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Essays Examining Xenophobia by William W. Berry of Buffalo, New York
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LETTERS PUBLISHED IN THE BUFFALO NEWS
Wednesday, January 28, 1998
"SURELY ALLENTOWN HAS ROOM FOR EVERYONE"
I have lived in and around Allentown since 1971 and found Arlan Peters' recent letter condemning human-service agencies so misleading, divisive and mean-spirited that I must respond.The most glaring inaccuracy is the assumption that the people who need and use these services are not "residents of the community." The small islands of affluence that pock the area are surrounded by thousands of people in desperate financial circumstances, who most definitely need and use these meager offerings. The well-to-do should be rebuilding their sense of moral obligation to support the less fortunate, as well as rebuilding their fashionable Victorian homes.
Another fallacy is that the functions of those agencies are "incompatible" with the life of the neighborhood. Why is eating a meal at "Friends of the Night People" any more incompatible than eating one at "Enchante?" Why is a meeting of the Restoration Society Social Club any more incompatible than one of the Allentown Association?
The answer lies in the elitist and bigoted nature of the anti-human services campaign in Allentown. Surely there is room for all of us.
William W. Berry
Buffalo
Thursday, April 1, 1999
"ATTEMPT TO KEEP DISABLED OUT OF ALLENTOWN IS SCARY"
The photograph of Erie County Legislator Judith P. Fisher at the Symphony North Apartments and the accompanying article in the March 19 News took me way back. It is not 1999, but 1963. It is not Allentown, but Tuscaloosa, Ala. It is not disability, but race. It is not the hollow stairwells of Symphony North, but the stone steps of the University of Alabama. And it is not Legislator Fisher, but Gov. George C. Wallace trying to keep people out.
Recently, the anti-social services crowd in Allentown has endeavored to hound services for the disabled out of "their" part of town. These attacks, cruel enough, have now escalated into what should be forbidden territory. This attempt to prevent certain types of people from even living in the neighborhood is very scary. Will it take federal troops to enforce the rights of the disabled to live in certain sections of Buffalo?
William W. Berry
Buffalo
Monday, February 14, 2000
"CONCERN FOR FIRE VICTIMS SHOULD DECIDE SHELTER PLAN"
The image of a swastika seeping through from the back side of the page distracted me as I read the Feb. 4 News piece detailing neighborhood and official hostility to the proposed Red Cross emegency shelter for fire victims. Turning the page for an explanation, I saw at a glance that The News had printed there a Toles cartoon condemning the Austrian Joerg Haider.
How fitting! Ink intended to stigmatize the Austrian whom The News rightly calls a xenophobe bleeds through the paper to bring home to inattentive Buffalonians a vision of their own prejudice. The good news is that we can actually do something about our own ungrounded fears and hatred of strangers. The tried and true method, of course, is to actually get to know the people we would put in isolation because they are different and poor.
Commissioner Ryan and Mayor Masiello should go to the Lenox Hotel, talk to the fire victims and show them as much concern as they do the Allentown crusaders and the wealthy campaign contributors on Oakland Place.
William W. Berry
Buffalo
Monday, June 19, 2000
"NOT EVERYONE OPPOSES NEW RED CROSS SHELTER"
The June 6 News report on reaction to the proposed Red Cross emergency shelter for fire victims deserves a footnote. Several West Side block clubs that were approached by the Bryant-Oakland-Summer Association to join the opposition to the much-needed facility have either refused to do so or withheld judgment.
"Forever Elmwood"'s involvement in efforts to slam the door on the shelter should give everyone pause. Five years ago, the group hounded Benedict House out of the neighborhood with a petition campaign based on lies and disinformation. Donn Esmonde's April 12, 1995, column, "New shelter is caught in a backlash," noted all the nasty details.
This time, "Forever Elmwood" is going after the Red Cross. The group's president attempts to frighten us when he raises the specter of "...men who are burned out of their rooming houses who have a substance-abuse background."
I sincerely believe he underestimates the people of my neighborhood. We will not be cowed by these misleading and cowardly tactics calculated to separate us from our neighbors who need a provisional helping hand.
William W. Berry
Buffalo
Friday, September 15, 2000
"MOST IN ALLENTOWN WELCOME SERVICES"
Donn Esmonde dredged up tired stereotypes and dangerous myths to fill his Aug. 31 column sympathizing with the plight of Allentown's well-to-do. Belying his "open arms" fairy tale, as long ago as 1972, Delaware District Council Member William Hoyt incited a "ban the bums" crusade to rid this area of troublesome reminders of poverty and disease.
It's the old story of the haves and the have-nots. Those who have are uncomfortable around those who do not. They blame the victims for the problem and try to get rid of them. One of the tactics they use to achieve this "cleansing" is to induce fear: the "addict" who will move into the Red Cross fire victim shelter, the "unbalanced" one who stares, the "ex-con" urinating on your lawn. Allentown is not so far from Sarajevo.
I live on the West Side near Allentown. Social services saturation of this community is a big lie. It has been repeated so often in these pages by prosperous and resident News staffers that it has come to be generally believed. While Esmonde juggles apples and oranges, my impoverished neighborhood cries out for more services, not fewer.
The survey he disparages indicates that the majority of residents would welcome those services. Presumably, that is because it polled the have-nots as well as the haves.
William W. Berry
Buffalo
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AN OUTING IN EVANS
William W. Berry
495 Connecticut Street
Buffalo, New York 14213
2300 Words
First Serial Rights
January, 2000
In the Fall, 1998 issue of Mental Health World, "Turning Around Intolerance" ("Welcome to Allentown") examined the xenophobic basis of the anti-social services movement in Buffalo's Allentown district. That article concluded that the most effective means of clearing the pervasive uncharitable atmosphere would be the open involvement of social services recipients in their block clubs and neighborhood associations. This follow-up piece by the same author contemplates the motivations and experiences of one person who did just that, although in a different part of town. It is offered in the hopes of encouraging and informing those who are understandably fearful of making such a leap.
An Outing in Evans
by William W. Berry
The Town of Evans early today said no to a rehabilitation center for 50 addicts on the Derby lakefront...After a stormy five-hour public hearing, punctuated by shouting, catcalls, insults and wild applause by a crowd of more than 250 residents, the Evans Town Board voted unanimously at 1 a.m. to deny the company a special-use permit...Dr. Douglas Gilbert, an Evans physician who treats alcoholics, hushed the crowd with an emotional appeal for the project. 'I am an alcoholic and a narcotics addict,' he said. 'When you talk about what kind of people would come to this facility, you're talking about me. If rehabilitation hadn't been available to me, I wouldn't be standing here--I'd be dead.'
Buffalo News, February 20, 1992
Seven and one-half years later, but only fifteen miles away, in Buffalo, Doug Gilbert waits at an Allentown cafe. He is tall, even seated by the window at the sheet steel table in the wrought iron chair. He is bearded, the permanently adopted outgrowth of impersonating Meister Eckhardt in a recent production of his own stage play, Meister Eckhardt Speaks. His wife wanted him to keep the whiskers. Meister Eckhardt was a thirteenth century Dominican monk who preached "belonging through detachment, prostration and prayer" to his Rhineland neighbors. Doug is a Presbyterian minister who is not comfortable confined to the heavy chair, to predestination doctrine or to a century and land whose preachers are not leaders. His neighbors are in western New York.
He precociously greets his lunch date by name as the shorter man, whom he has never met, arrives in the rain and closes his umbrella and the door to the street. Doug has, Doug explains, looked him up in a twelve-year-old pictorial directory and he hasn't changed all that much. At Doug's suggestion, and by astonishing coincidence, they had earlier made plans to meet this day at another restaurant, several blocks down Allen Street, close by and within sight of the white pickets which still perch rudely at the corner of Main. But that ironical spot was closed for the week.
After several tries at selecting something they're not "out of," Doug settles on bacon and eggs; his companion, linguine. The new arrival wants to know what happened after that 1992 meeting and the newspaper publicity. Did the rehabilitation center ever open? What happened to your practice and reputation? Has there been opposition to similar facilities since? As strident? Have you any regrets about being so open? Have any of the opponents repented? What about the fate of others who spoke in favor? How did treatment help you? Why you would put so much on the line.
Doug responds with his story. He grew up in Middleport, up in Niagara County, graduating from high school in 1962. Hobart College. Princeton Theological Seminary. A year at St. Andrew's in Scotland studying the New Testament in Greek. A parish pastor near Corning. Then on to medical school in Philadelphia, a general surgery residency in Cleveland and neurosurgery residency in Detroit. Increasing amounts of alcohol and other drugs and always more degrees and achievements to accompany them. He picked up tobacco smoking from the thoracic surgeon who mentored him in Cleveland. They would remove a cancerous lung, then break for a cigarette together before moving on to the next patient. He still smokes.
But the drinking and drugging would stop in 1985. After a marriage and three children and a divorce. After years of telling himself that he was too smart and too accomplished to be so sick. And after being told by another woman he loved that he was a drunk and she wanted nothing to do with him.
In September, 1985, he signed up for the 28-day detoxification program at the Chit Chat Rehabilitation Center in Pennsylvania. He came out clean and stayed that way. In late 1990, on the shores of Lake Erie, after five years of misery and meetings, he met a Catholic priest who talked to him and tried to understand him. Doug was this close to suicide.
Doug told him of the boyhood beatings, the emotional and sexual mistreatment. The cleric helped him to understand that he had been treating his childhood wounds with alcohol and other drugs and recommended a five and one-half day family counseling program at Chit Chat. It had helped others he knew to learn how to uncover these mysterious early afflictions. People who are paralyzed with fear don't want to drag out these injuries just because they are so affecting, so consuming, so shaming. But the program would help him to identify his particular curses and give him some tools to moderate and move forward from their adverse effects.
Desperate, Doug got right on the phone and discovered that the sessions were booked for months. By confessing to the woman on the phone that he might not "be around" for the next opening, he convinced her to admit him to the one starting the next week.
That five and one half days taught Doug that his parents were sick, not bad. The experience made it easier for him to forgive and harder for him to be so angry. He began to understand that in adulthood he had been replicating his experiences in childhood--hiding and covering up and avoiding these memories that hurt him so much. He cemented these realizations with three more years of Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings; with three years of struggling with a painful past he had not wanted to dig up. Counseling really did save his life.
He now teaches addiction medicine at the University of Buffalo medical school "when it occurs to them to offer such a basic course." He studies and interprets the Sermon on the Mount and visits prisons to treat the inmates. He continues to see and treat more conventional patients. He refuses to do business with HMOs.
Finishing off his omelette, Doug muses on what might have possessed him that freezing night in Evans to bare his intemperate soul before so many so merciless. He reveals to his still hungry companion that he had already "lost his anonymity" back in 1985 when he first sought help and counseling for his addictions. In a fit of irony, the CEO of the hospital where he was then Chief of Staff "blew him in" to the State Health Department only after Doug had acknowledged his problem and stopped drugging and drinking. He went bankrupt defending the charges but managed to keep his license and his patients.
So speaking out in 1992 at a huge public gathering studded with news gatherers risked little more than the gamble he had taken when he first admitted he was a drunk and a junkie. Then he chanced his reputation to save his life. Seven years later, getting up to speak out openly for the recovery center energized him and made him feel invincible just as first acknowledging his addiction and sickness gave him a chance to stay physically alive. Both times he needed public affirmation to "fix the brokenness." First his. Then his and Evans'. Why did he need the audiences?
The healing had to acknowledge the disorder: he hadn't been able to love himself; he had not been good enough, so he had always sought others' recognition. His addictions, though, cloaked childhood trauma, reenacting the childhood cover-up each day of his adult life. The nature of the hurt required secrecy and seclusion. The hiddenness was part of the disability. In coming to accept and care for himself he still needed the attention of others; hiding these secrets had gnawed away at his sense of being part of the world. This need to share to stop the private addiction, was in the Evans crowd that evening folded into and fortified by an external cause: the bid to salvage an operation whose prototype had actually saved his life by acquainting him with these realizations.
Even more, this speaking out in Evans was for a facility which was feared and opposed because "... if the bums get too close, I might have to face those demons in me, also, and confront those forces and problems in my own life which I'm trying to hide." As Doug saw it, the opposition that night was submerged in an epidemic of hopelessness which it did not have the tools to resist. Every one of them supposed that this organization, its bureaucratic creators, its powerful supporters and its unseemly following, were all out to subvert their individual choices to live in peace and isolation in a town bordering Eden. For them, that battle, then, represented a specific outcropping of the smothering malaise of hopelessness which surrounds them and convinces them that everyone is trying to take away something from everyone else. Then there was Doug stating, "No, it doesn't have to be this way. It isn't this way. I am one of you and a place like this gave me my life. This one will give you yours, not take it away." Doug fought for the life of the rehabilitation center and his community because counseling and then his community had given life to him.
To join the block club or to speak out at such a gathering is, then, to stage a redeeming drama. You must acknowledge a problem to begin to work it out. This is about accepting: accepting the history and the body that combined to bring you to this point. Accepting who you have become represents an end to covering up those influences; an end to pretending that all those causes had no effects. If you haven't accepted your past influences, you haven't accepted the need to abstain because you still want to obliterate them with drugs and alcohol. Maybe you haven't accepted your need to take medicine to lighten those delusional escapes from your situation, or perhaps you haven't accepted the need to get some help to balance your checkbook. If you have accepted yourself, it is impossible to hide that history from the others. Being open and accepting are part of the same process. If you can't disclose, you haven't accepted because you are still saying to yourself that what "they" think about you is more important to you than who you have become.
This is basic Howard W. Campbell stuff. Vonnegut 101. You become what you pretend to others to be. A prisoner. Think about your pretensions. If you continue to pretend that you've never suffered these curses you've gone ahead and denied to others that there is anything you or anyone can do to alter this aftermath you are living through. You have erected a jail. Predestination rears its debilitating silhouette: to forget and avoid pain, we drink or escape into delusions and that's just the way it is. To be able, rather, to engineer change, to deconstruct the penitentiary, to, in Doug's words, experience true resurrection, you must accept and study the calculus of the past. And you must be willing to move beyond that past.
And it is also about energy and time. Pretending borrows all this space that you would otherwise be using, naturally and unconsciously, openly and easily, for making the changes and for understanding your past trauma to make those changes possible. You don't open up to that new acquaintance who seems so ready to understand because your energies are directed into your mask.
The good citizens of Allentown lament an "unsightly congestion." Is it possible the crowd at Evans doesn't want to even see the addicts because each of the group as individuals has not accepted themselves and each and every person who has admitted a problem and sought treatment threatens to uncover their disguises? Is the psychological basis of xenophobia, that "hard-wired" distrust of the strange, related to another hardwired process which conspires to obliterate the memory of pain? Have we done mischief if we bring that specter home?
Doug's story and musings have taken his listener into this reflective spiral. He asks Doug if there weren't any ill effects of the outing in Evans. Doug says no. It was all positive for him. He doesn't think any of his patients abandoned him. He has earned a deference reserved for the forthright. What about the crowd? It's as if Doug has circled with his correspondent's thoughts: "Each and every one of them will be less likely to think the stranger they meet is trying to take something away from them." And that is because they know Doug has faced his demons and Doug is familiar to them.
But, no, the rehabilitation center never happened. And no others have popped up. He is not aware of the fate of any of the others who stood up for the rehabilitation center that midnight in 1992. Not one of the opponents has ever come to him hat in hand. Any gauge to measure the sum total of Evans' distrust is not so finely calibrated that we will be able to determine the Doug Gilbert variation the next time such a clinic comes up for debate. But because Doug unmasked his own struggle in the presence of his neighbors and because the sum total of that fear of strangers mirrors or maybe even duplicates the aggregate fear of all their own masked and unaccepted selves, the gauge will certainly read lower next time.
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WELCOME TO ALLENTOWN
William W. Berry
495 Connecticut Street
Buffalo, New York 14213
3600 Words
First Serial Rights
April, 1998, revised December, 1999
WELCOME TO ALLENTOWN
by
William W. Berry
Perched rudely at the corner of Main and Allen Streets in Buffalo is a low, white, wide-picket wooden fence. It blocks a sensible pedestrian short cut across a "community" garden bidding welcome, the sign says, to the neighborhood known as Allentown. This barrier intersects the fading footpath at an odd horizontal angle instead of following Main Street's natural inclination. It is unwelcoming and out of tune and place.
These squat pickets bring to mind the antisocial character of the noisy anti-social services crowd which has grown up in that part of town. Was there a problem with that logical, diagonal route tracing the edge of the railroad-tie planter? Why would anyone want to keep the community out of a community garden? If hating the sight of mud or other aesthetic sensibilities led to this extreme, certainly paving stones or a boardwalk would be more inviting and in keeping with the written message.
But maybe its not just the garden. Maybe its a symbol for them too. Maybe someone wants people arriving by subway from the other side of Main to see this stockade as a sign that they are not welcome further down Allen. "Welcome to Allentown," indeed.
This half square mile of historic district subsumes a lively jumble of restored wooden Victorian homes, cracking brick apartment buildings, fly-specked antique shops, tatoo and body piercing parlors, galleries and coffee houses with grimy windows, party bars and music clubs, ethnic restaurants, chain drugstores and nursing homes.
It takes in an endearing assortment of Rastafarians and Junior Leaguers, wily crack dealers and preoccupied Supreme Court justices, cross-dressing social workers, unemployed bartenders, Vietnamese laborers, white-haired former bikers in motorized wheelchairs, paroled Mafia hit men, the nearby symphony's janitors and its cellists. All around the Allen-Hospital station and F. Scott Fitzgerald's earliest home, freshly painted islands of affluence pock decaying tracts of destitution.
It is true that for several years the good neighbors and their clubs in and around Allentown have been trying to rid themselves of the Salvation Army, Friends of the Night People, Harbor House and other programs providing services to the homeless, poor and disabled. The campaign succeeded in hounding Harbor House out of the area by enlisting the aid of a county legislator to threaten its funding. Another mental health rights organization, similarly persuaded, abandoned plans to locate in the city.
The rallying cry for these individuals and their groups has been that there exists an "overconcentration" or "oversaturation" of these types of helping places in the Allentown and West Side neighborhoods. The crusade has been quite effective because it is composed of organized, articulate, affluent and mainly white campaign contributors. Their efforts have resulted in the creation of a "Permanent Human Services Siting Review Committee" established by the Erie County Legislature and an ordinance requiring a "special use" permit for human services agencies seeking to locate or expand in the city, passed by the Buffalo Common Council and signed into law by Mayor Masiello. The combination of these overlapping and possibly contradictory bureaucratic requirements has sapped the energy and depleted the resources of organizations serving the poor and disabled. Most alarmingly, though, the resulting battery of siting approval hearings has had a tendency to fan a flickering intolerance into fiery hate.
The virtually explicit purpose of the county legislature's siting review committee was originally to use the menace of loss of county funding to "encourage" social services agencies to locate in areas outside of the city's West Side. In fact, the committee has had in place a de facto moratorium on the expansion or creation of any such agencies on the entire West Side, not just Allentown. It is packed with neighborhood people and providers of services, but has not, apparently, until very recently, embraced even a single social services' consumer representative. Given the witch-hunting atmosphere of the committee's early meetings, it may be, however, that any consumer representatives have been keeping their affiliations under cover.
The "oversaturation" movement was born in legitimate concerns over crime: burglaries, thefts, assaults, harassment, and vandalism. Feelings of personal security and property values have declined in the Allentown and West Side areas. The corroding effects of disparities in wealth are quite apparent when those disparities stare at each other from across the street. Playing into those legitimate concerns, however, are primitive attitudes which can only be described as xenophobia, racism and class antagonism. These insidious forces are often fed by misinformation and illogic, which can be met with example rather than accepted as inevitable or dismissed as temporary or insignificant.
Much of the publicity intended for out-of-neighborhood consumption put out by these groups explicitly disavows a "not in my back yard" mentality. Pointing to the area's historic reputation for diversity and tolerance, their argument is that there has to be one hell of an "overconcentration" problem for broad-minded people like themselves to be up in arms. These social services providers and their clients are so pervasive, they maintain, echoing legal language, that they are changing the character of "our" neighborhoods.
But, in reality, the backbone of this anti-social services movement is commonplace, narrow-minded intolerance, and each xenophobic vertebra of it is visible in the so-called "Overconcentration Study" published approximately five years ago by the Allentown Association, Forever Elmwood, Greater Linwood Community Organization, North Pearl Street Block Club and The Irving Place Block Club.
The "study" speaks of "feeding hours" instead of lunch and dinner hours, when it refers to services provided by Friends of the Night People. This characterization of the less fortunate as also less than human informs the study's inhuman "solutions": move the Salvation Army's homeless services and Friends of the Night People's dining facilities to the Perry Project, because it is in an "industrial" area. If the people in the Perry Project don't like it, they can move to other housing projects. Shades of apartheid? These examples pale beside the rhetoric at the block club meetings about "trash", "those people", and "welfare scum". But the "Overconcentration Study", itself, borders on hate literature.
Its isolated crime statistics reveal that the "study" does not even establish the fact of oversaturation in Allentown, much less the entire West Side. The alleged oversaturation is more an article of faith in the tract. For example, all it does is enumerate police calls and services provided in a certain area of the city. There is no listing of calls or services provided in other areas of the city and county, so there is no reference point. In order for anyone to draw any rational conclusions about whether an area like the West Side is oversaturated, if that is even possible in turn of the century America, a comprehensive mapping and needs study would have to be completed. Although the county siting committee commissioned such a mapping study by Central Referral Services, which has resulted in an illuminating data base and set of maps pinpointing social services sites, the group has hardly even discussed the methodology for a most certainly complex needs study.
The five-year old Allentown "study" is still instructive as to the origins and characteristics of the anti-social services atmosphere in Allentown. It is filled with mischaracterizations and inaccurate data, generated from flawed premises and lines of reasoning, which go something like this:
1. Social service agencies located on the West Side attract undesirable non-residents who commit crimes and depress property values.
2. Therefore, closing or containing those agencies, and discouraging new ones, will reduce the crime and make the neighborhood more desirable.
There are numerous problems with this analysis. Most egregious is the explicit, unsupported and unabashed stereotyping: the poor people and disabled people who use these services are more likely than "us" to commit crimes and hurt others. Additionally, there is the express elitism, that "we" who don't need these services are somehow more deserving of what the neighborhood has to offer than those others, those beggars. Related to this elitism is the meanness and lack of generosity implicit in the reasoning.
More concretely, the reasoning fails because there is no evidence that the existing services are not used primarily by residents. Additionally, the provision of food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless, support for mental health recovery and treatment for the addicted demonstrably results in a reduction in crime. Finally, the physical improvements and regular maintenance common to the social service facilities actually enhance and strengthen the neighborhood. The anti-social services, pro-business bent of the block clubs' "plan" holds as an article of faith that an antique store or specialty shop catering to the healthy and wealthy is a preferred use over a social service for the poor or disabled. Indeed, of late, perhaps recognizing a fault in its logic but not its wisdom, the anti-social services movement has initiated a public and cynical attempt to prevent the disabled from even living in the neighborhood.
How neatly this vision dovetails with the mean-spirited cuts in social services spending engineered by the right-wingers in Congress. But the study is so short-sighted it does not even consider the beneficial economic impact of those services, such as rents paid to landlords who pay property taxes, and lunches and other goods and services bought by employees of those agencies, or the well-documented crime reduction resulting from the increased level of street activity associated with the provision of such services.
Is it, perhaps, the very appearance or presence of certain and different types of people which drives this self-defeating "ban the bums" campaign? Could it be that 1970s refugees from grim suburbs are, in their middle ages, endeavoring to transplant the uniformity from which they fled into the core of the city? Portions of the study point to just such an old-fashioned xenophobia as the driving force:
Anyone familiar with this intersection knows of the
unsightly congestion of people standing at the front
door of this facility all hours of the day and night.
The study is not content with faulty premises and horrifying reasoning, however. It stoops to deliberate lies, stating, for example:
There are no public schools in Allentown with large
numbers of teenage mothers requiring four separate
parenting programs.
The Jeopardy answer "What is Grover Cleveland High School ?" comes to mind.
While Grover Cleveland is actually a block or two from a narrowly defined "Allentown", the study goes far afield to find those nasty social service agencies which seem to plague its neighborhood. Included in its list of culprits, for instance, are a community dining room and also a T.B. testing clinic located at Elmwood and Lafayette, a good mile up the street from the corner of Elmwood and Allen.
Clear differences in morality and an obvious lack of human feeling aside, this type of NIMBY movement based on elitism and exclusion, distinguishes itself from legitimate local opposition to state-imposed mandates such as nuclear dumps, because it exacerbates the local problem instead of ameliorating or preventing it. A Martian viewing the oversaturation movement and its dubious achievements would be struck by the irony: a group of influential "haves" have convinced their representatives that they are the victims of the "have nots" and the services provided so begrudgingly to them. The irony is not there so much, but that the "haves'" transposed characterization increases the antagonism which leads to crime and the negative perceptions which result in a decline in property values. The quintessential self-fulfilling prophecy. In the quintessential American city, half emptied of population in the Fifties and Sixties as a result of the very same intolerant attitudes and perceptions. And this campaign is being waged in the name of keeping the middle class in the city?
At a witch-hunt of a siting committee meeting three years back, the aforementioned mental health rights organization's executive director humbly sought the committee's permission to relocate her small office to Elmwood and Ferry. A vocal Allentown resident, since removed to pastoral Orchard Park, who happens to be a trust officer at a large, multinational bank, screamed at her that all "those people" should be out at the old Bethlehem Steel property in Lackawanna where they won't bother anyone. A whisper, "Don't forget the barbed wire," heard only by a few, captured the savagery of the moment. The mental health office ended up in cosmopolitan Kenmore.
Although the committee's origins are mired in intolerance, it was for several years chaired by a genuinely decent man of the cloth, the former Director of Erie County's Commission on the Homeless, Daniel Weir. He shaped the siting committee into a forum and, despite continued funding cut-off threats directed by the committee to organizations such as Harbor House and a lingering "ban the bums" mentality in the block club representatives, the forum has deflected some hate and developed a useful product, the said siting data base and maps.
On a chilly, grey April morning, Dan invited a curious visitor into his sprawling yet homey and cozy offices in one corner of the third floor at the downtown YWCA. He finished tapping an e-mail message to his twenty year-old daughter in pre-med at Princeton. Then, proud and protective of his charges, he laid the two-foot by three-foot siting maps out on a conference table. Seemingly in tandem, the minister and his guest leaned over the charts and Dan explained their significance.
On one, scores of small red dots, representing the site of each helping service, are clearly concentrated downtown and snake out from there closely following the yellow paths representing bus and rapid transit routes. In another, the services are represented by circles of differing sizes proportional to the numbers of people they serve. The largest ones are downtown. It sure doesn't look like the evil social services bureaucracy has singled out Allentown or the West Side.
Dan commented that the maps illustrate the providers' sensitivity to their clients' need to be able to reach the services by public transit. He also ventured his opinion that the maps and data base from which they were drawn will be useful to the providers in making siting decisions. Implicit in his comment was a recognition that, given this information, and lacking an overall needs study, the providers and clients, themselves, who also just happen to be residents of their communities, are the appropriate assessors of the extent of need for their particular services at a particular location and that they will be able to perform this assessment more confidently knowing the location and types of services already being provided. Also implicit in his comment and manner was a trust he held in the professionalism and good sense of the caring individuals who staff these organizations.
Hopefully, in the future, the committee, making use of such data and maps, might continue to evolve toward a roundtable in which neighborhood groups, providers and consumers can communicate their plans and concerns, moving away from intolerance and bans. Unfortunately, Dan resigned as Chair in September, 1999. Now, a wealthy county legislator best known for leading the charge to rid her city neighborhood of these troubling reminders of disease and poverty has taken over. If possible, the funding blackmail has intensified.
Just prior to Dan's departure, a seasoned defender of the rights of the disabled speculated that any vision of the siting committee as metamorphosing from a negative to a positive force would become a reality only if it takes concrete steps to combat intolerance. When pressed, he sketched out those steps in words to this effect:
First, the local politicians who, for the most part, have been at their worst on this score, wretchedly pandering to the prejudices of the less eccentric but more vocal and monied of their constituents, must be educated. Though they have an obligation to principle as well as to their contributing constituents, the lawmakers must be consistently reminded that there are large numbers of voters who will not tolerate discrimination.
Similarly, just as it has communicated the neighborhoods' complaints, it is obligatory for the committee to publicize the sustenance the helping agencies deliver to their neighborhoods: curtailing crime by cutting at its roots of poverty, disease and inequality, and supporting their surroundings with cash. Might it yet be possible for the committee to coordinate a media blitz accenting these benefits as a counterpoint to the neighborhood complaints for which it has served as a convenient rostrum?
The committee has the power to insist upon documentation of oversaturation and persuasively question the alleged link between social services and increased crime and reduced property values. Members can demand that the vigilantes define such terms as "change the character of a neighborhood." They might even speculate publicly as to the likelihood that the antagonism and negative publicity generated by the oversaturation movement has actually caused or exacerbated the evils it claims to be fighting.
The siting committee must work to insure a balance between the numbers of out-of-the-closet consumer representatives and the neighborhood representatives. Committee members and observers can also be there to insist that action on any mapping or needs study take into account public transportation accessibility and convenience, especially for specialized services which can economically be located in only one place.
The committee would do well to support immediate repeal of the city special use permit ordinance, which caused such a terrible ordeal for the Harbor House clients and staff, as redundant at best.
Reduced to fleeing Allentown by legislative funding threats, this model homeless outreach and drop-in center settled in downtown's northeast corner. Playing to the new neighbors' speculative complaints and worst instincts, the Buffalo Common Council's majority shamelessly milked the public hearings required by the local law for personal advancement and denied the special use permit. Harbor House then challenged the legality of the ordinance, so unforgivably misused, in Federal Court in Buffalo, as violating the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act and state and local laws. Judge Skretny granted a Preliminary Injunction, forcing the city to allow Harbor House to occupy the downtown site. He found that Harbor House was likely to succeed in its claim that this application of the special use ordinance was unlawful. A respite! But inestimable energy had shifted and dissipated; fiscal intimidation still lurked in time to come.
And, finally, to better that time, this same advocate asserts that the committee could work to dispel the myths and rumors which the "ban the bums" movement needs to survive. One such myth is that the Friends of the Night People operates the only soup kitchen in the city. A variation on that myth is that it is the only one that serves an evening meal. Another particularly invidious concoction is that the provision of services on the West Side somehow deprives the needier East Side of services.
Other disability rights defenders and committee members, including Dan Weir and the Director of the County's Office for the Disabled, now forcefully argue that the Committee, with its witch hunts, must go, because it legitimates discrimination.
But, irrespective of the being and beyond the immediate confines of the siting committee, it is a visual artist who, with her words, has unveiled a most powerful measure for the rejected to fight this intolerance and assure that counseling and other services remain and can locate where they are needed; that, indeed, they may live where they choose. In Out of Order, Out of Sight, Adrian Piper suggests:
"...that the basic tendency that gives rise to all these areas of repression is the same. I think that Kant is right about this; there is an innate tendency to categorize, and if we did not do that, we would experience total chaos. So the basis of xenophobia is innate. It is hard-wired, and it is impossible to escape.
However, what counts as alien, what counts as fearful and unfamiliar, is entirely a matter of social context. If one is raised in a social context that has lots of different kinds of people in it, is very cosmopolitan, then one will not experience fear of other people, no matter how they look. If one is raised in a situation that is very provincial, very homogenous, in which everyone looks more or less the same, then it is much harder, because any variation in appearance or dress or conventions or behavior will be cause for fear until one can grow accustomed to someone who has that anomalous or different appearance."
If even a few of those who have used these services for recovery from addiction or mental illness, who have eaten a meal at a soup kitchen or needed help to manage their finances, should join their neighborhood organizations and block clubs and let their histories and views be known, they might gradually be able to turn the intolerance around and change the leadership that caters to bigotry. Social services organizations could encourage this participation.
A veteran of alcohol counseling and the neighborhood observes that this is not a simple task, especially on an individual level, because of the fear of being labelled a freak. It takes courage to even attend a block club meeting, much less join the organization, when your neighbors are speaking out not about what you thought you had heard at first, but about the trash walking down the street. He imagines confronting the dread and making a point of appearing at those meetings, thus establishing "ourselves" as part of the community. We can in this way, in the company of our neighbors, proceed to erode the stereotypes, calm the fears and, quite possibly, root out that white picket fence.
-end-
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Extra Essays Examining Xenophobia
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