Ghetto Express: How 'Real Bronx Tours' Exploited a NYC Borough for Amusement

If you’re a curious suburbanite or someone who lives a … sequestered life of comfort and privilege, every now and again after turning off the evening news and deep-sighing into your tumbler of single malt scotch, you may wonder how ‘the lessers’ manage to function in the ‘hood'. Or maybe you read Robert Huber's inflammatory piece in Philadelphia Magazine about what it’s like ‘Being White in Philly’, and want the opportunity to go ‘sploring around some foreign urban neighborhood, so you can see what makes the ‘hoodrats’ tick. Well, the opportunity to put on your best safari ensemble from TravelSmith, and get knee-deep in a hardcore hood expedition, has come and gone; because until very recently, a company called Real Bronx Tours, was offering curious (mostly European) spectators tours “through a real New York City GHETTO” as promised via its, now defunct, website. A 2012 archived blurb from RBT read …

"When we think about the Bronx we see images of the 70s and 80s when this borough was notorious for drugs, gangs, crime and murders. Over thirty years later quite a bit has changed including the birth of the hip-hop movement, a new [y]ankee stadium, renovation of the Mott Haven historic district and the re-creation of the infamous South Bronx. Real Bronx Tours will take you on a three hour journey into this diverse and mysterious borough called the Bronx. Sites on this tour will include: Yankee Stadium, Mott Haven Historic District, Bronx Zoo, Bronx Museum, South Bronx, Arthur Avenue (Little Italy), Grand Concourse and a ride through a real New York City "GHETTO"."

According to a recent article in the  NYPost …

NYPost.com

"Three times a week, Real Bronx Tours takes riders — mainly white Europeans and Australians  — on a trip that includes stops at food-pantry lines and a “pickpocket” park.
Last week, on the first stop of the $45 tour, guide Lynn Battaglia, from Pittsburgh, pointed out a housing project. She then mocked the Grand Concourse, modeled after a Parisian boulevard. 

“Do you feel like we’re on the Champs-Elysées?” she teased a couple from Paris.
As she spoke, a line of two dozen poor people — including one man visibly agitated by the onlookers — waited for handouts from the church pantry. 

“I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it,” Battaglia told the tourists. “We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.”
The bus stopped in front of St. Mary’s Park, where she credited Mayor Rudy Giuliani for curbing crime. 

“If it were 1980 and you said to me, ‘Lynn, I want to die.’ My answer would be, ‘You’re in the right neighborhood,’ ” she said.

Turning up the ghetto theatrics for her eager tour group, Battaglia also, incorrectly, attributed the slang term ‘pig’ to the NYC borough: ”The policeman, his name is Patty, and he would walk up and down that street, and if he ran into an alcoholic, he’d beat them mercilessly. So they’d call him ‘Patty the Pig,’” she claimed.

Much like Robert Huber’s self-indulgent missive about Philadelphia’s non-gentrified, predominantly black areas, the tours around the Bronx are a glaring example of ‘othering’, based on class and/or race, without any nuance for the structural reasons why people in the Bronx struggle and the ways they overcome their circumstances, no useful historical blurbs about the neighborhood, or sans any consideration for the surrounding community… but overtly more obnoxious and crude. Understandably, politicians and city leaders were outraged and backlash ensued. Bronx borough president, Reuben Diaz Jr. and City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito penned an open letter to Michael Myers (no joke), the man listed as the creator and owner of the tours, letting him know the depths of their disgust…

"We are sickened by the despicable way in which you portray the great borough to tourists. We strongly urge you to stop profiting off of a tour that misrepresents the Bronx as a haven for poverty and crime, while mocking everything from our landmarks to the less fortunate members of our community who are availing themselves of food assistance programs."

Unable to explain away its ignorance and intrusion on the lives of Bronx residents, the company shut down scheduled tours to the borough, “effective immediately”.

Unfortunately, particularly in this current cult-of-personality, it’s become even more commonplace to shame people who’re poor and from the inner-city, and use them as rhetorical devices to exploit and mock. If there was any inclination to deny how far the privileged will go to condescend to those who fight to stay afloat, these tours offer a clear illustration to the contrary. That Real Bronx Tours used “GHETTO” (in all caps) in its branding, as a pejorative descriptor to stigmatize and discomfit Bronx residents (in their own damn community), should have been a red flag to anyone with any semblance of awareness; to wit, it should have been clear that the reinforcement of racial and class stereotypes, was what was being sold. For clarity;  'poverty tours' isn't a concept that's exclusive to American inner-cities, tours are offered to other struggling neighbors abroad, as well (most notably in South Africa, Brazil, and India).  And while ignoring poverty definitely won't will it away, offering an opportunity for well-to-do people to gaze at it so they leave feeling better about their own lives,  isn't effective either . 

The tourists who forked over their $45 to be able to hover outside the perimeter, like a hulking and unwanted presence, so they could leer, point and laugh at people less fortunate than themselves, are just as complicit in exploiting unwilling participants, as Real Bronx Tours is. But then again, these are the same folks  who live on a steady diet of (mis)information about the lives of 'other', fed to them via skewed media images and entities like Real Bronx Tours.  

Film, "Eyes On The Rainbow: A Documentary Film With Assata Shakur"

The 1997 documentary, The Eyes on the Rainbow is a 47 minute film highlighting the embattled life of black activist Assata Shakur. The film visits Assata in Cuba, where she relays the details of the life she’s come to know as a political refugee, within an Afro-Cuban context. 

Brief background about Assata Shakur: Born Deborah Ann Byron (married name Chesimard), Shakur is a Black-American activist and was an active member of the NYC chapter of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. Assata and other BLA members were being surveilled by COINTELPRO--(which was par for the course for black civil rights groups and activists, including Martin Luther King and the black feminist groups, during the 50’s and 70’s).

During the early 70's, Shakur and two other black male BLA members (Zayd Malik Shakur and Zundiata Acoli) were allegedly involved in a shootout on the Jersey Turnpike after traffic stop gone awry, resulting in the deaths of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster and BLA member, Zayd Malik; Assata and a second state trooper were injured.

During a strongly debated trial, Assata Shakur was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to life in prison. Assata served six years in prison, before escaping in 1979 (with the help of three BLA members posing as visitors). Assata Shakur lived as a fugitive, and eventually made her way to in 1984, where she was granted political asylum by the Cuban government and where she’s been living ever since.

Fast forward 40 years later... last week, to seemingly emphasize the anniversary of the deadly shootout, the United States government listed Assata Shakur as the first woman on the FBI’s Most Wanted terrorist list, and placed a bounty of $2 million on her head (half of the reward put up by the state of New Jersey). 

Decrying the 'terrorist' label, Assata supporters galvanized and launched a campaign, resulting in the Twitter hashtag #HandsOffAssata. Following the FBI’s announcement, noted activist, Angela Davis and Assata’s attorney, Lenox Hinds, publicly condemned the government’s decision to list Assata as a wanted terrorist, calling the move “politically motivated” and an act of terrorism in and of itself. 

'Black Twitter' Takes on #BlackPrivilege

Written for and orig. published on Intersection of Madness and Reality

When racism rears its ugly head on social media, leave it to ‘Black Twitter’ to clap-back and upend rhetoric meant to denigrate black folks, and turn it into a clever and teachable moment steeped in the type of sardonic satire meant to make perpetrators of said racial insensitivity, feel stupid for having ever tried.

Last week, the #BlackPrivilege hash-tag gained momentum on Twitter, reportedly created as a response to the discovery of a (neglected?) tumblr blog and, perhaps, just being plain tired of having to ward off cries of "reverse-racism" whenever black people speak out loud about the lived experiences and daily microaggressions many of us have to navigate . “This Is Black Privilege” ... an anonymous tumblr blog comprised of a jumble of murky, awkwardly written non-facts that seem as if they were culled from the library stacks of Ignoramus University.

According to the answers for a set of Frequently Asked Questions, This is Black Privilege’s purpose is to “educate the uneducated” by way of “a compilation of black people privileges." According to the person behind the blog— a self-described nice, white 22-year-old "fairly well-known blogger", whose experience with dissecting race is purportedly relegated to: having grown up with blacks in Alabama listening to Hip-Hop, having  black boyfriends up until the age of 18, having taken a smattering of classes in the psychology of racism, African and basic  history, and anthropology—, black is “more prevalent than [you] think.” And “there are a lot of examples to back up and clarify this if [you] need it.” S/He also challenges, “If you’d like to refute each and every one of them, you’re welcome to try.”

However, none of the examples of  'black privilege' this person presents seem to be rooted in any actual facts. They seem more in line with the regurgitated donkey doo-doo one hears from Stormfront’s White Nationalist Community, pseudo-social science, or your standard Fox News broadcast. When challenged (repeatedly) to cite his/her sources for a lot of the asinine posts shared on the blog, the admin only offered a vague “sorry, I don’t have time to cite every source” response,  but credited the black women’s lifestyle and gossip site Madame Noire, as a prime example of “black privilege” and as the catalyst for the conception blog … because g-d forbid if black folks have the unmitigated gall to start their own media infrastructures and employ black freelance writers. How terribly… elitist and short-sighted of us to resource hoard, right?

Black privilege is expecting compensation for slavery from all whites, and it’s also ignorance about other types of slavery in the U.S.  

(…)Slavery of blacks was ended a long while before white child slavery was ended. The children would be worked 16 hours a day, without food, and would be beaten/mutilated. Also, slaves of color were more valued than poor white men.

   --Yes, because indentured servitude and serfdom is definitely the same as forced migration from the only home you know, chained, and packed at the bottom of a ship for grueling, seemingly endless, days like sardines; headed towards an unfamiliar destination only to be auctioned off, separated from your children, and sold into chattel slavery to work under brutal conditions for zero pay… and then raped, cuckolded, and murdered because you’re black and only 3/5ths of a human being. While child labor and the military use of children is a relevant human rights violation, this strikes me as a sloppy attempt to try to juxtapose the two issues against each other. So, bye.

(…) Slaves of color viewed themselves as better than poor whites because their masters did, too. Poor whites would have to take back entrances into houses while slaves didn't. Dust Bowl forced penniless white Oklahoma immigrants west.

--Right, because white Americans were the only people who suffered during the Great Depression and the

I've been at the receiving end of
ALL of this

Dust Bowl. And nothing is more reviled than an uppity Negro who wants to be regarded as a whole being and an equal, who just wants to be able to do simple mundane things like, oh, I don’t know… work for a paycheck to be able to eat, read, or sit at a counter in some diner and enjoy a milkshake with impunity. I guess elitist poor black folk and uppity slaves also explains the rigid anti-black laws enacted, during the Jim Crow racial caste system of the American south, and why poor whites were lynching black people left and right for being so damn full of themselves. I'm guessing the genius behind 'This Is Black Privilege' didn't learn any of this stuff during his/her African history, anthropology, or psychology classes. Or maybe those moments soaking in all that black privilege while hanging tough in Alabama, kicking it with his/her black boyfriend(s) while listening to rap, slipped his/her mind. 

Needless to say, not sure if ‘This Is Black Privilege’ was nothing more than trolling as a vehicle to complain about black people supposedly whining, by … well… whining about perceived threats to white imperialism; but ‘Black Twitter’ unleashed with a series of some of the cleverest, oh-so-real comebacks and dissections of race politics, in a purgative moment that resonated on a global scale. 

Documentary, "Reflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights"

This past Wednesday, I had the pleasure of attending a screening of the feature-length documentary Reflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights, directed by up-and-coming filmmaker Nev Nnaji at Smith College. Via interviews and compelling archival footage, the film chronicles the marginalization of black women within the Black Nationalist and (predominantly white middle-class) feminist movements during the 60s, 70s, and present-day. 

Where both movements failed (and fail) to acknowledge the intersection or gender oppression and race, the documentary explores the ways in which black women galvanized to raise awareness about and seek solutions for those issues that often left [us] out of the narrative-- reproductive rights, dependable daycare for working mothers, government resources, employment and fair wages. That mobilization essentially inspired other women of color to project their voices about the same issues, which were also framed around immigration policies.  

Reflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights features useful commentary from black feminist scholars who were former activists and members of groups like the National Black Feminist Organization and most notably, controversial Womanist and novelist Kola Boof who, according to Nev Nnaji (who I spoke with after the screening), inspired the documentary and Nnaji’s own awareness about the various aspects of the black feminist experience, which isn’t always rooted in the Black Nationalist movement or shaped by the language of academe.

After a couple of minor setbacks, (during the post-screening discussion, Nev was vocal about the exorbitant costs quoted to her, to enable her access to old film footage that would've been pertinent to her film— resources that seem readily available to white male filmmakers, yet difficult to obtain by those black filmmakers/historians trying to recount important aspects of [our] history—, Nnaji was, fortunately, able to get the resources necessary to complete her film and has been screening it at colleges and universities, to growing acclaim and interest. And hopefully it'll gain enough momentum, that it'll start making the founds at film festivals. 

I highly recommend Reflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights, if you are able to catch a screening near you.  As many young black women explore feminist works, it’s definitely a valuable and important narrative that’s been added to the discourse.

For a schedule of screenings and other information, visit Nev Nnaji’s website and Facebook page.