Half Sigma

SWPL and the ghetto meet at Prospect Park

A SWPL woman in the southeastern area of Prospect Park. Behind her, a boarded up building in the ghetto.

In order to appreciate her uber-SWPLness, I present a crop. Yes, that’s an iPhone she’s talking into.

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DaveInHackensack writes: “That's also an ~$800 stroller she's got there.”

Christian Lander missed that one. Expensive baby strollers and baby carriages should have been on the list of stuff that white people like.

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that "Expensive Strollers" is #135 in the book. Christian Lander didn't forget this, he just wants us to pay money to read his wisdom.

Another photo from Prospect Park

This scene was not that far away from the huddle of black men.

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“Sheila Tone” writes:

Did you do something tricky with the color?

I applied a bit of a warming filter because I think that the auto white balance was off, and I jacked up the saturation just a bit (but I had the camera set to the lowest saturation level).

However, I agree that the colors seem a little bit weird and I blame the camera. I’ve always felt that the colors produced by the Canon S90 were slightly off. For some reason, oranges don’t come out right: they either veer off to the yellow or the red. This is not something I know how to fix using Photoshop.

My Olympus E-620 SLR produces colors which seem to me to be better and more natural. Unfortunately, I left the E-620 home for this trip to Prospect Park, because it’s a PITA to carry around, and it’s not a good idea to walk around the ghetto with a big camera around your neck because you don’t want to attract attention to yourself in the ghetto. No, this is not me being “racist,” it’s genuinely a bad idea for a white person to attract attention to himself in a black neighborhood (a possible exception being Oak Bluffs).

To be fair to Prospect Park, the park itself is not the ghetto, and there are white people walking around there with visible cameras. And Flatbush Avenue looked like its safe enough during the day, as long as you don’t attract attention to yourself.

Blacks in Prospect Park

This picture was taken at the south eastern area of Prospect Park. Just outside the park is the ghetto. It looks like some of the ghetto residents have wandered into the park and are gathered together in some sort of huddle.

Normally, I feel that there’s no artistry in taking pictures with a telephoto lens, but I didn’t think it would be a good idea for a nerdy white guy like myself to walk up to these guys in order to get a more intimate photo.

I must point out that this is not the typical crowd that hangs out in Prospect Park. I estimate that only 15% of the people you see in Prospect Park are black, and of the 15%, one third are Oreos and another third are immigrant blacks from the Caribbean and Africa.

Visit to Prospect Park (with HBD commentary)

I took the Q train to the Prospect Park station. This is on the bad side of the Park. Before heading into the park, I walked a bit down Flatbush Avenue, a commercial street which serves the mostly black residents of the area.

A large number of the stores were barbers, hair stylists, and nail salons. There is no white neighborhood with so many of these places. Black people obviously put a lot more time and effort into their appearance than white people. Who knew?

There were lots of places to buy greasy food like pizza and fried chicken. And many bodegas. Liberals like to complain that poor people are fat because of the “unhealthy” food sold in their neighborhoods. Well, there were loads of empty storefronts waiting to be rented (obviously, business isn’t booming along Flatbush Avenue). I challenge these liberal do-gooders to stop complaining and open up a store on Flatbush Avenue selling “healthy” food. Of course the store will go out of business, because black people don’t want to eat food that white people consider to be “healthy.”

On the other hand, such a store might be profitable because there are a few brave white people trying to gentrify the neighborhood. Amongst all of the stores catering to blacks were two SWPL places. One sold “fine art clothing,” and the other was a coffee house in which I could see white people sitting around with coffee and their laptop computers.

It looks like you’re in the country, but it’s Brooklyn

So then I walked into Prospect Park, and it was like I entered a whole different world. There were hardly any black people in Prospect Park, even though it borders a black neighborhood. Black people obviously don’t like trees. This probably explains why blacks always live in cities, and then when you wander off into the countryside, there are fewer black people.

This is not to say that Prospect Park was all SWPL. There were many ethnic and working class whites in Prospect Park. I even saw a Hispanic SWPL couple. They looked just like two white people dressed in a SWPL-hipster manner, except they were talking to each other in Spanish. This demonstrates how the word “Hispanic” covers such a wide variety of people. Black Puerto Ricans are Hispanic, but some of the very whitest people you’ll ever meet (such as the couple I saw in Prospect Park) are also Hispanic!