Do Not Look At The Man Behind The Curtain!

Recently. one of the world's most famous Snake Oil Salesmen, Dr. Oz, visited the part of North Philadelphia in which I work.  This is the same man who is so untrustworthy that even Congress had to ask him, "WTF?!"  In response to the heroin epidemic and the violence that exists in this community, he penned an article titled "I Just Walked Into Hell."  (I am choosing not to link to the article because I don't want to give it any more credibility or traffic than it deserves.  You can Google it if you want.)  While here, he engaged in various unethical practices, not the least of which was actually photographing and videoing a man who was shooting up, which is a shameless act of poverty tourism and voyeurism.

I would trust each of these characters from Wicked more than Dr. Oz

Dr. Oz can go fuck himself.  He did not "walk into hell," he walked into a vibrant community, into the home of real humans who live here everyday.  He walked into here and shit on the community and on the people here by calling it "hell" for his own profit.  However, he is hardly the only person who should be criticized for the approach that is taken toward North Philadelphia and other similar neighborhoods around America.  Dr. Oz's pathetic attempt at profiting off of the suffering of America's disenfranchised is nothing but a more sensational and dramatic variant on the American past time of degrading poor and POC-majority neighborhoods.  Most often this is done through the homogenizing dichotomization of America into "good" (read: white, middle class, often suburban) neighborhoods and "bad" (read: POC, impoverished, almost always urban) neighborhoods.  (It is worth noting that the impoverished and drug addled rural neighborhoods that are predominantly white are rarely called "bad.")

Let me get the obvious out of the way first: some communities, like the one in which I work in North Philadelphia, are plagued by violence and a disease commonly referred to as addiction.  This is not the point I wish to debate, as it is simply the sad truth of the situation.  However, it is less clear that this allows us to delineate communities into "good" and "bad."  Here in North Philadelphia, I regularly see community members assisting one another.  This is especially important as social services collapse under neo-liberal late-capitalism.  I also bike past one of the largest urban gardens in the city in North Philly on my way to work each morning.  I recently rode past a young man working to train a horse in an open field.  I hear roosters crow, I see beautiful artwork and children playing; I see the construction of what will become one of the city's largest Mosques; a few weeks ago I saw a kitten chasing flowers in the street that had fallen off of a blossoming tree.  And, yes, I also see needles in the streets, I am often offered drugs, and I recently saw a body being bagged.  Both of these realities exist here, but the language of "good" and "bad" neighborhoods ignores that all neighborhoods include both.

Many images like both of these, those beautiful and those not, can be found in North Philadelphia on a daily basis.

Yes, the community in which I work is riddled with addiction, as Philadelphia, and especially North Philadelphia, offers some of the purist heroin in the country at the lowest costs, which produces what Dr. Oz came here to exploit; and yes, violence does come along with this.  However, the "good" neighborhood that I grew up in also includes violence and rampant drug addiction.  In that suburban community though, these things take place behind closed doors.  Furthermore, these communities are involved in a parasitic relationship to one another that blurs the very boundaries of communities, as the white suburbanites come into the cities to buy their heroin before escaping to their protected enclaves.  I could make the case that these suburbanites, with the secret violence and addictions, their alienation from their fellow citizens, their boredom and depression, all of which run rampant, also reside in "bad" neighborhoods that are engaged in a financial exchange with the "good" urban neighborhoods where people know one another's names and share resources.  I don't want to make that claim though; instead, I want to dismantle this language all together, instead recognizing the good in all communities while working to alleviate the social ills that disturb the community and its members.

A large urban garden with a beautiful painted wall and train car, located in North Philadelphia

One of the first steps toward this alleviation is the change in the language itself.  When using the tired trope of "good" and "bad" neighborhoods we also lead ourselves to believe that there is nothing to be done to change the problems of "bad" neighborhoods and that there are no problems to solve in "good" neighborhoods.  If the neighborhood (and, by association, its residents) is simply "bad," then we needn't look at the social structures of business, prisons, schools, and so on that produce these social problems; and, in the good neighborhood, we needn't admit that there are any problems, the community is simply always already "good."  By changing our language we begin to recognize what our language hid: the supposed "good" and "bad" coexisting side by side all the time.

So give up the racist, classist language of "good" and "bad" that is all too often an insult thrown by those outside of the community who rarely, if ever, have any first hand knowledge of these communities.  Those of us who live, work, or love here don't need your fucking paternalistic insults.  And while you're at it, look at your own community, question what is wrong there, what makes your children come into these "bad" communities for heroin, and fix the metaphorical fence in your own front yard.