I feel out of place-

-but no, not at all.
I am one among the white wealthy browsing the post-everything elite-intellectual bookstore; I am one among the young women walking Bedford Avenue bedecked in sunglasses, booty shorts and flowing shirts- less dressed up to be sure but it’s a result of my traveling restricting what I can pack; not any real indicator of a dividing line in class or privilege.

I was reading a book called “What the Hipster Was” or something, in a bookstore in Brooklyn, and it made the interesting argument that the argument over a cultural identity, of “hipster,” doesn’t matter.. It is a distraction from real entrenched power inequities. I agree with this. I share concerns with my friends over job anxiety: where can we afford to live? What jobs can we get, will we like or hate them and how much? Is going to school worth being in debt? But we enjoy in common the option of upward social and economic mobility. If so we choose it.
To choose away from suburbia, from the college and graduate education (both my upper-class-born American mother and working-class-born Serbian father met at Princeton)- these choices qualify my social role as a “hipster”: a “disaffected” youth, disillusioned with the status quo of White Power and attempting to disaffiliate from it. From what I perceive as normalcy.

(But bohemian alternatives do not equate to anticapitalism: even as I travel, temporarily homeless and transient, I buy overpriced coffees in cafes for the ambience.)

My homelessness is essentially a game because no real stakes exist; my privilege is there for me to draw on in dire circumstances, no matter how I try to shun or forget it.
It was not always like this. Before my hipster/punk coming-of-age, there was a time when I felt real anxiety about the prospect of ending up on the streets- at seventeen when I left my parents’ house in the middle of senior year.
A wealthy upper-middle-class white setting may seem a surprising backdrop to the closest I have come to feeling oppression. But perhaps not so surprising, because homelessness among youth was not a familiar topic among that community. I had no resources I knew of to call upon. Domestic abuse was as invisible and taboo to speak of as it remains now- especially, might I add, in predominantly white or wealthy communities.
Social workers, police, authorities, and many, many people ethnically profile the prevalence of domestic violence.

It is illuminating that my first experience of a. feeling less white than my peers/community, and b. feeling stigmatized for it (instead of say, different in an insignificant or interesting way) occurred in connection to the authority’s response to my dilemma of family violence.
My brother, drunk, had broken into the house I was renting a room in (after moving out of our parents’ house)- when he found me hiding inside from him, we began screaming and yelling, and the other tenant called the cops. No physical violence then occurred but I was terrified and expecting it.

One of the policemen told my white (but foreign, French immigrant) friend who I’d called there for support, that “this kind of stuff is just common in these immigrant families. This is their culture.”

In his comment I at once perceived contempt, detachment, racism- and in response felt alienated; stigmatized; and more alone. Cops had never been benevolent figures in my eyes but the experience solidified my realization that they were not sympathizers with victims simply because the law tells us they’re here to serve and protect.
That he shrugged off violence with a misogynist acceptance of the role of patriarchal force within a family structure; with a racist’s resignation to a belief that violence belongs in a foreigner’s way of life; a “barbarian” way of life.
That we immigrants come here bringing our violence and our troubles. As white and upper-middle-class my upbringing had been, the domestic violence in it was attributed to some racial or ethnic Other. This poses a problem for our society’s ability to help victims. Maybe that was why there were so few resources in my community- not because violence didn’t exist there (believe me, it does exist) but because we choose not to see it in a white or wealthy setting.

I believe that in some ways I was more adult at 17, 18, than now- even though even then at times I depended upon my mother’s money to help pay rent so I could avoid having to return to the house. At 18, I feared homelessness. I had not yet met the punks I would later meet who made a phase, a game of it-

I had not yet learned I could play with my privilege (perhaps only up to a certain age): test it; stake it; renounce it; forget it; fight it- all based on the security that whenever I chose to claim it it would BE THERE for my taking.
When I would learn this later, taking my place among the hipsters/punks, I escaped into the “permanent immaturity” that we, disaffected privileged mostly white youths, live in during our twenties and thirties. What becomes of us after that we don’t know- this feels so new. But though it seems new it is not revolutionary.

Revolution deals with power.

To be revolutionary, you must attempt to change power’s distribution. Ignoring power does not change it, and I think this wilful ignorance is what hipsters are guilty of- that everyone is guilty of who has more interest in dissecting the identities and nuances of “hipster” than in looking at the simpler truth:
white, upwardly mobile people.

The style, the age, the haircut, the lifestyle matters not so much as the privilege we have in common and the effect we have in common of raising rents in neighborhoods and displacing lower-income and ethnic minority folk.

It is not my FAULT I have economic power. I am so sorry for it I thought to ignore it and deny it completely: to “fashionably slum.”
My choices to follow a bohemian, traveler, punk/hippie/thrifty lifestyle are borne not out of necessity, but enabled by privilege. Just because I do not wish to spend my access or paths to wealth pursuing a future house in the suburbs or condo in the city, on an Ivy League education, on a car or brand-name clothing, does not mean this wealth or access to it, paths to it, do not exist for me.

The question is: does my having wealth/access to it take away from or negatively impact people with less? Does my ignoring my own economic power contribute to power inequity; not affect power inequity; or level out power inequity?
I think a simple answer is that as bystanders of any kind, we

-alternative/bohemian/hipster/punk privileged, and mostly but not necessarily all, white (the key qualifiers are class and money, which obviously do tend to run along racial lines) -

certainly are not agents of social change that extends beyond our community bubble.

Maybe we are agents of a kind of social, philosophical liberation for our privileged peers: yes, you as a woman can defy some ultra-femme norms, let your body hair grow or date another woman or travel on your own, and you will still find pockets of community that do not stigmatize you for it.
Yes, you can travel if you find your job, your projected future, or hometown stifling.
Yes, you can hop trains- the chances are slim that you will go to jail if caught, almost guaranteed that you will get out of jail quickly if you did go, and pretty much nil that anyone would suspect you of being a terrorist or an “illegal alien,” subject to deportation or the concentration-camp-like prison “facilities.”

No matter how much White Mainstream Power may dislike punks, it recognizes us as its own: class, whiteness, privilege. Entitlement.

As personally liberating I did in fact find it to experience travel and collective living, DIY arts and biking and all that, I noticed and still notice the obvious fact that almost everyone in these communities I cherish is white. If on the occasion an individual is not white, then almost invariably their class background was the tie that created such commonality with their white/hipster/punk peers.

Attempts to provide the resources that our punk community provides for ourselves, to a broader low-income ethnically mixed community are certainly well-intentioned.

Bike collectives that offer work-trade or free repair or cheap bikes for the kids of a community that this very same collective house’s presence is gentrifying, mitigates the effects of gentrification with the positive services they offer.
Donation-based yoga in locations that are in low-income and ethnically diverse areas is becoming more common: a good thing perhaps if the original residents are taking advantage of it. But is this just cultural imperialism: taking over neighborhoods and then to mask or apologize for the blatant displacement by power, we encourage converts to our cultural amenities? Maybe that’s harsh. Maybe it’s true.
But I’m not trying to knock efforts to make resources of any kind more affordable. And certainly free meals as well as affordable bikes and repair are of use to any community.
I read that the hipster figure becomes a presence in any community once that community reaches some level of economic wealth. As if whether good or bad, the hipster is simply an evolutionary pinnacle in a society.
While it’s true that a certain brand of intellectual and cultural elitism DEPENDS upon the having of spare time (and therefore, money), it’s debatable that every culture would inevitably manifest hipsters as a reaction to a comfortable position of wealth.

But whether and how hipsters develop is besides the point.

Once again the hipster concept distracts from real issues: economic inequality that is present, today. To be an agent of long-lasting social change and affect the roots of inequality, we privileged youths have to join that struggle which seeks to redistribute wealth and open up jobs and mobility to all.
IGNORING OUR ECONOMIC POWER OBVIOUSLY DOESN’T redistribute it- we ignore one resource we have to be effective. So okay, wealth is one resource, and perhaps the last one we WANT to use.
Out of guilt over even associating with it- or out of a selfish desire to guard it, safe if untapped, for ourselves in a future when we’re old enough to want to claim back our power- maybe for both these reasons we are reluctant to take those paths to make money or part with it.
We can do small things like spend the money we spend anyway, on coffee and food and such, on the family businesses our neighbors set up so that we support through consumerism the communities we slowly displace through rent..

We privileged feel more comfortable donating our time than our money.

Time that we have when and because we have money. The upside to this is that we foster relationships with people outside our privileged circles- while this may feel “fulfilling” for us, does this simply solidify the imperialism of white power? Like native-friendly missionaries that made colonialism more tolerable and tolerated, easing tensions and thus working against the potential for overthrow and rebellion?
In these forms: open-workshop bike collectives with affordable classes and work-trade opportunities; community meals (that we more often choose to take the time to dumpster, than to spend our money buying food for); donation based yoga, dance, arts classes.
Not that any of these things are negative.

But I would argue this: that in these last categories, hip-hop is much more effective than anything punks/hipsters have offered. And rightly so, because hip-hop DERIVES FROM THE SAME community it gives to.

There is no reminiscent feel of neocolonialist missionary work in hiphop. Birthed and developed within ethnic and economically disparaged communities, it retains a role and identity separate from that of white punks/hipsters- NO MATTER HOW SIMILAR THE GOALS and/or values are.
Self-expression, social change, battling inequality, personal empowerment, creativity, community: hipsterism and hip-hop may share these values but hip-hop is more practical. At least, for underprivileged and non-white communities. It may be that hipsterism is more practical, or provides a more logical identity, for the white privileged youths.

As a post-anarchist, punk-traveling, college-educated-but-voluntarily-not-graduated, hippie, I am-duh- a hipster.
My identity as a breakdancer ties to hip-hop culture, and these two identities- hip-hop and hipster/punk- have always felt quite separate to me. If not opposing, than at least incompatible.

And this sense of division, internal and external, has often troubled me. I feel never at home. Either I feel a scene as “too white,” too entitled- or I am in a scene that makes me feel self-consciously “too white”- not really in terms of apparent ethnicity, but white in terms of how do I speak, what type of education I’ve had, my clothing, my demeanor: lack of “hardness”. My paradoxical tendency to be more quiet, submissive, softspoken, traits that are cultivated in white upper-class females and seen as appropriately “feminine” (traits that are detrimental to survival outside that white-power bubble- and even inside; traits that justified my mother’s submission to the power trips of my father).
Paradox because these traits combine with my hipster “nonconformity” in action: traveling, dressing less feminine- these choices to disaffiliate with my white-power status quo background, yet which only illuminate the privilege I have in choosing to run from it.

How confusing. Feeling a lack of belonging and true community, I travel to try and find it.
Ideally my community is one that’s diverse in ethnicity, gender, age, orientation, language.. but wait. More than that.
Ideally my community is one of sharing, of trading time and resources. But wait. more than that.
Of a common effort to create justice; of a common engagement in struggling for economic and social equity and mobility among EVERYONE. Okay.

So the closest thing I find to this diverse community banded and bonded together through its individuals’ politicization, are the non-profits. Everywhere I travel I see the same scenes, and everywhere: some select non-profits merge the value of artistic expression and personal liberation that I learned to cherish as a punk/hipster, with the connection to community and mutual aid and giving.
And everywhere I go it is HIP HOP that connects these things, at least in the urban non-profits.
To be honest and therefore happy with myself, I should not try to hide or alter the authentic truths of my background and my choices that unmistakably qualify me as a privileged punk/hippie: a hipster.
I love to read and to write; I love art, seeing it or creating it. Bikes, performance art, living with a bunch of friends, old-time music, traveling- I love these “alternative” lifestyles just as I realize my privilege INHERENT IN MY CHOICES to pursue them.
I speak how I speak, dress how I dress, live with whom I live, socialize how I do- and it benefits no one to try to create a different image. That is not real belonging.
One resource I can provide in a way, should I volunteer at a hip-hop-based non-profit, is to connect the punk resources of food and cheap or free places to crash with youth that might need them.

These options exist, at least somewhat, for youths even outside the hipster/punk category. At least, somewhat, I guess. Temporarily, perhaps.

I am reminded of my house in Tucson and a punk house I stayed at in Santa Cruz, both houses that for some time hosted unexpectedly some runaway teenagers. In both instances the houses’ operation as a safe space for these youth was not a planned function of the house, by its members, but accidental- yet it functioned so anyway, at least as long as the rent-paying members’ charity and toleration of difference lasted.
In another house in Olympia I remember we denied couch room to a guy who didn’t have a place to stay. His error was using language we found offensive, but it also fell outside our highly specified norms of punk-appropriate, collegiate politically-correct.
While we reasoned that his language, offensively misogynist and homophobic, ruled him out- because, validly, we wanted to maintain our house as a safe space first for ourselves and our friends-

we were also more judgmental of the misogyny we perceived in HIS culture than we would be aware of in our own. In our own norms, misogyny is less visible.

So a misogynist using the right language, possessing the right color skin, the right background, could have and in fact did secure our couch as a place to stay that we had denied that one man. Many a male traveler sopped up our charity and targeted women one by one to hook up with and thus establish their residence as another temporary space to crash at. But the difference was these men were punks and thus recognizable as one of us, and thus they were given the benefit of the doubt.
Now let me describe an incident in which the guilty memory of our judgmentalism in Olympia clouded my judgment, years later in Chicago.

I met a young man in Chicago who was black and different from me in how he spoke, who he spent his time with, what he did with his time. Except for breakdancing- that we had in common and that was the context of our meeting.
I was traveling through, train-hopping and hitchhiking, and scoping out potential future home bases. He grew up and was living still in Chicago; was in a b-boy crew; and organized open practices at the same non-profit he had grown up attending. I valued meeting him as an ally on the dance floor (an environment so male-dominated I feel very much the need for allies); but he showed sexual interest and came on to me strongly in a manner I found disrespectful.
And then, I profiled him- by viewing his texts and persistence more CHARITABLY than I would have with a white man of a background more similar to my own.
I ignored my own intuitive feelings of discomfort and my valid right to tolerate only respect from all whom I interact with- through a kind of cultural CONDESCENSION or “tolerance.” Equating cultural and class differences with misogyny- this is racism, itself, though I sought to be tolerant. I created a double standard.

I will also admit that I imagined a relationship of any kind with him would secure my belonging in the hip-hop community, a community I perceived as more HIS THAN MINE. Which I don’t care to dissect now- whether that’s a truth I don’t know.
The point is, he was an asshole. As an individual, he was misogynistic and disrespectful towards me.
I have the choice of viewing him as an individual and recognizing I need to set clearer boundaries in my judgment; or I have the choice to profile other young men with his background/class/race as potentially more misogynist than the white punks I am USED to dealing with. The latter would be a mistake.
I am a feminist, determined, and intellectual- and I cannot sacrifice these aspects of my identity nor divorce their application to my life. But I cannot hide in them, in preaching to the choir of other queer-identified, college-educated, female-bodied punks (not that that community isn’t vital to my well-being).
But I cannot/must not hide from hip-hop, as if hip-hop is a culprit or the primary threat, on the wrong premise that hip-hop is more misogynist or has less place for me.
Where is the place for the conscious, independent, queer female- in ANY culture, hip-hop, hipster, or others? There IS one, no matter how small, and you find and participate in it.
If there is yet to be a place, you create it with all the space of your own physical and spiritual presence, and others find you and the space grows.
So even as a privileged, college-educated “mostly white” hipster, I have a passion in hip-hop and a place in it.
It remains my challenge to fight for my space within it, but as I fight for my place as a woman (of any background) within it, I owe also the obligation to fight for OTHERS’ space in the communities that I freely traverse.

(If I desire welcome despite my “otherness” within the hip-hop community, and diversity within it, I must balance that personal struggle in that with focusing on encouraging within broader society a welcome of THOSE members, a diversity in the power structures I have access to and the privileges I enjoy).

THEN I will be truly hip-hop, truly honest, and truly myself.