I’ve written before about Williamsburg, a neighborhood within Brooklyn. (See, TNIW, The Williamsburg Neighborhood in Brooklyn, and The Pickleback.)
It’s not because Whitewater will one-day look like just like that neighborhood. There are at least two reasons Williamsburg is relevant.
First, that neighborhood shows how very different ethnicities (Italian, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Hasidic) can live near each other (albeit with the occasional kerfuffle). If Williamsburg can make a go of it, so can Whitewater, with a smaller and less diverse demographic.
All the town-gown issues, for example, that Whitewater has ever seen are mere minnows compared to Williamsburg’s possible – but successfully met – challenges.
If you’re at our university, or in our city, and you’ve not bridged our own gaps, then you’ve only yourself (and those like you) to blame. If Williamsburg can do it, so can we. We’re no less American than residents of this Brooklyn neighborhood – we can deliver on the promise of a diverse city as well as they can.
Quick note, so that we’re all very clear: smearing the memory of a deceased college student for the act-utilitarian purpose of assuring others that we’ve no greater crime problem isn’t bridging the town-gown gap. See, along these lines, The True Measure of Institutional Greatness.
There’s a second reason I’ve written about Williamsburg. Although Whitewater will never look like Williamsburg (and certainly doesn’t need to do so), she will one day look almost as different from how she looks today as she does today from contemporary Williamsburg.
We’re at the beginning of this transformation now, one that has over ten years to go. There’s no one Williamsburg culture now, and they’ll be no one Whitewater culture then. There is, however, an ethos there are will take hold here: that there’s no one way, no one set of expectations, no one narrow standard that all must meet.
We have the beginnings of this New Whitewater, but they’re still small shoots. Creative ideas in art and culture are slowly emerging, but they’re still tightly controlled, and often used to advance an single, doctrinaire message (one group, one way, one city, all exceptional and flawless).
It’s a message all right, it’s just an insecure and laughable one. We’ll know we’ve progressed when art isn’t a mere handmaiden of that message.
That narrow vision reached its high-water mark sometime between 2004-2012, yet all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t make Whitewater’s politics so simple-minded again.
We’re slowly on our way.