Bold, Different, and New
by David Williams
As a child in the early 2000s, I cherished my small neighborhood of Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. The home of Biggie Smalls, it's where I would hear hip-hop and dancehall blasting on every corner while I grabbed my favorite Chinese takeout – the one from the restaurant with a ripped awning and a sign that read, "Free Iced Tea on Orders over $10!” In those years, it was a neighborhood filled with Black people from all walks of life who looked out for one another. It had a personality consisting of unique characters as reliable as “the bootleg guy” who regularly cycled by selling something you did not even know you needed. In my mind, Clinton Hill was the center of the universe.
At five years old, when I enrolled in Friends Seminary in Manhattan, that feeling of home was tested. It was a different world across the river with its own values, fashions, and flavors that I felt I had to adopt to belong. Where I had been taught to value community and diverse thought, my new friends were singularly obsessed with money and all its trappings. My childhood dream of being a taxi driver to engage with people around the world was ridiculed by my white classmates who, even at a young age, aspired to be affluent businesspeople like their parents.
Even our conceptions of the city were different. One afternoon, my teachers instructed us to build structures of New York City, and I held back as my small model of Coney Island was towered over by the sea of skyscrapers. Overcome by insecurity, I soon traded in my sweatpants and hoodies for name-brand skinny jeans (despite my not-so-skinny legs), and swapped my beloved Chinese food for sushi. I felt these cosmetic changes would not change who I was because I went home to a community rooted in the tenets of my identity: meaningful interactions, reggae music, and an appreciation of my Blackness.
But before I could wrap my mind around my need to code-switch at school, Brooklyn’s rapid metamorphosis began, and my center of gravity shifted once more. The bodegas where I got my deli sandwiches became specialty stores,; Frosted Flakes were replaced by artisanal cornflakes, and the “Free School Lunch” signs that used to herald summer were replaced by different kinds of “free food”: gluten-free, sugar-free, and dairy-free. As gentrification meant that my Black neighbors became white ones, the faces on Fulton Street and at Friends now mirrored one another. I started to feel like I was living through some sort of apocalypse and asked myself, “Which version of David should I be with my environment collapsing?"
By the time it came to apply to high schools, this feeling of being stuck between two worlds grew even more challenging, and I became desperate to be around Black people in an attempt to hold on to the Brooklyn of my childhood. When the decision to leave Friends was nearly finalized, a school administrator called my mom to share how much they valued me as an individual and wanted me to stay. I was confused: I'd spent the early portion of my life so hyper-focused on blending in that it had not crossed my mind that my difference could be so appreciated.
That call was an affirmation that my sense of belonging was anchored to feeling at home in my personality and not to any desperate attempt to be someone else. Feeling liberated, I entered high school more confident in the uniqueness of my experiences and opinions. I no longer needed to reduce myself to any one element of my identity. I became a mentor for Black elementary students, whose experiences remind me of my own. I now embrace that, just like New York City, I can be many things all at once, with past, present, and future colliding to make something bold, different, and new.