What my great-grandmother wouldn't have recognized as Brooklyn

Despite living in oddly-rural suburban NJ, and having had to dodge a live turkey while driving a couple days ago, I feel very connected to Brooklyns Old and New. Both of my parents grew up in the borough. I moved there for several years, right after college (cliché! sorry!), and I'm distantly related to a certain pair of artisanal-chocolate entrepreneurs who've won over, among others, at least two national editions of Vogue. (See also Slide 7 here).

One thing I've long noticed, but have trouble putting my finger on, is the way that Brooklyn-the-idea has become a kind of New York for people who otherwise hate New York. Who'd find it all too crass and competitive, or too diverse, too busy, too life just moves so fast. Young white people, but not ethnic whites from the region. White people from "Real America," not necessarily "Red America," but not suburbs of the city.

"Brooklyn" as an aesthetic has come to mean heritage-chic, or Americana-chic, this rustic, no-artificial-fibers, nothing-your-great-grandmother-wouldn't-have-recognized-as-food mentality. (Manhattan even has a Brooklyn-themed bar.) Nineteenth-century-ish vests and facial hair. Homesteader, pioneer low-maintenance-ness. Kale, rutabaga, and turnips. There's also Europhilia, and an influx of Western European tourists and expats, making Brooklyn (parts of it) almost an extension of that hipper, quieter, northern part of the Marais.

I am, as the expression goes, not hating, just saying. As I've said repeatedly, I'm a big fan of hipster cuisine. I miss the Greenmarkets, the coffee shops with chipper-yet-judgmental baristas. If I ever get over my pathological fear of spending more than $30 on jeans, I'm totally buying these. It's amusing to me, as someone who grew up in Manhattan, thinking of Brooklyn as vaguely dangerous and not remotely glamorous (although, by late high school, Brooklyn and my impression of it had changed), that it's now such a thing. But I'm part of the "thing," or was, back in the days when I'd get a martini at Soda on Vanderbilt.

What I find unsettling, I suppose, is the veneer of authenticity. It's all about being really authentically American, or maybe British or French (via). It's the embrace (aesthetically) of these identities through which Brooklyn's own earlier residents (non-whites, ethnic whites) were traditionally excluded. It's nostalgia not even for preppy or the era of quotas and Jim Crow, but something earlier still, a simpler time when these questions weren't even being asked. Now it's all about under-spiced food with self-farmed ingredients.

Meanwhile I certainly don't think those who participate in heritage-chic are themselves more likely than anyone else to be racist, or are participating with sinister motivations. "Hipster racism" may well be out there, but I'm not sure that's what this is. I don't know what it means that Brooklyn is the home of heritage-chic, but I must learn. Which is exactly why I'm having trouble putting my finger on my argument here; also why you, the WWPD audience, are getting this post before I've even tried to pitch this idea anywhere.