George and I

Social media has been reminding me that three years ago my neighborhood was burning following the killing of George Floyd. Today also is my birthday and as I reflect back on my life I've always wondered about how much of my life was only miles away from George Floyd's life even up to him dying. Our lives we very different and we are examples of the divides in this country that still persist between race and class in this country.

This was a letter to the editor I wrote to the NYT that summed up a lot of those thoughts. It didn't make it to publication (if it had maybe @Os Trigonum might've posted it. ) but sharing it now.

New York Times Editor;

I read your article about the life of George Floyd and have listened to the memorials and have been very moved by them. I am an architect and martial arts instructor in Minneapolis and am from Houston originally. I was shocked seeing George Floyd’s death but his life has been weighing on my mind a lot. I didn't know George Floyd and it seems like our lives had few connections but my life and his were literally not that far apart and paralleled each other.

George Floyd and I were close in age and we both came from Houston to Minneapolis. Houston had been a segregated city and if we had been born just a few years earlier we would’ve lived under segregation. The Houston we grew up in was a time of great change as Houston became a boom town and grew to a metropolis of the New South. George grew up in the Third Ward of Houston, one of the poorest neighborhoods and an overwhelmingly black neighborhood. I grew up about five miles away in a neighborhood called Southside Place an upper middle class neighborhood and an overwhelmingly white neighborhood. The University of Houston and Texas Southern University are in one corner of the Third Ward and my mother taught at both schools The Third Ward though wasn't a place that I went to socialize, shop or spend anytime other than at my mother's work. I doubt that George Floyd spent much time in my neighborhood either. George Floyd went to Jack Yates High School. A school that had been a colored high school under segregation and was named after a former slave. I went to Mirabeau B. Lamar High School a school named after the second President of the Republic of Texas who was a secessionist after Texas joined the US. It had been a white school under segregation. Yates fit the stereotype of a black school. It was an athletic powerhouse with a great marching band. It had a poor student body and poor academic performance. Lamar was known for great academics and was the first school to have an International Baccalaureate Program in Houston. It had students from some of the richest neighborhoods in the US and among my classmates were children of CEO’s, doctors, and prominent lawyers. We matched our schools as he was an outstanding athlete but poor and black while I was well off , Asian and excelled at academics.

George and I represented two parts of Houston. I was the son of a new wave of immigrants coming to America for opportunity. My family arrived in Texas in the wake of the Civil Rights movement at a time when barriers of race for Asians were being dismantled. We were allowed to participate in and to a certain extent welcomed into white culture and society. George was from people that had to live in the Third Ward because they weren’t allowed to anywhere else and now couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. People like me were the face of the New South, a generation that had little to do with Jim Crow and insularity but were diverse and worldly. George was still dealing with the Old South and financial and cultural segregation that kept people like him tied the Third Ward. The difference between those two Souths might've had much to do with how our lives turned out.

We took very different routes to Minneapolis. I graduated in the top tier of my class and went to the University of California, Berkeley. Many of my classmates went to other elite schools. For us success was expected, and we were already on our way. After he graduated George went to a college in Florida for a couple of years as an athlete only to return to Houston. He worked doing automotive detailing and found some local success as a rapper. He also ran into trouble with the law getting arrested for drug possession and theft. In the meantime, my only trouble with the law was during an anti-war protest and speeding tickets. Things got bad for George when he was arrested for armed robbery involving a home invasion. He did five years in prison and after he got out came to Minneapolis for a new start. I came to Minneapolis to get my master’s degree at the University of Minnesota. This was a new start for me also and as a struggling grad student was likely as poor as George when he came here but our lives were still on very different courses.

George Floyd had a good life here and loved Minnesota. He seemed to have found purpose in life and was leaving his troubled past behind him. My life in Minnesota has been full but unlike George I didn’t need to leave my past in Houston behind and still am tied to Houston. While we didn’t know each other it wouldn’t surprise me if we had met at some time as I’ve been several times to the Congo Latin Bistro where he worked security and El Nuevo Rodeo the other club he worked at is in my neighborhood. George came north for a new start but the same divides that existed in Houston exist here in Minnesota. I’ve made a living as an architect. George was a driver and a bouncer. In many ways we have followed the pattern that was laid out for and expected of us in high school. When we graduated high school I was a nerdy middle class Asian. He was a large poor black man. I’m now an urban professional who owns my own home and can afford to take vacations around the World. George Floyd is an ex con who died under the knee of a policeman.

I didn’t know George Floyd but I would’ve liked to. I would’ve liked to have talked to him about food in Houston, about how he was adapting to Minnesota winters and about the Houston Rockets. I’m sad that I will never get that chance. At the end of his life the only thing we had in common was that for a big part of his life we lived a few miles apart from each other across two cities.

There is an American belief that we largely write our own history and that we can always change yet looking at the different fates of George and I how much is that really true? Looking back on my life and George’s I try to imagine how things might’ve turned out so that it would be George writing this now and I killed by law enforcement on the streets of Minneapolis. Maybe both of us were long ago already trapped in a system that cost George his life.

 

Yesterday grabbed lunch at a place not too far from where George Floyd died and was thinking how would LEO have treated me if the store owner had called and said they thought I might’ve had used counterfeit money? Given that I actually do suffer from mild claustrophobia if for some reason they did take me into custody and I had a panic attack I doubt that they would’ve had me cuffed with two LEO on my legs and another keeping me down in the position that Chauvin had Floyd. My guess is that they given my appearance they would’ve treated me with far more deference than they treated George Floyd.

 

When I went to Lamar they had several students who came in from the Third Ward and other poor neighborhoods as part of the magnet program. Being next to West U and River Oaks though the IB and advanced classes were dominated by more well off students. At that time Lamar was the Flagship school of the HISD.

 

Also last night there was a community meeting by the spot of the Third Precinct to discuss how the riots affected local businesses and rebuilding along Lake St.

Minneapolis has far from recovered from what happened three years ago. There are still many businesses that haven’t come back and several lots that are sitting empty where buildings that were forced once were.

 

I don’t know if there were Korean businesses specifically but there were several Asian businesses. In the interest of full disclosure one of my clients is an Indian developer who is renovating a hotel
Along the Lake street that was badly damaged.

Many of the businesses burned were owned by minorities including African Americans. Many burned were Somali and it looked like a few somali businesses were specifically targeted.

 

I didn’t get into Harvard either and when I went to CAL they had a quota on Asians. For that matter I’ve been stopped and questioned by MPD and even had an MPD LEO point his firearm at me once. I’ve encountered racism before but I also think I’ve been given opportunities that George Floyd wasn’t and been judge in ways that he wasn’t.

I can certainly imagine a situation where MPD might question and even arrest me. I think it’s incredibly unlikely that they would treat me in custody like they would George Floyd. Even though given my background and training I might be more of a threat to them than Floyd was.