Essay 611

From The New York Times…

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Hip-Hop Is Spoken Here, but With a Queens Accent

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

There is not much racism in Howard Beach, say young people in Howard Beach. Just look at our clothes. Listen to our music. Listen to how we talk.

“In this neighborhood, it doesn’t matter what color you are,” said Lorenzo Rea, as he sat outside Gino’s Pizzeria on Cross Bay Boulevard. “Everyone’s listening to hip-hop, wearing G-Unit.”

It has been two decades since a gang of whites here chased a black man to his death, and about a year since Nicholas Minucci was accused of fracturing the skull of a black man with a baseball bat. Howard Beach is still a mostly white, mostly Italian neighborhood, with a lingering — and, people there insist, unfair — reputation for prejudice.

But it is now also a neighborhood where the mostly white, mostly Italian kids favor the same style and music as their peers over in East New York and New Lots.

There may still be a few people around here “who have a problem,” Mr. Rea allows.

“But if they don’t like black people,” he said, “they’re still dressing in the clothes, listening to the music.”

Whether such emulation is heartfelt or superficial is always up for debate, and it is in the hate-crime trial of Mr. Minucci, who admitted to investigators that he called out a too-familiar word beginning with the letter “n” to the man said to be his victim, preceded by the greeting “What up?”

His lawyers maintain that Mr. Minucci, 19, was defending himself against a robbery attempt, and during jury selection last week, they suggested that the word was not meant as an insult.

Most teenagers in Howard Beach, of course, weren’t even born when the Rev. Al Sharpton led a march through their neighborhood to protest the 1986 episode, to jeering and taunting from the locals. During their adolescence, the city’s name ceased to be synonymous with violent crime and racial tension. Where their parents feared the ghetto, they romanticize it, idolizing the swaggering culture and music born there.

“I got friends from all over,” said Matt Martocci, a carrot-topped, buzz-cut 18-year-old, horsing around with some of them near a Howard Beach park on Thursday.

“We all listen to hip-hop. Look at how we’re dressed,” he said, pointing his thumbs at his immaculate navy Sean John track suit and gold chain.

Some of his friends live in New Howard, the neatly kept, almost entirely white district west of Cross Bay Boulevard where last year’s attack took place. Some live in Old Howard, on the other side of the brackish creek spilling into Jamaica Bay. Many hail from Ozone Park or Lindenwood, more racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods on the other side of the Belt Parkway.

But they have hip-hop in common. They listen to Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Cam’Ron, and Fabolous. They wear G-Unit, Sean John and other hip-hop labels like Rocawear, the same brand-new baseball caps, stickers still affixed to the brims, cocked sidewise. Some stick hair-picks in their headbands, though few of them, truth be told, have hair kinky enough to need one. Like any number of white suburbanite kids, they favor black slang, embellished with the Queens accents of their parents.

“Sometimes, when I’m talking to my friends, it’ll come out,” said Mr. Martocci. “It’s just slang. It’s the way we talk. You know, I’m like, ‘What up, my brutha.’”

His friends all nodded.

There are no high schools in the neighborhood, so when kids get older, they drift off to public high schools in Forest Hills or Ozone Park, or Catholic schools like Christ the King, all of them more racially and ethnically diverse than Howard Beach. Mr. Martocci attends Forest Hills High School, where, he said, his friends include black and Hispanic kids.

“The younger kids, they’re not racist at all,” Mr. Martocci said. “Everyone’s gotten over it.”

A few blocks away, in New Howard, a half-dozen or so young men were playing around near an elementary school, talking and wrestling. “We don’t live in a bubble,” one of them called out. Anthony Borzacchiello, 19, who goes to John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, and hopes to be a defense attorney, agreed. “I went to Christ the King,” he said. “It’s white and black. Everyone gets along.”

Still, there are limits. Mr. Rea, who grew up in Ozone Park and works for a trash hauler, lives in Howard Beach with a Puerto Rican roommate. He listens to a lot of 50 Cent. Some kids call the rapper Fitty. “But I call him Fifty,” Mr. Rea says, with a meaningful look. “I try not to go overboard. I don’t like my jeans too baggy.”