New York is beautifully multicultural (um, right?)

We all ride the train together, but do you find that we basically get off at different stops?
Q-Tip: We’re starting to get off at the same stops but it’s because of gentrification. It’s not like the Smith-Buchanans are going over to the Mohammeds’ house.
Naison: I think New Yorkers often fit in many different categories at once. Is it more important that I am black than gay than female than a fan of bhangra music and slam poetry? What’s important about people’s identities can shift from moment to moment and the same person can get off at different stops at different times.
Hoch: The white American kids who get off at the same subway stop are not necessarily stepping into the same communities as the New Yorkers who are stepping off. There is the new phenomenon of American “vacuum communities” in NYC that exist in a bubble outside of the previously existing communities.
McBride: It’s not about train stops. It’s more about what you do once you get off the train. The Internet, TV, have changed the way we view each other. We were forced to interact in the past. Now we can just iPod and CrackBerry our way around.

Is the city getting whiter?
Yamamoto: No.
Iyer: It’s more sterile than it once was. But to me, it still looks just as brown as ever, and just as divided.
Hoch: White flight has reversed. Americans come here largely as consumers first, then as cultural contributors. The result is the economic and cultural erasure of black, immigrant and children-of-immigrant communities.
Parker: I’m not really concerned about whether the city is getting whiter. I think it’s losing its flavor and things are being homogenized. New York is about money: white money, Asian money and black money. In a country founded on racism, money is never just green. In 1975 I paid $90 a month for an apartment on 6th Street between First and Second Avenues. By 1985 that apartment was being rented for $800. Something ominous is happening in New York: Wherever there’s an empty lot, somebody is putting up an ugly building that blocks the light and the view of the sky.
Kweli: Our economy is built on borrowing, which leaves us in debt. When the country can’t pay its debts, only rich people can afford to live in a city where the cost of living is sky high. Living in New York City has become a bit like living in an office building.
Naison: Manhattan and some parts of Brooklyn—Park Slope, Williamsburg, Bushwick—are becoming whiter, but many outer-borough neighborhoods are becoming less white. Canarsie, which was predominantly Jewish and Italian 30 years ago, is now overwhelmingly West Indian, and all of Southern Queens, from Brooklyn to the Nassau border, consists of people of color from all over the globe.

Who runs NYC? Is the cultural elite still white?
Q-Tip: No. In the purveying of culture there is diversity among the people impacting Manhattan.
Parker: Culture is for everyone—the kids living in the projects in the Bronx and Brooklyn to the kids living in penthouses on the East side of Manhattan. Those who have the money call the shots.
Hoch: The cultural elite of NYC has never been white. However, the economic and media elite is, which is why we’re having a conversation in 2008 to assuage our collective economic and media guilt. We are not guilty because we’re white. We’re guilty when we continually put ourselves at the center of all cultural discourse and when we refuse to believe that maybe we actually could be wrong.
Iyer: Most of the cultural institutions have white leadership. Of course a lot of them are committed to accommodating diversity, presenting a broad range of work, and doing outreach into underserved communities, and I absolutely commend all of those efforts. But truthfully, that doesn’t send the same message as having real diversity among the positions of power.
Willis: If you are in Harlem the cultural elite include blacks and Latinos; if you live below 110th Street, it’s white. If you live below 14th or on the Lower East Side, it is mixed: Chinese, white, Latino and La MaMa.
Kweli: Cultural elite is another term for “white.”
McBride: If it looks like buzzard, and smells like buzzard, you can bet it ain’t catfish. But on the other hand, I don’t know what [“cultural elite”] means anymore. Great art and culture have usually—not always, but usually—emanated from a gutter someplace.

NEXT: In building our New York 40 list—which ended up including only three people of color—we considered ourselves color-blind. We had no quota. Is “color-blind” the right approach?»