Spec Boogie “Bed-Stuy” (via the Bed-Stuy Blog). This is sound and vision from the neighborhood we live in.

As two single, middle class white women who live in a historically black neighborhood in the heart of Brooklyn, Michaela and I are well aware that our presence is a marker of gentrification that some members of the local communites (and sometimes we) aren’t always comfortable with. The reasons behind our recent move from a brownstone duplex owned by an absentee, expatriate landlord to an apartment in an owner-occupied and managed building is pretty deeply entwined with gentrification. There’s been a lot of talk from the honky hipster quarters of Bed-Stuy about neighborhood improvements, but those “improvements” seem to be more about making the neighborhood more stylish and palatable from other white kids moving in from the midwest than they are about becoming a working part of the community. (See also the NY Press article on “Helpsters.”) We’ve had our brush with this type of “community service,” including the embarrassingly personal experiencing of participating in Bed-Stuy Meadow project last year. (Can I have my four hours and T&T cred back, please?) Our point is that it’s pointless to mobilize for community service unless you start at the actual community level rather than at your own white, middle class, geographical transplant perception of community need. Know your neighbors, go to the bodega on the corner, patronize the local library branch, join the CSA, talk to the little old ladies as they walk home from church, say hello to the Caribbean nuns and the ladies at the beauty parlour in the middle of the block, do your own laundry, give the little kids hell. Be humble. (Your place of simultaneously self-congratulating and self-effacing white privelege makes you neither special, nor anyone’s savior.) We’d like to believe that the fact that we do all of these things has helped us become a part of the community — even if we were the crazy white girls on Hancock and are now the crazy white girls elsewhere — rather than well-intentioned interlopers who want to wallpaper Bed-Stuy to make it look like something other than it is:  a vibrant, multi-racial and multi-ethnic community filled with working families at multiple socioeconomic levels. A community that has triumphs, problems, easy successes, struggles and room to grow.

Here’s another recent view of Bed-Stuy that comes from a place we’re pretty damned OK with. This is our neighborhood. Live it, love it.