Metro Heart – Nashville

On Being From Somewhere by Matt

Today I read an interesting and inspiring article in the Post-Gazette regarding an initiative for members of a community to take hold of their own commercial destiny. This concept speaks to many of the reasons I ended up here in law school: Time after time, I drove or walked down Brownsville Road and I wondered what could be done about the unceasing proliferation of furniture rental and cash checking shops whose basic goal is to feed off of and increase inequity. As I get older and admittedly less radical, the concept of employing capitalism intelligently and strategically to fight its more malignant form is appealing to me. (Interestingly, you’ll notice that wealthy communities do this all the time – see: the perennial failure of big box stores attempting to move into Regent Square, etc.)

I wondered for a moment if I could get involved in defending or otherwise helping something along the lines of S&G, if Carrie and I end up back in Pittsburgh at some point in the future…But I quickly rebutted myself: It’s doubtful that an initiative so deeply rooted in its community would want assistance from someone from without. In fact, in some sense, that is exactly what this organization seeks not to do.

Which brings me to the thing I’ve been mulling over much of today: What is it about the quality of being from a place that legitimizes your activities there?

I’ve been on both sides of this equation. When I was living in Poughkeepsie, I frequently wanted to integrate and assist the community but often felt that my effort (the effort of an outsider) was resented by those with a genuine, longstanding stake in the place. And I understand that feeling (especially since I was not particularly good at what I was doing there).

I understand that feeling because I have felt a good deal of resentment toward outsiders from time to time myself. A notable example would be the time I worked as co-captain of my neighborhood (Lawrenceville, at the time) for the Obama campaign…In looking over a map of areas that had been canvassed, I noticed that no one had registered voters anywhere in the South Hilltop area above 18th Street – an area that is traditionally deeply Democratic. I mentioned this to an employee of the campaign, and volunteered to take care of this area of the city myself. The campaign worker called over to another: “Hey, can I get a map of registered voters in the Lawrenceville/Mount Oliver area?”

I looked quizzically at the worker and mentioned that Lawrenceville and Mount Oliver are very much noncontiguous – in fact, they are about five miles and one river away from each other. She shrugged and mentioned that she was from Iowa.

My intention is not to belittle the efforts of my Iowan friends on the campaign – obviously they were hired for a reason and, as you will notice if you surf over to whitehouse.gov, they did their jobs exceptionally well. Still, to go into a city attempting to win hearts and minds without some feel for its complex socioeconomic dynamics…it struck me as naïve.

Maybe my attitude is borne of the fact that I grew up in one of the most insular neighborhoods of a famously insular city. Pittsburgh is frequently cited as an almost anachronistic collection of ethnic enclaves…When I was born, Mt. Oliver was allegedly home to the country’s highest concentration of German Catholics – second only to Troy Hill (where my dad is from). This is a city where communities of fewer than 5,000 people further subdivide themselves based on geography (I’m looking at you, Bottoms of Hazelwood/Observatory Hill/etc). And each of these places has a distinct feel and its own code of conduct – even if the gradations are barely perceptible, I assure you that there is a palpable difference between Lincoln Place and Hays.

Urban areas might be the extreme case of this phenomenon, since they are so dense, but this can be extended to suburban or rural areas. I’ve got to imagine that Evans City and Zelionople probably have a rivalry of some sort – presumably mitigated only be their common hatred of Cranberry. God only knows the depth of the fear and resentment citizens of Wilmerding harbor against the alien town of Wall.

It’s tough to bridge those gaps in practice. The middle school population of Poughkeepsie let me know daily that I was not one of them. I’m sure that my sarcastic smirk made the Iowan feel the same way. And yet, somehow exceptions continue to be made: John Fetterman in Braddock…Ed Rendell (a native New Yorker) in Philly for that matter. What makes them different?

This is a particularly pertinent issue for me right now, a relative newbie in the context of Nashville. I want to get involved in Legal Aid and other community programs, but I don’t want to be seen as some out-of-touch bleeding heart or gentrifier. I don’t want to be seen the same way as I saw the kids from Mt. Lebanon who repainted Transverse Park when I was a kid. I resented the insinuation that our neighborhood was some charity case that needed their enlightened assistance to help itself. (Apparently others in the ‘hood saw it the same way, since everything was covered in graffiti again two days afterward.)

I’ve gone on too long as usual, so I’ll leave the rest of my rant for some other time. The important thing to remember is: yeah, you’re going to be an outsider in an unfamiliar environment. That’s always where you start. Where you end is up to you…Establishing trust, respect, and familiarity takes time.

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