I Miss My Black Brooklyn
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
I once lived in a Black mecca. But by the summer of 2022, my toddler son and I were often the only Black folks on the playground in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a fact that felt both alienating and surreal. We moved to Bed-Stuy that summer to be close to my sister and her family. Reeling from a recent separation and scrambling for child care in a different neighborhood, I often found myself on the playground, trying to make sense of both our new life and this new community. In the heat of summer afternoons, I sweated and watched with morbid curiosity as my child played with a gaggle of white and mixed-race children. When we met the rare Black family, I was too eager to speak to them, a moth to a proverbial flame of racial solidarity.
One sweltering day, my son was riding his scooter on the playground when a white nanny came by with her charge, a mixed-race girl who was roughly the same age as him. After hearing my son speak hesitantly to the little girl she was minding, the nanny said that my child, then nearly 3 years old, would make a good athlete but might struggle with academics. I told her that seemed unlikely, given that he’d started walking at 17 months old and seemed to have inherited my lack of athletic prowess. Undeterred, she went on with her inane theory; I tuned her out and spent the rest of the summer carefully avoiding her. When I saw this child’s Black father on the playground the next weekend, I contemplated telling him about his employee’s behavior, but I decided to just let it go.
I was offended, shocked that this woman would use her “expertise” to opine on my child’s academic potential. Bed-Stuy was the last place where I thought we’d be the target of racist microaggressions. But the predominantly Black neighborhood, where I once visited my great-grandmother’s brownstone and where my sister had lived for the better part of 20 years, had turned into something unrecognizable. Few and far between were the Black elders who would greet you and expect a greeting in return, replaced by young white professionals and families who offered awkward smiles and occasional small talk when forced into proximity. For the past two decades, I have found myself witness to what feels like a slow, deliberate death of the strong Black communities that produced and enveloped me, an extension of the Caribbean, which my parents left for New York in the late 1970s. Far from an inconsequential transformation or a sign of the times, these changes have left me feeling disoriented and seeking a new place to call home.
The numbers bear out this erasure. Over two decades, from 2000 to 2020, New York City lost nearly 200,000 Black folks, or about 9 percent of its Black residents. These losses have been particularly notable in historically Black strongholds like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Harlem. New York University’s Furman Center data shows that in 2000, Black residents made up approximately 75 percent of Bed-Stuy’s population, and that number dropped to about 40 percent between 2019 and 2023 with the white population increasing more than tenfold.
I was born in Crown Heights in 1980 to parents from the Caribbean — Barbados and Antigua specifically — part of a tidal wave of late-20th-century West Indian and African emigration that changed the face of Black New York. My Brooklyn childhood was marked by three distinct periods: There were the early years my sister and I spent in a co-op apartment my mother bought in Crown Heights. Later, we lived in a Flatbush apartment with my father, stepmother, stepbrother, and a rotating cast of extended family. By the time I was 16 years old, my father and stepmother finally fulfilled their dream of buying a home in Old Mill Basin and our lives became starkly different.
Beyond the money, though, there’s a question of culture — specifically the disappearance of Black culture and predominantly Black neighborhoods — that factored into the Norvilles’ decision as well. “I realized that my children would never have the childhood that I had. In some ways, that’s a positive in terms of danger,” says Norville. “But at the same time, the kind of culture we grew up with, in terms of very familial neighborhoods where everyone knew each other, where neighbors were looking out for their children, or going to Grandma’s house after school, just that very family, close-knit New York, is not always available to us anymore.” Many of her husband’s family members have moved back to the Caribbean, and she says that watching the city change so drastically has given her a kind of “emotional detachment.” What keeps me here is the fact that my immediate family remains, in no small part because they’ve been able to purchase and hold on to their homes.
After a long apartment search last summer that included stops in Harlem, Jersey City, the East Village, and the Lower East Side, I finally found an affordable place in Bed-Stuy through a friend. The clock ticks loudly in my subconscious until our sublease ends in June.
The whole-cloth erasure and erosion of Black communities will not be undone quickly or perhaps ever. I blame these problems on a capitalist free-for-all, and specific city and state policies around housing and real-estate development, which have made poor and middle-class Black people strangers in and pushed out from their own communities. Resurrecting the vibrant neighborhoods that nurtured me would mean implementing public policies that make the city truly affordable and accessible for Black folks and poor and middle-class New Yorkers of all races. Even with a new administration and its promises, I fear that the Brooklyn I knew and loved is long gone, never to return again. Still, I take solace in this quote from Schulman’s book: “Anything that humans construct, humans can transform.” For now, I count the days until we move again, committed to savoring the best of what may very well be our last days here. What I want, truly, is a return to the Black Brooklyn that raised me, but there’s no way to revisit a time and place that no longer exists. And so I’ve resigned myself to being open to making home elsewhere, setting down roots in a new place that we can afford and where we can be both happy and free.
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Racial grievance and replacement theory is much in the news. Here's an example of an author doing both. Odd the New Yorker decided to publish such racist material, isn't it?
America is 250 years old. For 80% or so of that time blacks were not welcome in white neighborhoods (and in some cases are still not,). When they did manage to move into a white area white flight occurred.
I don't understand why it would surprise a single person in this country that attitudes like this woman's exist.
So you are okay with blacks keeping whites out of their neighborhoods, but when whites do the same thing it's terrible?
I am okay with understanding history.
Do you hold whites and blacks to the same standards or not?
Someone who was 25 in 1963 is 87 today. There many many millions of such people. There are photos of young white women , and men, protesting school desegregation in the 60's, sometimes in the most racially derogatory terms. Is it your opinion that the tens of millions of racists who were young people in 1963 did not pass their racism on to their offspring? The idea borders on absurdity.
It will take more time to end racism than we have spent on it so far. Deal with it.
What standards do you hold whites to? I don't recall you ever saying much about white racism.
In your mind, this is okay from politicians:
“I have the distinct honor to be able to come before you and say I actually lost white population in my community."
This is not:
“I have the distinct honor to be able to come before you and say I actually lost black population in my community."
Your comparison is laughable.
Explain why one is acceptable to you and one isn't.
Neighborhoods change over time. That is a fact true of most places. Some change more than others. I’m not sure if the author is trying to blame someone for that or not.
Calling it an erasure kind of implies intentionality, but I don’t wish to read too much into this, as she doesn’t really put much effort into that thesis. I really very much doubt that anyone is moving into a neighborhood, anywhere, with the intention of driving out the people who live there. Finding a place to live just doesn’t work that way for most people.