Stuff White People Like: The A Train?

For all of my Brooklyn heads, or anyone who rides the A or the C train regularly —

Is Jay St Brooklyn’s version of the 59th St conundrum? I remember once upon a time I was watching something akin to Def Poetry Jam and this white dude was talking about what he called “the 59th street conundrum” — his observation that on the uptown A train, all the white people get off at 59th street. (next stop 125th). I rarely venture that far uptown so I’m not sure.

However, I’m willing to bet that at least 70% of the white people on any given car on the downtown A/C train will indeed get off the train when it reaches Jay St./Borough Hall. (Of course to then get on the F train, which is a disturbingly white train by the way, once it gets into Brooklyn.) When you ride the A or the C, play close attention. I have a game that I like to play where I guess when people will get off the train — so far, so good.

But I do admit I’m having to adjust lately. It seems like white people have this new contest that they’re participating in. They’re all competing to see who can stay on the A train the longest. Most of them are gone by Clinton-Washington (or Nostrand on express), but even at Utica there tend to be 1 or 2 stragglers. I guess they win.

I attribute this white people contest to the nouveau hipster.

Now I understand that not all white people are hipsters (or do I mean trendsters?), and probably not all white people are participating in this new game, but I’m talking about white people at large here. To echo Bernie Mac, I’m talkin’ about universal white people.
I kid.

I think hipsters have this need to prove that they are cultured and cosmopolitan, that they can traverse the metropolis without problems. They are post-everything, which is why they like to move to what might’ve been the hood (before they spread the word to their bros who pedaled over with kegs on their backs). They are post-white, post-class, even post-violence because they transcend all these things, they understand them, so they aren’t phased. Moving into the hood is also part of appropriating a working class aesthetic, which is a key hipster characteristic that Douglas Haddow mentions in his hilarious article Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization.

He writes:

The American Apparel V-neck shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols and icons of working or revolutionary classes that have been appropriated by hipsterdom and drained of meaning. Ten years ago, a man wearing a plain V-neck tee and drinking a Pabst would never be accused of being a trend-follower. But in 2008, such things have become shameless clichés of a class of individuals that seek to escape their own wealth and privilege by immersing themselves in the aesthetic of the working class.

Word.

So uh… what about the A train?