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Chapter 13
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The City We Became, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cities and Gentrification
Community, Diversity, and Prejudice
Ethics and Nature
Beliefs, Concepts, and Stereotypes
Art
Abuse
Summary
Analysis
While Bronca drives toward Staten Island, Padmini asks Hong where he found Paolo so she can enter an address into Bronca’s phone. Meanwhile, Brooklyn finishes a call with her daughter Jojo. Bronca thinks maybe she should call her 30-something son, but decides not to, since they would likely argue.
Bronca’s decision not to call her son, with whom she evidently has a combative relationship, emphasizes that her real community is not her family but Veneza and her other coworkers at the Bronx Art Center.
Themes
Bronca asks Brooklyn whether she’s sending Jojo to stay with Jojo’s father. Brooklyn says Jojo’s father is dead. When Bronca asks whether he died from drugs, Brooklyn, affronted, replies that he died of cancer. Apologetically, Bronca explains she remembers Brooklyn rapping about relationships with men in the drug trade. Brooklyn retorts that often, those men are better than “your average nice upstanding predatory lender”—but also, her lyrics weren’t always autobiographical, and she thought that “only white people” always took rap lyrics literally.
When Bronca assumes that Jojo’s father died from drugs, she seems to be endorsing the racist stereotype that Black men are likely to be drug users or dealers. Bronca’s explanation of her assumption—that she was extrapolating from Brooklyn’s rap lyrics—suggests that preexisting stereotypes can influence people’s understanding of art and also be reinforced by art. Brooklyn’s response is twofold. First, by claiming that many men in the drug trade are ethically superior to “your average nice upstanding predatory lender,” she seems to be arguing that men who sell drugs for economic survival are better than those who exploit others economically merely to get wealthy. Her comment that she thought “only white people” took rap lyrics literally, meanwhile, suggests that Bronca has made an important mistake in art interpretation—assuming that the artist is just drawing on her own biography rather than inventing creatively.
Themes
Though Bronca knows she’s reacting to the pressure of the situation, she gets angry at Brooklyn. She points out that some of Brooklyn’s lyrics seemed “real” to her and quotes some where Brooklyn threatened to shoot any woman who tried to have sex with her. Brooklyn replies that she’s apologized for that song and given $1000 to the Ali Forney Center. Not mollified, Bronca asks Brooklyn whether she knows the numbers on violence against “queer kids.”
Whereas Brooklyn has just argued that it’s a mistake to take rap lyrics literally, Bronca is arguing that bigoted art, even if the bigotry isn’t intended literally, can cause literal violence against minority communities. The Ali Forney Center is a real nonprofit serving homeless LGBTQ youth in New York City; that Brooklyn donated to them suggests that she wanted to make public amends for her past bigotry.
Themes
After a pause, Brooklyn says she knows her apology doesn’t right the wrong. She explains that during her rap career, she was targeted with homophobic slurs and sexual violence due to her gender—and that she “passed that shit on” until some friends intervened. At that point, Brooklyn realized that she shouldn’t mimic the behavior of toxic men. Sighing, Brooklyn tells Bronca that during her music career, many people she knew were intoxicated with fame and playing into anti-Black stereotypes for financial success.
Somewhat like Aislyn replicates the sexist, racist, and xenophobic thinking she learned from her emotionally abusive father, Brooklyn used to “pass[] . . . on” the sexist and homophobic abuse she suffered from men in the music industry. It was only due to her friends’ intervention that she changed her behavior. This pattern suggests that while Bronca may have been right to tell the Woman in White that abuse victims can rise against their abusers and change the world, victims will only make positive change if they learn to direct their anger at their abusers rather than at other victims.
Themes
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Seeing Brooklyn is in earnest, Bronca apologizes for asking whether Jojo’s father died from drugs: “That was, uh, racist. Technically prejudiced because the power dynamics are basically flat, but . . .” Brooklyn admits the comment touched a nerve because she does know people who have died due to drugs. Bronca says she’s “touchy” too, since she’s the Bronx. Brooklyn replies: “And I am Brooklyn.”
Bronca distinguishes between racism and racial prejudice because according to a common definition of racism, the perpetrator must occupy a position of greater racial privilege than the victim. Since Bronca is indigenous (Lenape) and Brooklyn is Black—both marginalized racial groups—Bronca believes that “the power dynamics are basically flat” between them, so they can’t “technically” be racist toward each other, though they can display racial prejudices. Bronca’s apology and her and Brooklyn’s willingness to be honest about why they’re “touchy” show that the two avatars are coming to accept each other and themselves as representatives of their shared community.
Themes
Bronca’s phone reroutes them away from FDR Drive. Hearing FDR Drive mentioned on the radio, Bronca turns it up. She hears that a right-wing group called Proud Men of NYC is blocking FDR Drive to protest “feminist liberal nonsense” because “it’s okay to be a white man.” Bronca speculates that the police won’t stop them and may target counter-protestors. She also thinks this demonstration of public racism is odd, since racists in New York are usually lower profile, lest they “get knocked the fuck out on the subway.”
The protest against “feminist liberal nonsense” and for the sentiment that “it’s okay to be a white man” comes directly after Bronca has alluded to the difference between racism and mere individual prejudices—where the difference is whether the racially prejudiced person occupies a position of racial power over their victim. No one occupies a position of racial power over white men in the U.S., so the novel is clearly mocking the protestors’ implicit claims of reverse racism. Bronca’s speculation that the police will tolerate white male protestors—but not counter-protestors—reminds readers that in the novel, the police are not true defenders of the city but rather parasites who enforce racist hierarchies. Her surprise that New York would be the site of a racist protest suggests that overt racism wanes in diverse urban areas where there are a sufficient number of residents willing to “knock[]” a racist “the fuck out on the subway.”
Themes
Disturbed, Hong says that this incident reminds him of New Orleans—institutional failure and resurgent racism destroying the city’s avatar at its birth. Bronca asks whether Hong is implying that the Better New York Foundation engineered this protest somehow. Hong says he doesn’t know but usually, cities create good luck for their avatars—the embodied boroughs’ bad luck is a sign of New York City’s weakness or its opponents’ determination to thwart them.
The possibility that the Better New York Foundation could be backing an apparently spontaneous protest by racist New Yorkers underlines how global companies can use their money to manipulate local politics. That such racist New Yorkers existed to be manipulated, meanwhile, reminds the reader that the Woman in White is exploiting preexisting tensions in the New York community.
Themes
Driving through Spanish Harlem, Bronca sees a Starbucks, almost invisible beneath white tendrils. Suddenly, a face appears out of the tendrils. Shocked, Bronca swerves. Then a second Starbucks garbed in tendrils lurches into the street at the car. Bronca evades it and stops further on. Peering down the street, Brooklyn says that every Starbucks is like this.
Starbucks, a global brand, is associated in the public imagination with gentrification—when a neighborhood is gentrifying, it gets a Starbucks. That tendrils have completely occupied the Starbucks franchises emphasizes that the tendrils represent how gentrification homogenizes cities and destroys their local cultures.
Themes
Hong explains that because Starbucks is ubiquitous, it makes the city “more like every other place.” When he asks, snottily, whether Bronca has a plan, she says she’ll “drive like a motherfucking New Yorker.” She starts driving again and soon accelerates to 70 in a 25 mph zone. Her driving creates an energy envelope around the car, which shields it from the next Starbucks attack and seems to prevent the police from noticing her speeding.
In the novel, cities draw power from the concepts associated with them. Starbucks is a global brand associated with “every … place” rather than a particular place; ergo, its homogenizing presence makes particular cities weaker rather than stronger. By contrast, “driv[ing] like a motherfucking New Yorker” is clearly a place-specific concept and practice; as such, it gives Bronca power—and protects her from the police, the false defenders of the city who might seek to stop its true defenders, the embodied boroughs.
Themes
When Bronca and the others pass over the Verrazano into Staten Island, they can sense Staten Island’s avatar. This sense leads them to a house with a white pillar growing in the front lawn. When they try to approach the house, tendrils explode from the ground and the pillar. Some tendrils become the Woman in White, flanked by eerie shadow creatures. When Hong tells the embodied boroughs that the situation is all wrong—that the Woman has never taken a human body or used speech before—the Woman comments that assumptions “make an ass of u and me.”
That the tendrils literally create a body for the Woman in White suggests that they are physical extensions of her, as Brooklyn speculated they might be earlier in the novel. The identity between the tendrils and the Woman in White suggests in turn that she, as well as they, represents how outside forces can exploit divisions within a community to destroy it. The Woman’s comment that Hong’s assumptions “make an ass of u and me” displays the Woman’s odd, rather juvenile understanding of human popular culture. But it also displays an important truth: people’s assumptions and beliefs shape their perceptions, and so assumptions can blind people to objective reality.
Themes
Abruptly, Bronca, Brooklyn, Padmini, and Hong are transported into cityspace, where they see a city looming between them and Staten Island. This city is larger than New York, entirely white, and full of things that at first seem like buildings but appear to be “breathing.” Even looking at this city causes Bronca terror and pain. Then they’re back in peoplespace—having just realized the Woman in White is a city from another reality. Hong, horrified to learn they’ve been fighting another city all along, says he doesn’t understand. When Bronca asks the Woman what she really is, the Woman tells them her name is “R’lyeh.” Bronca doesn’t recognize the name but notices Padmini mouth a curse in response to it.
In this passage, the Woman in White is revealed to be a city. Since the Woman has previously stated that entities from her reality don’t build cities but created her to understand humanity, the reader can infer that these extradimensional entities built the city whose avatar the Woman in White is specifically to bring it to life so that it could combat human cities. This explains the Woman’s sadness that the entities from her reality find cities “monstrous”—her creators find her monstrous. It may also explain why they torture her; though they created her, they don’t respect the kind of life that she is. “R’lyeh” is the name of a lost city, occupied by an alien entity called Cthulhu, from H.P. Lovecraft’s 1928 short story “The Call of Cthulhu.” The allusion suggests that the extradimensional entities trying to destroy New York and humanity are the same entities Lovecraft mentions in his fiction.
Themes
The Woman in White pretends to brandish an object “like a broomstick” in front of herself and tells them, “Youshallnotpass.” Then she explains that Staten Island has joined her righteous cause and she’s not going to let Hong or the other avatars try to change Staten Island’s mind. She volunteers to fight them.
The Woman in White is loosely reenacting a famous scene from the 2001 film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring (1954), the first book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In the scene, a wizard named Gandalf the Gray battles a demon called a Balrog. As a result of the battle, Gandalf dies and is resurrected as Gandalf the White. Gandalf is a hero while the Woman in White is a villain; the novel may be using her identification with him—on the basis of their shared association with the color white—to subtly critique the racial whiteness of the science-fiction/fantasy tradition. That the novel bothers to make such a critique suggests that art and art traditions shape people’s thinking and so it’s important to treat them thoughtfully. Meanwhile, the Woman in White’s refusal to let Hong and the other embodied boroughs speak to Aislyn suggests that she still isn’t sure of Aislyn’s loyalty and so needs to control the information and options available to Aislyn.
Themes
