I had lunch at the White Dog today (very good in fact) and as I walked up Sansom Street towards the Penn Bookstore, I saw the following exchange. A taxi was driving up Sansom. Anyone who has driven the street knows it’s one-way and has one lane for traffic. The cab driver was black and he pulled over to pick up a fare. The lady he stopped for had a suitcase. The driver got out of his car to help her put the suitcase in the trunk.



As he stopped, a black lady pulled up behind him in a beat-up Honda Civic. She honked at him, leaned her head out the window and said, “Get the hell out of the way!” The driver waved at her and said he’d just be a minute. The lady yelled back, “Go back to where you came from and stop blocking the street.” The cab driver did have an African accent, and looked like he might be West African. He responded, “Go back to where I came from? Maybe you should know more about where you came from.” This angered the lady who started hollering, cursing and honking her horn.



The driver got back in his cab, with his mortified passenger, and slowly drove up the street. Philadelphia, the city that loves you back.

Hmmm....sounds like Atlanta has come to Philly.


Seriously, Philly's African American communtiy is dramatically more militant than anything I have seen back home in NYC. Most crimes in NYC are about serious things like drugs/gangs/domestic/robbery. In Philly, people simply seem to shoot everyone based on not liking them. It's a shame really.

No wonder people overseas have such bad images of America. And people in other parts of the nation have bad images of Philadelphia.

Most Philadelphians have been very nice to me. But as with everywhere, there are exceptions. Also, people out in the suburbs are much meaner than within the city of Philadelphia. Maybe that's where this woman is from. But Philly needs to chill with the attitude. Becasue it's hurting business. And hurting themsleves...

To heck with Philadelphia being depressed, we're just angry! And i don't know why...

I run into many nice, good people. But the angry people I run into are just SO extremely angry.

Any idea why?

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Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us. -- T. L. Holdcroft

Expecting life to treat you well because you are a good person is like expecting an angry bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.-- S. R. Barr

Uh, what exactly do you mean by "militant"? And are you reading the same story i'm reading? I don't see anything about guns in there. Yes, there have been a lot of shootings lately, but how is that relevant to this story?

While the Honda driver was absolutely wrong to make a xenophobic slur, i do sympathize with her frustration. Cab drivers are obnoxious in this town: i don't know how many times i've seen them block a lane of traffic when it would have been just as easy to pull over to the side. Blocking a one lane street to pick up a passenger is not acceptable.

i don't understand the title of this thread -- "brother against brother." do all black people have to like each other? africans and african americans come from completely different cultures. they just happen to share the same skin tone. what she said was very rude and ignorant, but were you more alarmed by the comment or that a black person made the comment?

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SWCC/Graduate Hospital

"The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind. " - Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

Ok.. I'm bouncing between being amused and entirely pissed.... As a woman of color, two things came to mind as I read the header message:

1. To some degree, this interchange could have happened between two people of any ethnicity; I found myself waiting to figure out the relevancy of mentioning that the participants were black until I got to the end of the message. As someone else indicated, do all white folks get along 'just because', regardless of circumstance? Geez....

2. "Philly's African American communtiy is dramatically more militant "? What the hell does that mean? And... I don't know what part of NYC you come from, sweetie... but we New Yorkers can be just as 'militant' depending on the circumstances (she said, with tongue firmly in cheek).

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- We must be the change we wish to see in the world -
Mahatma Gandhi

thank you! i really hope philbert fills us in.

__________________
SWCC/Graduate Hospital

"The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind. " - Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

Colored New Yorkers, or New Yorkers in general?

Forget Philbert title... lets focus on Ballards militant comment. That worries me a bit more than some Philbert drivel.

I assume this is an attempt at being amusing...?

__________________
- We must be the change we wish to see in the world -
Mahatma Gandhi

You are not picturing that block of Sansome WWD - its one block long - its not a through street to anywhere. The lady in the Honda should not have been on it if she was in a hurry to get anywhere. Although it is a one-way street and would have been unsafe, that street gets so little through traffic she actually could have backed up to 35th. She was just being rude.

I don't think tensions between African Americans and African immigrants or between Af Ams and recent Carribean immigrants is unique to Philly but it does touch on some thorny issues that play out here, as well as in other places in the country. I am thinking of a story someone told me of hearing one of their neighbors complain to them that "Jamaicans don't respect black people" - a statement that at face value is absolutely kooky.

I am also thinking of that recent community meeting with Jannie Blackwell I went to where all of the local Af Am clergy - People's Baptist, Beualah, and Hickman Temple A.M.E. -spent nearly half an hour elaborately introducing each other but that the other large church in the section of Baltimore Ave being discussed (49th -51st) which happens to be West African (mostly Liberian I believe) was rather conspicuously not invited to the open "community meeting". None of the congregations in Calvary were invited either, although I suppose it could be argued they are located on 48th so they were "out of the target area" - although for example a lady from the Cobb's Creek neighborhood organization which is a good 10 blocks down Baltimore was invited and spoke extensively. The "community" seems to include Baptists, AME, and Pentacostals apparently just not West Africans (or Ethiopian Coptics).