In his article “In Queens: A Melting Pot, and a Closed Book,” Adam Ellick completely fails in his portrayal of Jackson Heights, most likely because he was similarly unsuccessful at immersing himself in the neighborhood to begin with. The problem could have been that he wasn’t fluent in the many languages of the many cultures inhabiting the area or that the area he moved into marked a particularly divided one. Or, it could have been that in the entire year and a half Ellick lived in Jackson Heights, he never unpacked his “Invisible Knapsack”. Now, one of those can really bog a person down, especially a white male person!
In 1988, a feminist and anti-racist activist named Peggy McIntosh published an essay called, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” in which she discusses the various benefits people with light skin are afforded as well as the ways in which they are “carefully taught not to recognize white privilege.” Ellick provides a perfect example of this ingrained ignorance in describing his screening process by the co-op board of the building in which he hoped to gain residency. He openly admits to “purposefully omitting mention of [his] two years in the word’s largest Islamic country,” but fails to see, or at least acknowledge, that his ability to do so is a direct product of his skin color. In other words, he can clearly see that being candid about his travels in the Middle East may jeopardize his acceptance into the building and therefore adjusts his answers accordingly, but it’s not obvious from his writing that he recognizes a crucial element in his being able to get away with his white lie: his white skin.
Ellick reveals more white male entitlement throughout his article in an array of crude language. In the very first paragraph Ellick “[vows] to penetrate the black plastic façade that effectively shielded the place from voyeurs like [him],” which he later on suspects to be a brothel. By labeling himself a “voyeur” whose aim is to “penetrate,” Ellick not only sexualizes his experience, but also deems himself as the dominant figure within it. This crude chauvinistic attitude remains prevalent throughout Ellick’s article, especially when he describes his female neighbors: “One gorgeous young woman smiled flirtatiously, but before I could return the gesture, her father whisked her away.” He even ends his portrait of Jackson Heights by giving a patronizing description of an 80-something Korean woman he met at a bar: “When she grabbed my friend and jerked him into a slow dance, [she] seemed to have risen from the dead…I concentrated less on dancing than trying to support her drunken body.”
So, while it may not be fair to condemn a person whose society unwarrantedly affords them more privilege than others no less deserving, in the words of Peggy McIntosh, it may be urged that they use their “arbitrarily-awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.”
–Sophia Curran
Works Cited
McIntosh, Peggy. White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies. Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, 1988. PDF. 14 Feb. 2013.
