviously, an undocumented person cannot be on the books. So they are allowed to take their own initiative and bag groceries for customers who may or may not tip them. This is not exploitation — it’s practically charity.
In a neighborhood full of immigrant families (I don’t mean immigrants from Iowa), goods have to be cheap, which means cutting costs. If that means paying below minimum wage to keep your store running and profitable, then if the risks of punishment are low, that’s what you do. If the authorities catch wind, the risk goes up, as well as prices. Opportunities for immigrant workers lessen. When you pay $7.15/hr for a job that used to cost $3.50, you are eliminating a job — and of course, the guy making twice as much will now have to do as much as two people. The person who loses their job — the undocumented one, if the management is going to choose — starves.
I hardly see a gain, here, except to another major sponsor of the Despierta, Bushwick! campaign: the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, whose competition is eviscerated if the campaign has its desired effect.
Congratulations, Make the Road, in removing opportunities for Bushwick’s struggling undocumented families.
José is at it again: bombast with little substance and scaremongery spluttering of downright lies. He’s getting quite repetitious, too: “We rebuilt up on our backs, and now it’s being sold to developers. We built this neighborhood, and now we have to fight for it.”
He’s conflating “neighborhood” and “community” — while the community may have been severely challenged and damaged in the wake of the fires and looting, and may indeed have been “rebuilt” in the decades since, the physical neighborhood is whatever was built up until the 1920s and then what was built by the city — almost no private development took place in Bushwick after the 70s until now. So if you’re gonna say anything physical was “rebuilt,” fine, but it wasn’t rebuilt on your backs — it was rebuilt on the wallets of the middle class, in places people from your “community” burned down.
“A lot of the delis, Spanish restaurants, and panaderías are being replaced by fancy shops, organic shops, and Internet cafés,” said Lopez. “A lot of shops are shutting down, and the ones that are opening in their place don’t serve the current community, but the new one.”
and
“Where we used to have bodegas and rice and beans restaurants, we’re now seeing wine bars and luxury condos.”
One word sums up my reaction: no. Nowhere in Bushwick has a panadería gone out of business to reopen as an “organic shop.” Nowhere in Bushwick has a bodega closed to reopen as a “fancy shop.” Nowhere in Bushwick has a “Spanish [sic] restaurant” gone out of business to reopen as an “Internet café.” Every panadería with hot pink sugared pastries [sic, again], 99-cent store, and shitbag bodega I have ever seen is still in business, including the one that menaces and rips off the corner near my house, crowd of gangbangers and crackheads intact.
And trust me, if anyone would know about such things, it would be me or someone I know, and nobody can produce any evidence of such a trend thus far. There are simply too many storefronts that have been vacant for years that entrepreneurs are busy filling with still-too-few new amenities. Not to mention all the “old community”-serving shops that the “new community” patronizes. I see little market pressure upon older businesses to completely abandon their old customer base in favor of a few thousand people who don’t know what to do with a plantain — a variety of items can fit on store shelves, after all. In addition, I routinely see Puerto Ricans in the handful of nicer places in Bushwick — the word “organic” clearly doesn’t send shivers down their spines. Maybe this “community” of which José speaks isn’t as monolithic as he’d like us to believe, or at least isn’t willing to obey marching orders from official class-baiting organizations that claim to speak for it.
I do not deny that the trend José fears will happen in the near future, and it’s a distinct likelihood that he’s just gearing up his troops to, I don’t know, protest and picket a few of these “new community”-serving shops when they do show up. But right now, it’s all lies. And frankly, it just makes Bushwick look even more attractive to possible future residents. Hmm…just whom are you working for, José?
Know what I’m sick of lately? Activist types showing up here, getting all up in our faces about our part in advancing gentrification — or at least that we don’t weep enough about gentrification. The worst part is that for all their many hundreds of words on the subject, they can never seem to get any real ideas across. They’re infected by vapidity and are crammed full, top to bottom, with empty rhetoric. It’s hard to even look sometimes.
I had actually been somewhat avoiding the subject of gentrification, mainly because whether we debate it or not, it’s inexorable, a given. I didn’t see the point. What little bits I let slip as I otherwise walked on eggshells here brought me nothing but whining and hate posts. So you know what? Fuck it. I’m putting down the shield I use to bounce weak anti-gentrification spitballs back at their launchers and pulling out my bazooka — and I’m taking no prisoners.
In today’s Daily News, Metro section columnist Albor Ruiz covers gentrification in Bushwick with some insights from Wednesday’s Make the Road by Walking rally. The article opinion piece doesn’t really delve into anything new, rather it just regurgitates the same old “gentrification is bad” statement. The one good point that Ruiz makes is that for all their anti-gentrification bluster, Make the Road by Walking does have suggestions for positive development. Unfortunately that jewel is lost between the vilification of landlords (sometimes deservedly so) and the overall simplification of the larger issue. Ruiz quotes 21-year-old José López, a Make the Road by Walking staffer, who says “no matter if these people come and say they want to better the community, they cannot do it because they don’t know anything about it and are not interested in the community input.”
Hi José. Nice to meet you. I didn’t know you were so clever. I mean, c’mon, you figured out my whole reasoning behind moving to Bushwick. Of course I say that I want to get involved with the community, but in reality all I want to do is make fun of poor people whilst sipping a cappuccino with my fellow white invaders at one of our ultra-exclusive, rich-people-only coffee shops. You totally get me!
Sarcasm aside, communication is a two-way street there, José. You can complain all you want about “these people” not really caring, but until you make the effort to actually include us in these discussions you are essentially nothing but an angry person full of empty rhetoric. If your intention was to make us feel unwelcome and thus scare us out of Bushwick, keep on keepin’ on brother.
A better tactic would be for Make the Road to host a “Welcome to Bushwick” event for new residents. Many of us who moved here have no desire to see our neighbors thrown out on the street, no matter how hard you try to typecast us. In fact, I plan on attending the next Community Board meeting in September to see what is going on with Bushwick. As much as it is our job to become involved in our community before we start complaining and judging, it is also the job of those who wish to preserve Bushwick’s identity to welcome us into the fold — keeping both sides segregated will only make things worse.
So, José, I’d like it if next time you made an attempt to get my opinion before judging me, because I have not done the same to you. Thanks. You can e-mail me. Or come visit — I’ll be holed up in Northeast Kingdom with the rest of the crafty crackers as we plot against you.
