the Whitest Woman On The Block
Jun. 27th, 2020 02:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/3dFXFnR
so i took farmkid over to my mom’s house yesterday morning, because it seemed only fair– my mom’s been doing all the driving around of kids and such, and i figured i’d just drive for once.
my parents were full of complaints about the niblings, my older sister’s kids who’ve been with them for almost two weeks now. understandable. once in a while i’d ask ‘didn’t we do that too though?’ and they’d be like ‘no you guys were angels’ and i’d be like ‘doubtful’ because while we were generally very good kids, we were real actual kids. the difference is that my sister’s kids have slightly different foibles– among other things, the one kid is like, sneaky-devious, and none of us had the imagination for that. also the boys leave the toilet seats up, which we, as all girls, never did, so.
My dad did proudly show me the earth oven he and the 10-year-old had built according to the directions in, like, some 1762 drill manual or something.
Then i sat on the patio and mended a pair of my own trousers (! most of my mending is of my sister’s clothing, usually) in the dappled, shady sunshine. At some point the 10-year-old whipped my ass at Bananagrams, which I had trouble with because I thought it was Scrabble and thus could not understand how to rearrange letters. He was delighted by this. Also I got four Us in a row, and got both Qs at once, not at the same time as the Us.
we stayed past lunch, and then a bit after 2pm we came back to the farm to help my sister arrange flowers. one of her good friends, whose daughter is farmkid’s bestie (they tell everyone they’re sisters and people believe them), was there, and farmkid was excited to play with her BFF.
Then we had a potluck dinner featuring the farm crew, and then the family of Farmkid’s BFF, who are in our isolation circle but we never see the dad. He’s an absolute stitch, the whole family is– he’s a surly-looking skater-dude type with wild stories of snowboarding off the roof of his parents’ garage. His wife was elected The Whitest Woman On The Block when they lived in South Troy, and was given the position of Community Liason To The Police whenever the authorities had to be summoned to deal with the teenaged drug dealers who bedeviled their block. (Far from the only white woman on the block, this woman was given the position because she’d grown up in a relatively-affluent suburb so she could do the I Demand To Speak To A Manager presentation really well– and she learned after the first time the cops demanded she prove she owned her house that you have to dress up in business casual and do your makeup before you call, so she’d do that too. In return, one of her neighbors gave her South Troy Lessons. [she was like, you gotta get out of the car already screaming, girl, that’s how they know you’re serious]) The cops were like, we can’t arrest them unless you know their names, where they work, have video evidence, and have apprehended them yourselves (each of these conditions was added on during successive incidents, y’know?)– and so her surly skater-dude husband, in real life an auto mechanic, BUILT AN IRON MAIDEN CAGE and actually trapped one of the teenagers in the alley where he’d always flee to dump his drugs, and when the cops showed up to find like the entire block clustered around this extremely overbuilt gate contraption (it was eight feet tall and had screws facing inward), every one of the residents chanting “WE GOT HIM, WE GOT HIM” and there’s the kid, there’s his resume, there’s his list of known associates and his entire work history, there’s hours of video footage of him committing crimes all like collated into a manila folder with a cover sheet and a letter and a PowerPoint presentation… they finally were like… fuck, we actually have to arrest these hooligans… after YEARS, and HUNDREDS of incidents of vandalism, dumping drugs in the kids’ play yards, breaking into people’s houses, dealing drugs directly outside the children’s windows, etcetera…
(There was a crew of actual professional gang-related drug dealers operating nearby but she never called the cops on them– they were pros, kept the neighborhood nice, were invested in community support to keep the cops away, and also were united with most of the residents of the block in fucking hating the teenage drug dealers for making the whole profession look bad and dragging down the neighborhood. No, they were nice, she never called the cops on them. Not that she supported their mission or whatever but honestly whose jobs are entirely unproblematic; that wasn’t her business. it’s not like they worked in finance or something, that REALLY hurts people.)
anyway it was a great story.
so i took farmkid over to my mom’s house yesterday morning, because it seemed only fair– my mom’s been doing all the driving around of kids and such, and i figured i’d just drive for once.
my parents were full of complaints about the niblings, my older sister’s kids who’ve been with them for almost two weeks now. understandable. once in a while i’d ask ‘didn’t we do that too though?’ and they’d be like ‘no you guys were angels’ and i’d be like ‘doubtful’ because while we were generally very good kids, we were real actual kids. the difference is that my sister’s kids have slightly different foibles– among other things, the one kid is like, sneaky-devious, and none of us had the imagination for that. also the boys leave the toilet seats up, which we, as all girls, never did, so.
My dad did proudly show me the earth oven he and the 10-year-old had built according to the directions in, like, some 1762 drill manual or something.
Then i sat on the patio and mended a pair of my own trousers (! most of my mending is of my sister’s clothing, usually) in the dappled, shady sunshine. At some point the 10-year-old whipped my ass at Bananagrams, which I had trouble with because I thought it was Scrabble and thus could not understand how to rearrange letters. He was delighted by this. Also I got four Us in a row, and got both Qs at once, not at the same time as the Us.
we stayed past lunch, and then a bit after 2pm we came back to the farm to help my sister arrange flowers. one of her good friends, whose daughter is farmkid’s bestie (they tell everyone they’re sisters and people believe them), was there, and farmkid was excited to play with her BFF.
Then we had a potluck dinner featuring the farm crew, and then the family of Farmkid’s BFF, who are in our isolation circle but we never see the dad. He’s an absolute stitch, the whole family is– he’s a surly-looking skater-dude type with wild stories of snowboarding off the roof of his parents’ garage. His wife was elected The Whitest Woman On The Block when they lived in South Troy, and was given the position of Community Liason To The Police whenever the authorities had to be summoned to deal with the teenaged drug dealers who bedeviled their block. (Far from the only white woman on the block, this woman was given the position because she’d grown up in a relatively-affluent suburb so she could do the I Demand To Speak To A Manager presentation really well– and she learned after the first time the cops demanded she prove she owned her house that you have to dress up in business casual and do your makeup before you call, so she’d do that too. In return, one of her neighbors gave her South Troy Lessons. [she was like, you gotta get out of the car already screaming, girl, that’s how they know you’re serious]) The cops were like, we can’t arrest them unless you know their names, where they work, have video evidence, and have apprehended them yourselves (each of these conditions was added on during successive incidents, y’know?)– and so her surly skater-dude husband, in real life an auto mechanic, BUILT AN IRON MAIDEN CAGE and actually trapped one of the teenagers in the alley where he’d always flee to dump his drugs, and when the cops showed up to find like the entire block clustered around this extremely overbuilt gate contraption (it was eight feet tall and had screws facing inward), every one of the residents chanting “WE GOT HIM, WE GOT HIM” and there’s the kid, there’s his resume, there’s his list of known associates and his entire work history, there’s hours of video footage of him committing crimes all like collated into a manila folder with a cover sheet and a letter and a PowerPoint presentation… they finally were like… fuck, we actually have to arrest these hooligans… after YEARS, and HUNDREDS of incidents of vandalism, dumping drugs in the kids’ play yards, breaking into people’s houses, dealing drugs directly outside the children’s windows, etcetera…
(There was a crew of actual professional gang-related drug dealers operating nearby but she never called the cops on them– they were pros, kept the neighborhood nice, were invested in community support to keep the cops away, and also were united with most of the residents of the block in fucking hating the teenage drug dealers for making the whole profession look bad and dragging down the neighborhood. No, they were nice, she never called the cops on them. Not that she supported their mission or whatever but honestly whose jobs are entirely unproblematic; that wasn’t her business. it’s not like they worked in finance or something, that REALLY hurts people.)
anyway it was a great story.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-27 06:43 pm (UTC)But I am curious about why the cops were so obstructive. Were the teenage drug dealers white, and most of the community people of color? Were the cops shaking down the teenage drug dealers for payoffs? If you know.
I mean, I am not doubting the account that the cops were useless, or maybe worse than useless. I just don't understand the dynamic.
I admit that I am white, and a (very late) Boomer, and grew up in a mostly white town with a police officer as our next door neighbor. I got early training in "the police are your friends," and although I started getting educated about how untrue that often was during my twenties, the process is not complete...