In West Philadelphia, Born and Raised

I recently found myself in the fortunate position of travelling around the United States on a university-assisted grant. Being something of a self-acknowledged leftie cynic I arrived in the USA with a great many preconceptions and prejudices about what this nation, surely the foremost manifestation of the modern capitalist post-industrial society, would amount to. Although I was forced to revise a number of these over the course of my travels, the experience of stumbling into the wrong part of Philadelphia offered glimpses of an aspect of this self-proclaimed “Greatest Democracy upon God’s Earth” that many in Washington – or for that matter, soccer-mom suburbia – would prefer not to be reminded of.

Arriving at the Amtrak Station on 30^th Street I took the subway 4 stops west to be within walking distance of the hostel I had booked for two nights. I asked at the subway station how to get to where I was headed, and at the time didn’t think much of the ticket vendor’s raised eyebrows upon hearing my destination. It wasn’t long before I understood.

Anyone who grew up in the 90s will probably recall seeing Will Smith star in the improbable sit-com The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, in which the young and poor Smith is sent to live with his rich Aunt and Uncle in California. Accordingly, many will have the words of the Fresh Prince theme tune grafted indelibly onto their childhood memories: “In west Philadelphia born and raised, in the playground is where I spent most of my days”. Until I got off the train at 46^th Street west Philadelphia, I’d never understood what was supposed to be conveyed in that line. 

For west Philadelphia is not the good part of the city of brotherly love. It’s not where tourists are supposed to go. In fact I had actually meant to book a hostel in the Penn State University area, but had clearly made a mistake because that is not where I ended up. My first thought when I got off the subway at 46th and Market was simply: f**k, I’m not supposed to be here.

What I’d walked into can, I think, be fairly described as the underbelly of the American Dream, the kind of place that people like me aren’t supposed to visit, and which many would prefer to pretend doesn’t exist. But it does exist, and it’s places like this which, from a cursory glance, have not benefited one ounce from the Bush administration’s policy of cutting taxes for the ultra rich. If there ever was a trickle-down effect the stream dried up long before it reached this part of town. There are of course areas like this in every city in America, and probably the world, but whereas I’d previously trekked head-down through some sketchy areas of New York, I hadn’t yet seen American poverty up close.

Allow me to describe the neighbourhood I walked five blocks through to get to my hostel. The paving stones were broken and uneven, and a pale, yellow-green grass poked through the many cracks, growing in abundance at the edge of the sidewalks. Houses were in a state of disrepair, and rubbish lay un-swept at the side of the street. Most of the cars looked as beat and old as the roads they stood on – except, that is, for the conspicuously new blacked-out SUVs cruising slowly through the neighbourhood blearing out gangster rap. Around the corner from the hostel were nestled, amongst the boarded up shop-fronts, two 99-cent stores both of which displayed worn and dirty signs proclaiming “We gladly accept food stamps”.

It’s worth reflecting on that for a second. This is not the America of the 1930s, or even the 1980s, which a New York Times article I had read a few days before arriving in Philly noted was the last period (until 2008) in which food stamp use was not in decline. And don’t kid yourself into hoping that this sign was new. Food stamps have been a staple in this neighbourhood for a long time, at least if appearances are anything to go by.

As I walked through these streets to my hostel, I had two over-riding thoughts – or more accurately, I had one thought accompanied by an almost over-riding feeling of fear. I was afraid for two reasons; firstly because I had ‘tourist’ - and therefore ‘target’ – written all over me, and secondly because I am white. You see this is a poor inner city neighbourhood, and in American cities that usually – and in this case, certainly – means something else: a non-white neighbourhood. Was this fear an admission of a sub-conscious racism I hadn’t known that I possessed? Perhaps. Was my fear justified in the circumstances? Almost certainly. In any case my fear led to my thought: “get out of here, now”.

But I didn’t, mostly due to the fact the hostel had a no-refunds policy – presumably because otherwise people would take one look at the neighbourhood and go running back to the east city. The only thing that made me feel less scared as I was walking through these streets was the fact that I have heavy tattooing down the bottom of my right leg and happened to be wearing shorts. For the first time in three weeks of polite conversation with white middle class professionals, my choice of body art felt not like a cultural elephant-in-the-room of social awkwardness, but more like valuable camouflage.

As I was walking to the hostel a young black man stopped me and asked me for food. This, by the way, is not uncommon in the United States. Being asked for money is a daily occurrence in the USA – every time you exit a bus, train or subway station someone (usually black) asks you for spare change. However, a half-dozen times within the first two weeks of my travels I was asked directly for food, usually appended with a statement as to how long it had been since the person in question last ate. As I must confess to often doing, I made my excuses and walked guiltily away, whilst hoping that the guy in question wouldn’t take a fancy to the pack I was carrying.

I got to my hostel and rang the bell. A few minutes later the door was answered, and I tried – and probably failed – to sound confident in explaining that I had made a reservation. I was told by a young, well-built black man to wait outside. After five minutes he came back and told me I could come in. For the next 20 minutes I sat nervously on a dirty couch whilst he fiddled with a laptop and watched television, ignoring me completely – all the time praying he would say they had no records of me and were full-up anyway. But eventually he looked up and informed me they had my reservation, before showing me to my room. As it happens, the hostel was relatively clean, well-kept and safe. Most of the people staying there were long-term residents, working or looking for work and needing a cheap place to stay. This calmed me down as I concluded that the hostel was probably a safe refuge from the streets outside.

Yet it is worth putting this neighbourhood into further context. About a year ago I had a somewhat heated email exchange with an old member of my university who currently lives in New York. He had found a piece on an old blog of mine, and we got into an argument about politics, social economics and so forth. Quite a gulf of the political spectrum existed between us, but one thing that has always stuck in my mind was the comment made by my correspondent that Scandinavian social democracy was “the latest example of a failed socialist dream”. Now, I’ve never been to Scandinavia and so I cannot comment on its dreams, failed or otherwise – but I have seen the area around the 46th Street subway stop in west Philadelphia. If American society embodies the highest (though I use that term hesitatingly) manifestation of the Capitalist Dream, then this looked like a prime contender for the status of failure to me.

This was a neighbourhood where a 6ft, 21-year-old athletic male (i.e. me) makes an immediate resolution to be back inside his hostel before it gets dark, and not to leave again until the sun comes up. To record what this neighbourhood looked like I took a few quick pictures one morning after taking a hard glance around and being sure I wasn’t advertising my cherished camera for somebody who wanted it more than me, before stuffing it quickly back into my bag and moving on. Photographs, however, don’t really give a thorough impression. One really has to walk these streets to see how poor they are. Many (liberal) social commentators say that if you are black and poor in America, your life-quality is akin to that of people living in a developing nation. I’ve never been to a developing country, but this neighbourhood was as run-down and decrepit as the worst areas of Eastern Europe I visited last year. More Bulgaria than Pennsylvania.

After spending a night in the hostel I braved the five blocks to the subway to visit the more tourist-friendly areas of Philadelphia. Mostly I visited the historic area where I reached my absolute saturation point with public American history and the relentless repetition of the American national myths. Perhaps this was bound to happen having visited rather too many historic sites relating to the American Revolution, but the contrast between the public face of the American Dream and the neighbourhood I would be returning to added anger and indignation to my feelings of saturation.

Take, for example, the story of the Founding Fathers. According to the museums and visitor centres of Philadelphia the tale goes as follows: The Founding Fathers were stalwart defenders of the liberty of the ordinary man. Inspired by the anti-absolutist writings of Locke and Paine, they over-threw the wicked, arbitrary, unjustified and dictatorial rule of colonial Britain, asserting the rights of all men – who were self-evidently created equal, as recorded in the Declaration of Independence – to found a free democracy and enshrine the principle of individual liberty. Thus was founded the Greatest Democracy in the World. Somewhat embarrassingly, these founding fathers were all slave-owners – but that is overlooked by employing contextual excuses, and pointing to George Washington who “eventually saw the evils of the institution” by providing for the emancipation of his own slaves upon his death.

Another telling of the story, however, might go like this: The Founding Fathers were a group of wealthy, self-interested, slave-owning, white male patriarchs who rebelled against British rule not in the interest of handing freedom and democracy to the ordinary man but out of a desire to avoid paying taxes and to establish a political system in which they could become predominant, exploiting the natural wealth of land stolen from an indigenous population to maximise their own prosperity. After achieving independence they did not institute universal suffrage, did not extend the rights of women, and continued to uphold the institution of slavery. Indeed, prominent individuals like Jefferson are now known to have fathered mixed-race children whom they kept in bondage. The Founding Fathers couched their arguments in the terms of Locke and Paine to attract popular enthusiasm, but in truth desired to establish a system in which the elite property owners of the colonies achieved unrestrained dominance.

Naturally the truth lies somewhere between these two accounts. Yet you’ll hear not a word against the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia. One would be forgiven for believing (as many Americans apparently do) that they were saints upon Earth, the founders of the self-proclaimed greatest democracy in the world.

Of course all nations have their national myths, and in many ways it is no surprise that many Americans are as proud of their nation as they are; in many respects it is something of a global winner, after all. Yet journeying in from 46^th and Market in west Philadelphia the endless repetition of the claims to the greatness of America and its founders – and the implication, intended or not, that the rest of the world is wholly inferior by comparison – became almost too much to bear.

For example, consider the near-incessant rhetoric of the importance of freedom and liberty anyone visiting America will encounter. A particularly sharp example of this can be found at the Liberty Bell Centre in Philadelphia. The Liberty Bell is – according to the dozen displays you must pass before you reach it – a symbol of freedom the world around. Its story I can surmise for you as follows. Cast in England and brought to Philadelphia where it served as the state house bell, it was evacuated during the War of Independence so as ensure the British didn’t capture it. After the British were repulsed it was rung as a symbol of liberty. The famous and distinctive crack is the result of attempts to fix a smaller fault in the bell. One day the bell was ringing for Washington’s birthday and it cracked to the top, silencing it forever. In the 1830s the Abolitionist movement adopted the now-named Liberty Bell as a symbol of freedom in the struggle to end slavery. After the Civil War ended in 1865 the bell was taken on a tour of the USA to help encourage the process of reconciliation. Many world leaders have been photographed with it, including Nelson Mandela. Americans view it as a symbol of freedom.

At the Liberty Bell Centre this information is stretched out to a dozen, highly repetitive displays before you get to the bell, all of which reinforce a constant message: America loves freedom, and all Americans are free. While this is arguably true, it might be worth considering what kind of freedom some Americans enjoy. If you live near 46th and Market your freedoms will involve some of the following: freedom to prostitute yourself to feed yourself and your children, freedom to buy, smoke or sell crack, and with higher likelihood than other parts of America, freedom to get shot.

The displays at the Liberty Bell Centre also do a fairly proficient job of papering-over some basic problems contained within the symbolism of the Liberty Bell. For example, while the Bell may have become a symbol of freedom during the Revolutionary War, the founding fathers who claimed to hold the truth that all men are created equal to be self-evident didn’t themselves see it as self-evident that some men shouldn’t be slaves because of the colour of their skin. It took almost 90 years after the Declaration of Independence before Abraham Lincoln issued the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation – in an act of great personal vision and determination and in the face of much opposition – declaring that black men as well as white were born free and equal. The Liberty Bell Centre deals with this tension by briefly noting that the Founding Fathers were slave-holders constrained by an unfortunate and contextually-excusable moral blindness, before quickly pointing out that the Abolitionist movement in 1835 adopted the Liberty Bell as its symbol. It is not mentioned that in 1835 the Abolitionists were widely viewed as crackpots and dangerous radials, and that it would be another 28 years until slavery was in fact abolished, and arguably not until the 1960s that African Americans would achieve anything like equal political status throughout the United States.

There is however something even more significant in the public rhetoric of freedom, and in the constant re-telling of American popular myths than just the subtle re-working of history so as to present a more palatable, straightforward and sanitised version of the past. Rhetoric about freedom is often disingenuous, particularly in the mouths of politicians and populists - after all, no politician ever tells their electorate that they are against freedom, especially not in the land of the free (and the home of the brave)! Yet in America the word ‘freedom’ seems to have suffered a hollowing-out so as to become little more than a populist platitude. Its endless repetition – by politicians especially, but also in museums, films, television and other sources of popular culture – seems to have bored out any serious reflective content upon what freedom meaningfully amounts to. Americans have no doubts that they are free, but if pressed on exactly what their freedom amounts to, things get much trickier. Like some subtler form of Orwellian Newspeak, all Americans will confirm that they love freedom and are themselves free. But whether the freedom being valorised is the freedom many Americans – the 42million with no healthcare? the un-unionised wage slaves of Walmart? those living on and next to the broken streets of west Philadelphia? – really enjoy is quite another question.

Returning to my hostel for the final night I received an insight into the strange ironies and paradoxes that seem to characterise many aspects of America. Aiming to find a quiet spot to read before going to bed, I walked through the communal living room in which a dozen or so residents were crowded around a TV set. The subject of much amusement and interest was a reality TV-show in which failed contestants from previous reality shows compete to earn a large sum of money by behaving in generally debauched, outrageous and childish ways. The programme, it turned out, was called I Love Money. I glanced out of the window onto the broken streets, abandoned cars and the households feeding their children with food stamps, before turning back to the people transfixed upon the television in the room before me. It is often jokingly remarked by the British that Americans have no sense of irony, and perhaps that’s true. As for outrage, indignation, sadness and disgust, whether ordinary Americans never had such capacities, or rather had and lost them, is an altogether more troubling proposition.