Brethren, rather than hang this on a text from scripture, I choose to hang this on the words to an old song, not as gospel, more as ambience –

“…And love, love is just a passing word
It’s the thought that you had in a taxi cab that got left on the curb
When he dropped you off and he stated firm
Oh, oh, oh
You’re a native New Yorker
You should know the score by now You’re a native New Yorker…” — Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell

This song was the tune du jour when Studio 54 was the club du jour. There are surely hipster clubs. There are plenty of velvet ropes left in the city, plenty of back rooms filled with ottomans lined up against banquettes in zebra print, with track lighting and artistically cut mirrors. However, before the clubbing hour – never a minute before 11 pm ever, if you’re really hip, and honestly, it would be much hipper to cruise by about 1 am – where are the hipsters hopping?

I found them at #1 Beard Street, in Brooklyn, all of them, around 4 pm. I passed leather-clad Japanese couples arm in arm, a girl with a saffron Obama T-shirt on with Sarah Palin glasses, a pony tail tortoise-shell-clipped to one side of her head, true religion jeans, and a macramé hip-hugging belt. I locked shopping cart wheels with a German runway model with waist-length red hair with her Catherine-Deneuve look-alike mother. I breezed past young men, with that over-gelled hair spiked up, that crazed look in their eyes from too much World of War Craft suddenly unplugged, eating cinnamon buns, making the Jonas Brothers look old and jaded. I brushed against a Rastafarian man with dreds bound up in hemp, I think, wearing a Movado watch, carrying a futon.

True, there was no velvet rope, no sushi bar with aquarium walls, no giant moon with a cocaine spoon hanging from the ceiling – yes, I DID see the original 54 when it was open and I was too young to have legally entered – but there were ottomans in neon colors, track lights galore, artistically cut mirrors enough to quench the thirst of the vainest among us, and one could buy hanging moon mobiles, spoons, but not the two combined. Besides, exclusivity is no longer hip – it’s obscurity, like a Red Hook warehouse is remotely located, that is the bar to the uninitiated.

I was in Ikea, and not the suburban one. Everything is pretty much the same as the Ikea in New Jersey or Long Island, only people wore more black, more Ugg, people were greener, were more blasé. It was the bootylicious Ikea, the street Ikea, the I-just-bought-a-loft-in-Bed-Stuy-and-am-painting-it-chartreuse Ikea. Even in Europe, Ikea is generally planted in the suburbs, but this one was planted in the just-out-of-reach-of-the-uninitiated gentrifying Red Hook, and everyone knows that the new Soho is now in Brooklyn – the debate is only about exactly where.

I bought some lamps for my desk and my bedroom, a set of casters to attach to the bottom of a cabinet, a curtain rod, and a few other accessories from renewable resources. Green, after all, is the new black. Black is still the new black, of course, but green – green is the new black, and mocha is the new green. Clear – in case you haven’t heard – is the new mocha. What the new clear is, I don’t know.

While I was trolling around with my yellow bag between products with names like Glimma and Trikka, they were piping in a sound track that was cooler than most of the lounges I frequented in recent years, much of it from my misspent youth, others of it sounding like the goth side of the Fuse network or MTV2. I paused to pick up a pink table lamp using low-wattage, energy-efficient bulbs only, and I heard a song that used to close out my nights at Le Privilege, the VIP lounge of the Palace night club where I used to dance mid-eighties, drinking flaming drinks from cups that looked, well, a lot like this lamp in my hand, I thought, and air kissing all kinds of girl models (French kissing a boy model or two). Now my club days have been turned into a retail experience – I am apparently one of the targets of this market, as I did buy some knick-knacks that I might have avoided at Costco with no sound track at all and no hip clientele of which to speak. They are doing pretty well, even as the stock market yo-yos.

Seeking more aficionados of this new hipster, urban American Ikea market, I have some suggested product names and designs for the folks at Ikea –

• Bufda – a home gym that folds into the wall, making an inclining bookshelf unit.
• Mutha – a vibrating baby chair with black and red skull-and-crossbones in a mobile above it.
• Stuppa – An ice pack with a straw – fill it with the hair of the dog for the morning after.
• Sherpa – an environmentally sound, ergonomically designed GPS for pedestrians.
• Friki – a black twin Murphy bed with hand-cuff-suitable hooks.
• Prozaka – black-on-black double Venetian blinds.
• Ganja – a highly flammable organic furniture set, woven from fair trade grasses that are more than just decorative at a party.
• Chikka – a hot pink bed on a large lazy Susan in the shape of a pair of lips.
• Sukka-fri – a narrow quadraphonic speaker system with extra base and with spinning rims on the woofers.
• Hipsta – a combination lava lamp/blackberry/loofah sponge/chaise lounge made out of recycled tires and mulch.

In any case, it was nice to see my co-Brooklynites out en masse with Manhattanites willing to go through the Battery Tunnel to buy that which must be had this season among us. It is nice that exclusivity is out, democracy is in, and the New New York is the Old New York over the East River. Red Hook, in case you haven’t heard, is the new little black dress.

Brethren, I’m back on this blog, after a pause in August.  I take my anger from observable hypocrisy and my scripture from Paul:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” — Galatians 3:28

Here is what I have recently observed.  As I have said here before, I am recently divorced, and I have been looking for a righteous, Christian man whom I might eventually date.  I have not accepted dates or even had conversations wth non-believers.

Twice, it has happened that a caucasian Christian man has engaged me in conversation. Over the coure of time, while he is doing that peacock dance that seems to be the better part of most men’s courtship ritual, puffing himself up to prove to me he is better than other men, he mentions people of color.  He uses — horror of horror — the “N” word, not in a hip-hop twenty-first century way (which would be bad enough, coming from a crunchy white man), but in a nineteenth century Jim Crow way.

The two times that this has happened, I have gasped, called the man on his bad attitude, told him to lose my number if that is his attitude toward other people of any race, and then he denies he meant anything by it, and he tells me, “I have plenty of black friends.”

Hmmm…

Twice, too, these men have then told me utterly improbable stories about brave, young, wonderful, much-admired, bff-type best male friends who were black.  One told me he dated a woman of  color who was a wonderful woman whom he cared about — this I doubt even more.

No one white ever uses the N word and has “black friends.”  There may be people of color who have to tolerate these lying hypocrites, but there are surely no confidences, no shared important memories, no affection whatsoever.  I pity those who have encountered these people and received less than their fair share of compassion and respect.

I have attended mixed-race churches ever  since I was baptized in the Holy Spirit, more often than not where I was, as a white woman, in the minority.  I have volunteered for church projects, and I have borne my soul  to women and men of  color, and those brothers and sisters have enriched my life by allowing me to really get to know them.

Even with all that, I would say that I only have made a few lasting frienships with people of color, not for a lack of love and mutual respect, but because racism is alive and well in America today, and African-Americans are right to exhibit some level of distrust, even within the church, with white folks, who are apprently, even as we — in Jesus’ name, elect Barack Obama president — still not conquering their absurd and idiotic ideas about  people of other races.

The good news — We are quite probably electing a black president, so this view is by no means universal, and most of the people  who don’t want to vote for him have other objections to him than that of his race.

Also good news — the men who heard me gasp and spew invectives knew that their views were absurd and idiotic, and they were embarassed by them when they were called on what they had said, and so they lied to cover their racist tracks.  Even if their views did not change — I suspect in both cases, they just wanted to get into my white panties, not embrace the black population (and for the record, my panties remained unconquered)  — however, at some level, they understood that their views were entirely unjustifiable by any intelligent argument.

The bad news, very, very bad news — before those words slipped out of their mouths, they assumed, surely from recent experience, that they were generally acceptable to the majority of white, Christian women whom they might want to date. This shocks me more than I can say.  I am horrified that there is at the very least a complacency among any Christians about racism, who seem to think that it is nothing that needs to be overcome.

I especially don’t understand how any Christians are left without understanding that Jesus is coming soon for an unblemished church, that racism is one of America’s greater blemishes, that it was designed and perpetuated by a group of social darwinians who understood that if they could get immigrant workers to hate African-American workers and vice-versa, they could dominate both groups because they were divided.  An unracist America would conquer poverty and crime, would ensure the welfare of every single child born in the USA, would demand a living wage for all workers, would demand excellent education for all students, wherever they lived, and would, in short, conquer the elite’s stranglehold over the many.  If this sounds communist to any of you, I exhort you to read your New  Testament carefully — it is in fact the way God sees the role of the church.  We are to take care of, as Jesus told us in the  sheeps and goats parable, “the least of these,” in other words, the most vulnerable people in our society, hence the poor, hence the excluded, hence the illegal immigrant, hence the crack baby, hence whoever has been given the short end of the stick, and that often  includes people whose skin color is different than our  own.

We should all gasp when we hear the N word from white Christian friends, especially those whose friendship is not imaginary.  We should storm out.  What fear do we have of calling our bretheren on this?  It is as great a sin as any, and it speaks so very little of the intelligence of the conversation that would bear it.

Any man who thinks he recommends himself by announcing that he is better than another ethnic group ought to have his name written on the walls of the stalls of  ladies’ rooms in churches with this warning –
“Has imaginary friends.  Has imaginary appeal.  Is a great, white hope in his own mind.”

I pray, in the name of Jesus, a man with wooly hair and Middle-Eastern skin darker than my onw, who died on the cross and rose from the dead for me, that we will at long last conquer this horrible affliction within the church.  In His name, I bind the spirit of ignorance and pride from our body.  I loose  the spirit of unity and understanding.  Let the church say AMEN.