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According to Google Maps, The Valley Swim Club and Creative Steps Day Care are only 7.9 miles apart. But as we learned last week, they exist in two different worlds. When a group of African-American children from Creative Steps was turned away from the club last week, charges of blatant racism exploded across the national media. Judging from eyewitness accounts of the incident, however, it appears that more than racism was at work. This seems to be a case of urban-suburban prejudice, or "urban fear," which is a growing problem in our society.
During the visit, some children said they heard club members asking why black children were there. One woman reportedly said she feared the children "might do something" to her child. These comments sound eerily similar to what I once heard said by suburban parents at a summer camp when they learned that their children were in a cabin with a few inner city kids.
In the case of the camp parents, the prejudice couldn’t be chalked up to racism. Some of the suburban kids were black or Hispanic, and some of the inner city kids were white. Instead, the prejudice was geographic. The irrational fear was based on where the kids lived, not on the color of their skin. I suspect that the incident at the Valley Swim Club had similar motivations.
Geographic bigotry might be the least recognized of the many forms of prejudice that exist in our society, but it’s presence is undeniable. It can be found in the jokes of suburban teenagers who use the words "cheap" and "ghetto" interchangably; in the logic of outlying counties who vote down mass transportation despite their horrendous traffic problems because they are afraid of who might come out from the inner city; and in the regrets of church members who decline volunteering at the homeless shelter because the thought of parking downtown and walking two blocks is just too scary.
To be fair, we can’t really know what the motivations of the Valley Swim Club were – if it was racism, urban fear, or something else. They are claiming it was simply because the pool was overcrowded.
No matter which of these is true, the fact that the incident drew such a strong national backlash makes it significant for how we think about prejudice going forward. Certainly, racism is still a big issue, even in the Obama era – but perhaps it is time we stop crying "racism" so quickly, and instead look to the new and more complex face of bigotry. We can no longer reduce things to a facile "black vs. white" paradigm. We must dig deeper.
2 Comments
Interesting article Jim. I actually hadn’t heard about this story until now – been away from the intertubes and the newspapers since Friday. I do wonder, however, if we can call it a suburban/urban prejudice when members were asking, as you said, “why black children were there.” That seems to confirm that this was at least in part racially motivated. And the distinction between racial prejudice and urban prejudice is so conflated, it’s hard to parse them. The word “urban” is so often the proxy for “black,” or “Latino,” or even takes on a socioeconomic dimension, as you mentioned, to refer to poor, or items of poor quality. Add “inner” to the term “city” and you’ve basically labeled it black and poor in the minds of most Americans.
That said, there is no doubt that kids from the city raise alarm bells in suburban parents’ minds. In general kids in the city are exposed to more, and earlier, than their suburban counterparts. Parents often want to protect against the early exposure. This is understandable, but if the zeal reaches these extents, it’s absolutely unacceptable.
Good points, Lance. One thing this illustrates is the fact that prejudice is complicated. There are many social factors at work in an incident like this, a point which is easily overlooked in our sensationalist and overly simplistic media culture.