Garbage pick-up on my block is every Thursday. But with Christmas falling on that day of the week, this year garbage pick-up rolled over to Friday.
The running joke among us residents on the block is that we all sometimes, unfortunately, get unpleasant sights and smells of each others' garbage because of the way our gaggle of sanitation workers barrel from house-to-house, leaving unsightly reminders of our trash.
One neighbor a couple of houses from mine in our cul-de-sac calls the sanitation workers' garbage pick-up performance "anti-trash day" as she cleans up behind them. When the sanitation truck rolls away, the area is strewn not only with our trash but with our trashcans and recycle bins now littering the block, too. And each neighbor must retrieve his or her receptacles from a mountain of trash cans.
On that Friday, the day after Christmas, when the sanitation truck drove away, another neighbor of mine went to retrieve her receptacles expecting nothing out of the ordinary. As my neighbor was rolling her bins back into her yard, she couldn't believe what she saw scrawled on one of its sides—the N-word!
Shocked by the sight of the epithet, she took a picture of the racial slur and hurried to remove it. But the stubbornness of the wax oil crayon left an indelible imprint, reminding her how hatred can so suddenly and unexpectedly visit upon you.
Cambridge, Massachusetts—proudly dubbed as "The People's Republic of Cambridge"—is ranked as one of the most liberal cities in the United States. And with two of the country's premier institutions of higher learning—Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology—that draw students and scholars from around the world, Cambridge's showcase of diversity and multiculturalism rivals that of the United Nations.
Cambridge is also proudly known for a lot of firsts in this country. For example, it was the first city in Massachusetts to issue a legal application for same-sex marriage. It's the first major city in the country to elect an African-American openly gay mayor—Ken Reeves. And Cambridge elected its first African-American openly lesbian mayor in the country in 2008 with E. Denise Simmons.
Cambridge is, no doubt, a progressive city. With racial and police tensions nothing like that of Ferguson or New York City, people of color in Cambridge can feel somewhat removed from nagging reminders of intolerance and insensitivity.
However, when you scratch below Cambridge's surface, there is intolerance and insensitivity. And like Southern intolerance that sees only race and tries to keep people in their place, Cambridge maintains its racial and class boundaries not by designated "colored" water fountains, toilets or restaurants, but rather by its zip codes—like 02138 known as a tony enclave; major street intersections known as squares, like the renown Harvard Square; and residential border areas that are designated numbers, like the notorious Area 4—a predominately Black, poor and working-class enclave.
Cambridge, sadly, isn't as multicultural as it purports to be.
Fewer than five families of color reside on the block. My neighbor is Southeast Asian and the family has lived on the block for 20-plus years, with two children who've graduated from The Cambridge Rindge and Latin School as well as BB&N ( Buckingham Browne & Nichols ), and one now in attendance at Harvard.
My neighbors invited me to go with them to the police station to lodge their complaint. They wanted to make certain that the police not only have a record of the incident but they also wanted to ascertain if other residents of color anywhere in Cambridge have had similar experiences.
While Cambridge Police is nothing like they were when they arrested renown African-American Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates in 2009 as a suspected house burglar, the police officer was politely dismissive of my neighbors as they nervously struggled explaining the incident while showing the photo.
Our culture's present-day cavalier use of the N-word speaks how we as Americans—of all races—have become anesthetized to the damaging and destructive use of this epithet.
The N-word is firmly embedded in the lexicon of racist language that was and still is used to disparage people of color.
In 2003, the NAACP convinced Merriam-Webster lexicographers to change the definition of the word N-word in the dictionary to no longer mean African-Americans but instead a racial slur. And while the battle to change the N-word in the American lexicon was a long and arduous one, it is even harder to purge the sting of the word from the American psyche.
As quiet, law-abiding and upstanding residents of Cambridge, my neighbors wonder who could have possibly written such hatred and direct it toward them.
The answer is that it really doesn't matter.
What does matter is that, as Americans, we cannot become unconscious and numb to the use and abuse of the power and currency this racial epithet still has in our society.
Why?
Because it thwarts the daily struggle many of us Americans work hard at in trying to ameliorate race relations.
And what also matters is that no person of color should ever have to experience what my neighbors did that day after Christmas, especially in Cambridge.
