When the Dogwhistle is an Airhorn

My beloved Yonkers was, in a national news story, the subject of a desegregation lawsuit which was resolved in the 1990s. In the interest of full disclosure, I moved to Yonkers right around the time of the desegregation, and lived approximately five blocks north of the recently renovated Arthur J. Doran townhouses, named after a long-serving judge who is a fixture in the neighborhood, the sort of larger-than-life local character that one runs into in the local taverns. For a while, I was carless, so I would take the local bus to work, and I struck up a friendship with a bright, musically talented African-American girl who would take the same bus to the Saunders Trades and Technical High School. This young lady lived in the neighborhood because of the desegregation effort. Despite the fears of a lot of white Yonkers eastsiders, the neighborhood wasn't negatively affected by integration, and the property values most certainly did not plummet. In my estimation, the desegregation (which wasn't necessarily an integration) improved the neighborhood. At the same time, a maturing Irish immigrant community was moving into the area from the Bainbridge Avenue neighborhood in the Bronx and Albanian immigrants were moving up from the Pelham Parkway/Lydig Avenue neighborhood. As things stand, East Yonkers is a vibrant, diverse neighborhood, the sort of neighborhood which is a destination for people from the tristate area and overseas.

Why am I bringing this up? Via Tengrain, we have a racist horror tale told by the Occupant of the White House, the sort of horror tale which is contradicted by my lived experience:

I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2020

There is no non-racist interpretation of this statement. The Suburban Lifestyle Dream the Dotard describes probably only existed in 1950s and 1960s sitcoms, and was notably skewered by Gerry Goffin and Carole King:





Yonkers is that most urban of suburbs, a city of two-hundred thousand residents which is dwarfed by NYC, which abuts Yonkers to the south. My neighborhood is a mix of one family houses, multi-family houses (I live in a three-family house, with an immigrant from Northern Ireland and her children on the floor above me and an African American family, the husband a lawyer and the wife a nurse, on the topmost floor), and largish apartment buildings. Dropped into my neighborhood, you could picture yourself in certain neighborhoods in Queens or Brooklyn. It's the sort of neighborhood where an elderly Irish man goes to the house of the Mexican family next door to watch football, by which I mean fútbol... the sort of neighborhood where the Albanian guy working at the auto repair shop buys his breakfast at a Yemeni delicatessen. It's a Suburban Lifestyle Dream which is diametrically opposed to Trump's racist nightmare... a glorious City of Hills which beats the hell out of a Pleasant Valley.