Voyeurism

I went on a field trip to Harlem with my class yesterday. It felt like contrived tourism, with old guys sitting on their stoops or passing us by on the sidewalk, shouting, "Don't listen to him, he don't know nothin' about Harlem!" We were a mixed group of students, but the professor was an old white guy in a baseball cap.

But does it feel like voyeurism because of me and my whiteness and my subsconscious racial prejudices? Would I feel like a voyeur if I were to go on a trip of historic Greenwich Village? Probably not. So why does Harlem feel any different? Why should going to look at Zora Neale Hurston's old hangout, at the sites of old nightclubs, at famous streets, be any different from checking out where Allen Ginsberg used to hang? Why do I feel embarrassed?

In any case, it was cool to see all those sites, and also sad, because most of them did not have plaques or anything commemorating their history. The old nightclub, Small's Paradise, is now an IHOP; the former headquarters of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association is marked only by a small sign, and is now a beauty salon; the Savoy Ballroom site has a nice little monument, but is exploited nonetheless by the ironic phrase "hip & historic," as if the city cares about other former landmarks of the Harlem Renaissance.

In front of the Schomberg Library 

The current site of the former Cotton Club... 

...and the previous! Crazy