It Came from Queens

Being from Queens N.Y. fills me with intense pride but also immense shame, mainly because I share my birthplace with New York City based real estate developer Donald Trump. He always rubbed me the wrong way. I have memories from the 1970s, when I was a child growing up in Jamaica, Queens, Donald’s hometown, and befriending other Black families like mine, embracing suburban serenity and middle-class aspirations. I’d be privy to some of these families complaining to my folks about stopping methods to their being shown available homes for sale in certain White neighborhoods. Others would encounter discrimination and terrible conditions at their apartment complexes that only occurred because they were Black. Most of these properties in Brooklyn and Queens had legendary scumbag developer paterfamilia Fred Trump and son as landlords.

I became reacquainted with Donald Trump, understanding the essence of who and what he really was, in the 1980s when I started venturing out of Jamaica. Though Donald hailed from Jamaica Estates, perhaps the one-time cream of the Queens neighborhoods, the rest of Jamaica was by now a tarnished and crumbling abandoned kingdom of squandered cool founded and surrendered by the very best of African American genius. All that was left was a haunted castle converted to a crack house full of zombies, ghosts, and gangsters.

The other Queens neighborhoods, though scenic and quaint, achieving a collective “meh,” usually had posses of xenophobic baseball bat-wielding White American Youth, which form in my mind a collective weapon. A brutal fist made up of big meaty fingers of English, German, Italian, and Irish American racists and finally a thick and considerable thumb, which was a confounding catch all of Greeks, Jews, European immigrants, and White-identifying mutts of all varieties. There’s even the odd social-climbing, White-appearing Hispanic, who sometimes in the throes of their passing have to kick a negro or two. When not dodging the clumsy but forceful deathblows of this Racist Fist of Fury in various Queens neighborhoods, I had to step around the toxic shit thrown at me out of nowhere by the occasional Asian in Flushing. It’s even worse when I am betrayed by the brown, lowering my guard only to be spat at by Hindu snakes in Richmond Hill. Receiving obvious and unnecessary disses or unwarranted f-you vibe from the Latino Nation in Corona or Jackson Heights hurts just as much.

“To the Guidomobile!” Joey screams, and a gaggle of greasy, pimply goons scramble like circus clowns into a multicolored racing-striped muscle car that stinks of blood, Brut, Juicy Fruit and sex from the back seat. I’m sure Michael Stewart and innumerable other unfortunate Black boys may have heard and dreaded and ran for their lives behind that rallying cry. It was no better in Brooklyn, now crack-infested and crazy in the Black neighborhoods, and in the adjacent White communities where the vigilante posses, like the Ku Klux Klan in the south, actually gain legitimacy.

Donald Trump was cut, tailored, pressed, marketed and mass produced from the same blood and crap-stained cloth as those other baseball bat-wielding White American a-holes from Queens, different only in that he was born with lots of money. This only seemed to make Donald the jewel-crowned King of the A-holes¾squatting over his golden throne, unpuckering and poised to blow his rancid smell all over Manhattan. Trump emerged within the tarnished charm and cobwebbed sophistication of the mid-80s New York City social scene as a Queens mook show off and it only got worse from there. He became a local anti-hero, like the pompous, doofy bad-guy wrestler you loved to hate.

In the late 80s, After trigger-happy Kew Gardens, Queens born subway gunslinger Bernie Goetz shoots three Black teenage pushy panhandlers and paralyzes another in a scene right out of Charles Bronson’s 70s urban vigilante classic ‘Death Wish’, White New Yorkers were more polarized than ever. Many were concerned about a growing phenomenon of roving bands of Black teenagers running into mostly White areas to cause mischief. Perhaps, as an unconscious protest and rebellion against the institutional racism and compound injustice exemplified by verdicts like those against Goetz, cleared of attempted murder charges and pinched with only a gun possession rap, more and more kids took to the streets inevitably becoming rambunctious, unruly, and often criminal packs. It was typical teenage angst coupled with urban decay, but with color it soon becomes outrage, making it a big city and national sensation. I remember having to wrestle armloads of batteries and blank tapes from many a young brother who rushed in to rip off the mid-town Manhattan record store where I worked as an assistant manager. Some boys were heard to sing along to the rap song “Wild Thing” by West Coast Hip Hop one-hitter Tone-Loc on boom boxes as they rampaged. In the usual game of media classification-by-way-of-Telephone these boyhood rites of passage became known as “Wilding”.

Donald Trump believed these “wilding” Black boys were tarnishing the city he was trying to renovate and remake in his own image. He took every opportunity when in front of a microphone or camera to decry these “thugs” “punks” and “animals”. He had such palpable racist fervor and hatred for Black male youth that he took out a full-page ad in The New York Times to crucify five teenage boys who were arrested but not yet tried for the brutal rape and attempted murder of a female jogger in Central Park. It’s safe to say Trump beat the drum for the march of injustice those five young Black men took in their wrongful 15-year convictions. When asked to comment on whether he’d changed his mind upon the men’s exoneration and release, Donald dumped on them one final time, casting aspersions on their “true nature,” saying, “Hey, some of these guys got involved in some bad stuff while they were locked up. Bad stuff. No, these guys are no angels. They are bad dudes. Bad, bad dudes.”

Racism. Sexism. Narcissism. Xenophobia. We saw how Trump’s rhetoric awakened, embraced, and emboldened White America’s ugly underneath till it buoyed him into the oval office. And it is no surprise that he brought the Ku Klux Klan with him into the White House. The KKK had gone underground after the Republican defeat in the 1990s and thrived on the Internet, reemerging as “The Alternative Right.” With Donald Trump as President, taking over the ultimate seat in US government, the new Nazi-Klan has set about changing the cultural, legal and economic landscape of the United States.

Racism is nothing new in this country. Some would say it’s as American as apple pie.

Though Queens, N.Y. is world renowned for its bucolic splendor and cultural diversity

there’s no denying the boroughs problems and Trumps polarizing effect on all of us. And every time I see him now, lying, cheating, hating, I see many of my neighbors, NIMBY nimrods pledging allegiance to an abusive dullard and virulent racist, someone just like them. And the rest of us are scared witless, trapped in a science fiction horror movie we can’t escape from called, “It Came from Queens”.