Where You From?
I saw something very disturbing outside my school not long ago. One of our middle school students, a tall African-American boy, was at a deli about a block from the school, playing a video game. It was the aim-gun-kill-person type, where you have the plastic gun with which you pop anyone who appears on the screen.
This boy was just mumbling over and over, “Nigga, where you from?” and then shooting. When I asked one of the other teachers about this later, he explained to me that this is a standard opening for gangs before they attack. “Where you from?” means what neighborhood, and if you are not in your neighborhood, you’re about to get jumped.
Setting that unhappy thought aside for a moment, I return to the National Geographic website I was haunting earlier, chuckling about their “Cultural Tips for visiting L.A.” Sure enough, there’s the genteel version of the same geographically-based tribalism:
Where do you live?: The thinly disguised screener for the start of every new relationship.
And, lo, National Geographic is right on this one. It’s the first thing people say, not “what do you do,” but where you from? The dating game operates on the same basic principle as the gang-turf wars. Are you a member of my posh little gang of Weho café-frequenters? Nigga, what’s your gym?
Well, perhaps I’m being too cynical. At the gang level, it’s all about loyalty, safety in numbers, and survival of the streets. At the more one-on-one relationship level, it’s all about how far you have to drive to get laid. Well, with traffic here, that’s a survival-of-the-streets issue in some ways…
But still, it’s strange to contemplate: love or hate, life-making decisions still boil down to location and proximity. Alas, the more things change, the more they remain the same.
