WTF, New York?

Apparently it’s fucking noose-mania in my hometown. Shameful. Gothamist reports:

The person who hung a noose on the doorknob of a professor at Columbia’s Teachers College the other week seems to have been a catalyst for NY metro idiots, who have been been copy-cating or otherwise emulating public displays of hateful symbols. Most recently, Parks Dept. employees were appalled to find 10″ nooses wrapped around the necks of their clothes when they opened their work lockers in Queens Saturday morning.
Kenny Clark and Michelle Rouse-Williams are both supervisors at the Queens facility; Clark is party to a class-action lawsuit against the Parks and Recreation Dept. that claims minorities are passed over for promotion. When Rouse-Williams opened her locker and found the noose, her reaction was natural. “This has got to be a f—— joke.”

Indeed. You know, I think white New Yorkers like to think of the city as immune to racism. (After all, we’re all cosmopolitan and shit. Right?) For example, I never heard anyone use a racial slur when I was growing up–not until I moved down south for college. I was completely clueless that folks my age were racist; I think I thought of it as something from an older generation. But I went to diverse schools where that shit wouldn’t fly. And benefiting from white privilege, of course, it’s not like I had to experience racism or even think about it until it was explicitly in my face. Even knowing all that, it’s still difficult for me to recognize that my city is just as capable of spewing hate as any other.
And now, in Connecticut, some folks are trying to defend the use of nooses in Halloween decorations. Sigh.
(By the way, Cara has a good post, “On nooses and white reactions,” that you should check out.)