Love Out Of The Box - A Ghetto Romance, Or Stick To Your Own Kind

In Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, the Broadway 50s musical based on Romeo and Juliet, a boy and girl from two opposing gangs, one white and the other Puerto Rican, fall in love. Anita, a friend of Maria, warns her against getting involved with someone from a different community.  She sings:

A boy like that
Who'd kill your brother
Forget that boy
And find another
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind
A boy like that
Will give you sorrow
You'll meet another boy tomorrow
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind

“Stick to your own kind” is her refrain. If you don’t, you’re asking for trouble.  Of course Maria does not listen, bad turns to worse, and the final scene is a melodramatic replay of the end of the star-crossed lovers.

In short, the story is about diversity.

The remake of Bernstein’s original, faithful to theme, music, and lyrics attempted to make the story one of today – all traces of racial and ethnic stereotypes removed and the upbeat, happy ending emphasized.  Although we may cling to outdated notions of cultural and racial separatism, we will eventually realize our common humanity and such divisions will disappear.

However, this will never happen – history since the first human settlements records the persistent identity of tribes, clans, religious sects, communities, states, and nations. Although recent DNA analysis has shown that homo sapiens did interbreed with Neanderthals, it probably was no more common than clowns marrying circus freaks. In fact historians of pre-history conclude that the two ‘racial’ groups tried to kill each other off, and thankfully the right side won.

Why is this lesson so hard to accept? Don’t birds of a feather flock together?

Don’t they peck at the intruder until he leaves?

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No society – not even Margaret Mead’s Trobriand Islanders whose kinship and community patterns she distorted to suit her theories – exists without social, ethnic, economic, or racial divisions.  Whether India with its persistent caste system; our division by wealth, income, and race; or Iraq’s splintering divisions by Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd, we all do it.

Vicki had seen and loved West Side Story many times, both versions.  She was charmed by the lyrical beauty of the first, entranced by the simple Romeo and Juliet story, and nodded in understanding at the remake.  Finally Hollywood put its money where its mouth was and cast real ethnic characters to play ethnic roles. Yes, white people could play Puerto Ricans, but casting originals gave the movie authenticity and made it more consistent with the multicultural times of the day. 

In all her romantic fantasy she overlooked the central, inescapable lesson of the musical reprise - stick to your own kind.  Although Bernstein intended it to be an expression of the damaging, insular, and hopelessly aggressive tendency for sameness, its powerful method of watch out what you wish for is clear. 

A recent production of The Merchant of Venice was produced by the Washington (DC) Shakespeare Company, and the producers turned it into a farce.  Each of the communities of the play - Italian, Jewish, and WASP - were all caricatures.  The Venetians were tough Jersey goombas, the Jews were pure Seventh Avenue, Diamond District, shylock moneylenders, and WASPs talked with Locust Valley lockjaw and pranced around like spoiled debutantes. 

The play, taken over by 'diversity' missed the whole point.  The audience cheered, but for what?  The old Jew got his due from the WASP-in-disguise lawyer? Ethnic stereotypes in this case were not unreal, but reality.  The Joisey dumbing down of the guineas was also on target.  That's what Italian Americans are like after all, still spaghetti and meatball oafs. 

In any case Vicki was young enough and single enough to search for love 'out of the box' as she called it. An affair with an African American would lay to rest any doubts about her progressive credentials, would dispel cruel stereotypes of the well-hung machismo of the black male, and would finally break the confining mold which had held her captive since her days in high society. 

She met Pharoah Jones at a conference on racial injustice.  For too long the black man had suffered at the hands of white supremacists, locked in poverty and dysfunction, and despite the Civil Rights Act, affirmative action, and billions of dollars of investment in the inner city, he remained much as he was 100 years ago. 

Perhaps it might have been wiser for Vicki to move up the racial ladder - starting with the likes of Barack Obama, a mellow whitish black man close to standard - but she opted for a ghetto pimp who had been invited to the conference because of his street savvy, his ghetto culture, and his particularly black entrepreneurial (drug running) spirit. 

Now, Pharoah did not come to the conference all tricked out in bling, zoot suit, and patent leather.  He knew his audience - liberal white women - and so he dressed the part. As a con man Pharoah knew how to enjoin, engage, trick, and profit from the gullible, the credulous, and, the idealist. 

He was her mark, her john, her foray out of the box; and while her colleagues warned her - diversity does have its limits - she forged ahead, made overtures, and locked onto her prey. 

Of course as much as Vicki thought she was the operator in charge, it was Pharoah who thought the quick seduction of this blonde, blue-eyed white girl would be a nice finish to a tedious day.  

It turned out better than either of them expected.  Pharoah treated her well at the beginning, happy to show off his white prize to his malt liquored stoop mates in Anacostia; and she was delighted to be had by a real man (yes the hung stereotype was true); but not surprisingly, the affair went quickly bad.  The sisters in the neighborhood dunned Pharoah mercilessly, no prize there, they said, fucking a dumb white chone.  'Chocolate pussy no good no more?'

And it didn't take much for Pharoah to revert to his pimping ways. Vicki was just one more whore in his stable, worth nothing more than the money she brought in; but before he had a chance to send her out onto the streets, she split for uptown, chastened but not bowed.  Bad luck was all. 

There was Prince, then LaFarge, then Ra-Leyden, and finally Washington Carver Lincoln, where she should have started, a Denzel Washington Roman Israel, PI respectable Negro; but in the end he was too white and not worth the effort. 

Stick to your own kind, so she spent more time than usual at the Yale Club and the Society of the Cincinnati, a place for the most high-toned, aristocratic, top-of-the-line old English American royalty; but was bored to tears by Edwardian clones and Wall Street bankers.  Now, if these investment types had been the Jeffrey Skilling, Enron variety - macho men out for a killing - she might have been interested.  They were white, OK, but they were certainly out of the box. 

But these young men were throwback to another century, old fools fifty years too early and as sexually inviting as old wool. 

She felt silly at the Adams Morgan Latino festival. These smallish leaf-blowers had none of the appeal of ghetto men, none of the swagger of Pharoah Jones and none of his African-bred sexy muscularity; but she was out to show that her progressivism was not just an academic prospect. 

She went after the tallest Jose, a 'retailer' although he did not specify what or how he sold, Salvadoran by his accent, and with some education noted in his nearly correct grammar; but he turned out to be the virtual Latino stereotype - Gaithersburg split level, four Corolla beaters in the driveway, new arrivals in the kitchen, salsa on the radio, squalling babies, and endless fighting. 

What was next? Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Arabs?

And then she pulled up.  What was she doing in the first place?  She was no different than her progressive sisters loving pho, tacos, and felafel and calling it diversity - a game, a ritual, a pastime.  She was screwing stereotypes instead of just talking about them, but that was only a difference in modality.  She was as definitively a product of her parents and her lovely environment as they- as ignorant, presumptuous, and adolescent. 

A reprise of Bernstein's West Side Story was being performed at the Kennedy Center, and she went, delighted as she was the first time, convinced of the play's deeper meaning, and vowing to return to her roots. 

Pleasant roots they were - summers on the Vineyard, winters in Palm Beach and Gstaad, Chippendale, Townsend, Revere, and Copley and boys of the same ilk, and the Muffy Cabot and Harrison Lodge wedding.