who’s a real new yorker?

The New York Knicks are in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999. On a historic 13 game streak since the playoffs, the Knicks are moving with a hunger for the NBA Championship title that has got the whole country watching. This rise from the ashes has got many lifelong Knicks fans stating that this moment is for the real New Yorkers. But, what makes someone a real New Yorker?

New York is a city of global immigrants and Black Americans whose families migrated from southern states. New York City has always attracted people who’ve felt like outliers in their racist, homophobic, and small thinking small towns. And people who've sought out better jobs and educational opportunities for their families. So why has there been so much recent uproar around who is actually a New Yorker when this city has always been known for being a melting pot?

I feel like this conversation has really picked up online post the pandemic. New York’s soul has changed a lot since the COVID-19 pandemic shut the world down, and many of us lifelong New Yorkers who knew New York before the pandemic can say that New York just does not feel the same. However, this conversation has primarily surrounded transplants and gentrifiers as the cause for the hollowness that we now feel spreading across the five boroughs. 

I am a native New Yorker, that term meaning someone who was born and raised in New York City. I have lived in Bushwick my entire life, and as many of you may know, Bushwick is transplant central. Now, what’s a transplant? A transplant is colloquially understood as someone who moved to New York City from another state as an adult. I cannot tell you when the mass transplant migration began in Bushwick, but I can say that this has been happening slowly over at least the last ten years. In the last few years though, Bushwick has visibly changed. Our classic row home houses have been demolished and replaced with modern, grey, and cold apartment complexes that tower over our smaller three-story residential homes. The Bushwick that I know and love, characterized by a blend of Dominican, Puerto Rican, and African-American cultures has been washed away by the influx of ‘trendy’ (and smelly) mostly white L train riders. 

The transplants in Bushwick used to, for what I can now appreciate given the current state of the neighborhood, assimilate into the environment. But now, it seems like we’re attracting the regular Patagonia wearing normal everyday white Americans, whom I would call gentrifiers. A gentrifier, as defined by the Center for New York City Affairs, is someone that is more affluent who comes into a lower-income neighborhood and triggers rising property values and the replacement of local, independent businesses with high-end chain stores, cafes, and boutiques. Gentrification is what displaces the Black and brown low-income families that migrated here three or four or even more generations ago, causing ‘white flight' and setting up shop in the areas nobody wanted anymore. And now that we’ve made it cool, it seems like they want their city back. Across Brooklyn, it feels like we are being colonized.

The seemingly sudden influx of all of these white and affluent faces, because gentrification is not solely about race and neither is colonization, has increased tensions behind the question “Are you a real New Yorker?”. Now, I more than ready to participate in the real New Yorker olympics. I have my green student metrocard, my regents exam results, my birth certificate, and my deep knowledge of NYC slang, rappers, inside jokes etc ready to serve up to the officials to get my Real New Yorker ID. However, what I thought was us all joking online has turned into real concerning passion behind discerning whether someone can actually say they’re from New York. 

I was watching a Tik Tok by the creator @theotherotherdarius, who made a video on the “Who’s a real New Yorker?” conversation. I highly encourage you to watch it because I will be referencing the points Darius made in his video.

In the video, Darius asks us to swap out the word New Yorker for the word American in the question. When you do that, the question becomes “Who’s a real American?”. Through this, Darius highlights the budding xenophobia and nationalism that pops up in our rhetoric deciding who is actually from New York. He asks us to think about the context this question will exist in in 15 years when transplants eventually start having kids. Will those kids be native New Yorkers? And, by that time will their parents be native New Yorkers? He asks us if we can see how this conversation aligns with the one about anchor babies and natural citizens. And, how uncomfortably that sits when thinking about the many first-generation immigrant families that came here only a few generations ago. Again, the video is required viewing for this article because I’m not gonna do his points justice. 

He then gives the example of a conversation between a native New Yorker and someone who was not born in New York, but has been here 15-20 years. He pays taxes, he votes, he’s a citizen, is he not a New Yorker? And the native New Yorker told him “No, and if you don’t like it then you can leave.” And Darius illuminates that we have heard this sentiment before from Republicans. Now, I think that for the most part, the convo about who's a New Yorker and who’s not, has mostly been in jest. But word to Kamala, we did not fall out of a coconut tree and we exist in the context of all that comes before us and all that will come after us. The tension behind this question is being powered by the rise of gentrification and displacement of Black, brown, low-income, and other families who have lived here for the past three or four generations and can no longer afford it. We are just tryna hold on to what we can claim, which is being “a real New Yorker". But, Darius makes a great point that the convo gets weird in the “who’s a real American” context. 

Many people in the comment section disagree with Darius and don’t see the correlation in his points. With one person saying it isn’t “apples to apples” because asking who’s American comes with questioning someone’s rights, while asking who’s from New York doesn’t. But again, online discourse does not exist in a vacuum and there is no such thing as a coincidence when it comes to American politics. The point is that the way we converse colloquially is becoming rooted in nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric, which aligns with and reinforces the greater fascist political stage that the US is currently operating on. That affects our rights locally and nationally. That is apples to apples. New York City is THE American city. With the political climate we’re in, I find it funny that we’re going back and forth about what it means to really be from somewhere, when the federal government is snatching up people left and right for this very reason. Over this very question. That ain’t weird to y’all? Not sorry to be that one woke friend. This conversation over who is a real New Yorker is a slippery slope into MAGA territory if we don’t, like Darius stated, choose our words carefully and get clear on what we’re really trying to say. 

At the end of the day people just want their cultures to be preserved and autonomy over if they live or die in the city that raised them. Transplants are not the people we need to be beefing with, yes they are annoying, but they are here. Gentrifiers are insidious, but they alone as individuals do not account for the rising costs of living and the historic colonization of marginalized groups across this nation and globally. Developers are the people coming in, re-zoning neighborhoods and stealing deeds from Black Americans in Bed-Stuy with the NYPD right there to support them. Simultaneously, NYCHA needs 80 billion dollars to fix all of the issues with all of the apartments in its ownership. These issues include mold, lead paint, rat infestation, broken lobby doors, pissy elevators, no hot water, I could go on. NYCHA is a federally funded program and this administration and others before it are clear that they do not care to support public housing. No matter what city or town you live in, groceries cost an arm and a leg. Speaking of arms and legs, do we wanna talk about healthcare? Also, y’all see the way this city floods? We need climate infrastructure. And yet, we find ourselves spewing the very rhetoric of the country that is inducing our demise and that orchestrated the demise of our ancestors. 

Yeah it may feel good to tell a white person to go back to where they came from. But it never seems to stop at just white people. And like Audre Lorde said, the master's tools will not free us from the master’s house. Spewing this nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric will get thrown right back in our faces. ICE is detaining American citizens for defending immigrants right now at Delaney Hall in New Jersey, right outside of New York City. What we say to each other everyday is what we normalize. It may not seem that deep, but it is. And I being saying this to the girls too with the femininity debates. Watch what you say, deadass. 

I deeply appreciate Darius calling all of us in because this conversation is getting weird and we’re getting distracted. What we want is to stop being pushed out. We want to stop people from colonizing the homes our families built and sustained. We want to be able to afford the city that shaped us. We want to be able to raise our own families here, or to decide that we want to leave, and raise them elsewhere with the option to come back home if we so choose. We want to look around and see people who look like us. We want to live without working 24/7 just to enjoy two days off. We want diversity and difference without erasure. 

The Knicks making it this far in the NBA Finals is a time for us all to remember why we love New York. Native New Yorkers are holding on for dear life to a New York we once knew. We should keep fighting for a New York we can afford and a New York that preserves our historic cultures. But we gotta fight the right people. We gotta show up in mass to rental ripoff hearings, or deed theft protests, or community board meetings in mass the same way we show up to jump transplants online. The community board is where zoning measures get passed and it eventually goes off to city council. When utilized correctly, these zoning measures can preserve the way our neighborhoods look, the kinds of development that comes in, and ensure that locals get a say in what happens in our neighborhoods. We have power and I think rather than screaming online at transplants who no longer feel shame and are now starting to tune us out, that we actually make a sustained effort to learn about what’s happening civically so that we can manipulate all aspects of this wicked system to our advantage until we are able to make a new one. 

I hate gentrification, it was the second thing I wrote about when I started this blog. I know how scary it is to feel like your home is slipping through your fingers. I have watched mine change and I don’t think it’s coming back. But nothing in this world lasts forever. And we do not own anything on this land. Instead of championing that our neighborhoods have the right to evolve while still remaining affordable, we’ve spent our time policing one another and clinging to colonial understandings of identity, borders, and origin. I wanna end this by saying that this is not in defense of transplants, but rather asking us to watch our language, because at the end of the day we may hurt ourselves. The fun of being from New York is saying “I’m really from New York.” That prideful jest and energy is what makes us who we are. What happens in New York City sets the tone for the nation. We are too powerful of a group to waste our energy arguing, which we do so well, with the wrong people. Or to be anything less than clear and blunt about what we want, which we also do well. New York City is changing, and that change is largely being shaped by developers and the government, as it changes, we need to make sure we are leading the decision-making. 

And with that, please make sure you are registered to vote in the primaries this June, thangya. With all that’s happened with the Voting Rights Act and voting rights being gutted in the South, we need to vote. Again, what we do in NYC sets the standard for the nation. We have too much power to be the breeding ground for their nonsense. Godbless. 

Go Knicks. 

P.S You know I gotta answer the question. At the end of the day, no matter the context, if you real you don't gotta prove it. Nor do you gotta shout it from the rooftops. Real is real. And I mean that in regards to everything. Kinda related, but part of being Black, similar to being from New York, is seemingly always having to prove how Black you are. I only compare the two because they're both this entity that everyone wants to lay claim to, that no one can really own or singularly define, yet everyone tries to though caricatures of what they think being both things looks like. That whole "Black Card Revoked" game is a perfect example of that. And I'm so over trying to prove that I'm enough of both. Being really anything is understanding that you don't have to prove shit to anybody. And I think the essence of being a NYer lies in being authentic and aiming to please no one. So, a real NYer would laugh at the jokes and keep it pushing. Who am I proving myself to??? To you? Lol.