Xochitl Gonzalez’s essay in the Atlantic today, “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?” (subtitle, “The sound of gentrification is silence”), frames the author’s experience in moving from a noisy minority neighborhood to a quieter, wealthy white college campus as evidence of pervasive class- and race-based oppression: “It took me years to understand that, in demanding my friends and I quiet down, these [wealthy white] students were implying that their comfort superseded our joy,” Gonzalez writes. “Some white students resented that we self-segregated. What they didn’t understand was that we just wanted to be around people in places where nobody told us to shush.”
When the author returned to Brooklyn after college, she was dismayed to find that the community was quieter than it had been during her childhood. That, too, was unforgivable: “Now the foreigners had come to my shores, with no intention of leaving. And they were demanding that the rest of us change to make them more comfortable.” Gonzalez continues:
I find many city noises nerve-racking and annoying: jackhammers doing street maintenance, the beeping of reversing trucks, cars honking for no good reason. Yet these noises account for a small minority of all noise complaints. Nearly 60 percent of recent grievances center on what I’d consider lifestyle choices: music and parties and people talking loudly. But one person’s loud is another person’s expression of joy.
What is there to say about an essay like this? Some arguments are too absurd to address at length; by quibbling with every dubious line, one is taking the premise more seriously than it deserves. But two things stand out: First, the hilariously racist assumption that undergirds Gonzalez’s piece — that minorities are, as a totalizing generalization, loud. (Has she spent much time in New York’s Asian neighborhoods?) And second, the insistence that every community should be loud to validate Gonzalez and her friends. Ironically, this is the inverse of what she accuses her white classmates of: Gonzalez resents that “their comfort superseded our joy.” In response, she insists that her preferred mode of communication supersede theirs.
The author assails noise ordinances and “quiet please” signs as an affront to her very identity. (“I had thought these were the sounds of poverty, of being trapped. I realized, in their absence, that they were the sounds of my identity, turned up to 11.”) In reality, different communities have different identities and styles — some may be louder, others quieter. The expectation that one abides by the rules and norms of a particular community while being a part of it isn’t oppression. It’s basic manners.
The British philosopher Michael Oakeshott once said, on a political impulse that he describes as “anti-individualism”: “The determined ‘anti-individual’” is “intolerant not only of superiority but of difference, disposed to allow in all others only a replica of himself, and united with his fellows in a revulsion from distinctness.” Most of us are capable of living with some amount of distinctiveness and difference. Gonzalez, it appears, isn’t.