Don Imus was suspended from MSNBC and CBS Radio for two weeks after making racial slurs about the members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team.
If you didn’t know already, Imus referred to the members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.” Pam Spaulding has been all over the racial, misogynistic and class issues on this one. Even Al Roker is getting into the act. Various bloggers have covered the utter tin-earedness of the responses of inside-the-beltway media figures and politicians who can’t resist defending the old fossil.* Others have covered the free-speech issues involved with calling for Imus’s resignation. I, personally, don’t think a damn thing will change unless he’s fired given his long history of racist and sexist remarks and his use of the public airwaves, and I agree wholeheartedly that Imus’s remarks are just a cover for what he really wanted to say.
I don’t want to cover all of that, which has been handled so well elsewhere.
Instead, I want to talk about New Jersey.
I think that one of the reasons that Imus’s remarks were so vitriolic and class-based is that the Lady Knights are from Rutgers, which is not only the state university of New Jersey, but also in the urban-industrial-gasp-black northeastern part of the state.
I’ve probably only mentioned this in passing, but I lived in New Jersey until I was 13. And you wouldn’t believe the jabs and jokes you hear about New Jersey whenever you leave the state and tell people you live in New Jersey. Even when you come from an area with houses like this, which is down the street from where we lived (albeit long before prices got so high).
But, hey, New Jersey is associated with Newark, and New Brunswick, which means black people. I’m sure the Newark riots of the late 60s didn’t help the image of New Jersey, nor does the continuing mob situation (think The Sopranos is entirely fiction? You’d be surprised at how many mob figures we had out in affluent bits of New Jersey. Those scenes from the first season of The Sopranos where AJ is entirely clueless about his family being involved in the mob yet everyone else knowing are fairly true to life).
And yet.
When I was 13-about-to-turn-14, my family moved from New Jersey to Connecticut. To a community where housing was a lot less due to its distance from New York relative to our old community (Glastonbury, CT, is properly considered a suburb of Hartford, while Mendham, NJ, especially after NJ Transit started running a direct train line to New York, is a suburb of NYC). And yet.
My family’s star rose way the hell higher than it should have, just by moving out of New Jersey into a less-overally-affluent community in Connecticut.
Because, people: ask yourselves: what does “New Jersey” mean to you? What does “Connecticut” mean to you? Does “armpit” come into play for the first but not the second?
Really, neither state’s reputation reflects its reality. Each has a reputation influenced by elements on the extreme end of the spectrum. It’s just that New Jersey gets defined by its poorest elements while Connecticut, similar in every way, gets defined by its richest elements. So when you hear “New Jersey,” you think of the oil refineries in Paterson, or the pork store in Kearney featured in The Sopranos, or Newark, or Trenton. And when you hear “Connecticut,” you think of Greenwich, or Darien, or New Canaan or even the dairy farms East of the River. You don’t think of Bridgeport, or New Haven (lest you’re thinking of Yale) or Hartford, all of which are among the poorest cities in the country. In fact, you may laugh when you watch Miami Ink and hear Darren Brass talk about “Connecticut Hardcore.” Even though Brass is from Waterbury, which is pretty hardcore.
What was interesting to me was how much power just mentioning you were from Connecticut had in, say, Michigan. When I was in law school, there was no real difference in perception between me and the guy from Stamford who went to Yale — when some guy from Bloomfield Hills was mocking a guy from Muskegon about class issues, all I had to do was pull out the “I’m from Connecticut and you don’t know Greenwich from Stafford Springs” thing to pull rank, in a manner of speaking, and stop that shit. Would it have worked if I were identifiably from New Jersey? Probably not.
In fact, our old friend(?) Bill Donohue pulled out the Jersey hate during his woe-is-me-ing over the horrible, horrible affront to the Catholic Church that was the Chocolate Jesus:
DONAHUE: All right. All right, first of all, Leonardo, you’re not.
But, quite frankly, where should you have this displayed? In New Jersey is where New Yorkers put their garbage. There’s a big sanitation dump. That’s where you should put it.
I’d like to dedicate this post to Amanda, whose protracted argument with me over whether “mansion” is a proper term for Bush’s Potemkin Southfork vs. “ranch,” the more Texan-friendly option, is lost to server movement.
Perhaps Amanda can see that Texas and New Jersey have a lot in common, if nothing else than big hair, bad drivers, funny accents (cripes, you shoulda heard my mother) and unnecessary (though not entirely undeserved) loathing from other states. But no matter how much you think Texas gets denigrated — trust me, Jersey has it ten times worse.
___________
* Yeah, it’s ageist. But have you seen the dessicated old cadaver recently? And what’s with the Snoopy’s-cousin-Spike-from-Needles look with the duster and cowboy hat in New York? Or, if I’m not mistaken, he lives in CONNECTICUT.
My best friend is from Detroit, but she’s tall, blonde, and blue-eyed. I can’t tell you how many conversations like this she had when we were in college:
“So where are you from?
“Detroit.”
“Really? Bloomfield Hills or Grosse Pointe?”
“No. Detroit. Dee-troit. The city.”
Followed by the questioner slowly backing away so as not to get the contamination, too.
Her parents’ house was pretty close to 8 Mile Road, if that gives you a general idea of where she lived. Definitely not the lily-white upper-class upbringing that people assumed by looking at her.
I’m usually just a lurker here, but I wanted to step out of the shadows for a moment to thank you for writing this. I’m a lifelong Jersey girl, having lived in both the poorest and the richest areas of the state, and I’ve practically made a career out of defending Jersey against those who think they can sum up the Garden State based on what they see from the Turnpike and The Sopranos. The Jersey angle of this story never even occurred to me until I read your post, but I have to say, knowing how much Jersey is hated by the other 49 states, it makes sense. I’ll keep defending my wonderfully rich and diverse state until the day I die, though, if only because I am a glutton for punishment.
Thank you again.
New Jersey, to me and I imagine many others of my generation, looks like a Kevin Smith film, so I can’t say I’ve ever really thought about it as any sort of cesspool like Imus and others must.
I’m from Long Island (LAWN-GUYlind), and most jokes I heard about NJ were about “big hair, bad drivers, funny accents” which is strange because we have those things here too. But it was never anything about Black people specifically.
There are a lot of superfund sites in NJ – which is what I attributed the “armpit” and garbage dump jokes to. But perhaps the reason those sites exist there is because some environmental racism is going on in the neighborhoods least able to protect themselves.
My first reaction: New Brunswick is so not North Jersey!
What I find interesting about this is that outsiders see Jersey as some sort of monolith, usually based around the Turnpike near Newark Airport, whereas residents know there’s at least four (North, Central, South, Shore) regions of the state, with attendant stereotypes that come along with them.
I do think that the stereotype of New Jersey is changing, particularly if your skin is white and your accent is more neutral; I certainly got more of the “Connecticut” response that the “New Jersey” response when I indicated where I was from in college.
So, my stock rose when I moved from Arkansas to Connecticut? (even though it was only Stafford Springs; such details only would have confused folks) I’ve always felt for NJ folks, especially after I drove through the Jersey City/ Newark area.
Oh Newark’s not New Jersey, geographically yes, it is technically in new jersey, but true new jersey types don’t think it is, largely because the citizens of newark aren’t inbred dunwhich horror rejects – which marks them as diabolical outsiders when they travel about among the rest of the hell-mouth-breathers.
The Local Shop from the league of gentlemen could have been from new jersey, except it lacked the neccesary giant ball of string such places always have.
It’s one of those bits of the south that suffers deeply from colonial-esque exploitation but is still filled with confederate flag waving morons who can’t wait to lick whitey’s jackboots for the honor of being shat upon.
I have no sympathy for New Jersey, nor anything but contempt for it and all who’ll sail upon once I figure out how to push it into the sea.
There are valid reasons for hating new jersey – mostly because a high number of people are like donohue there, but also because when New Yorkers look down on jerseyites, and because it’s largley just a another bit of New York but with out any sort of manhatten equivalent area that money and yuppies can sink into.
but also because when New Yorkers look down on jerseyites
forgot to end that sentence, that should read: but also because when new yorkers look down on jerseyites, the jerseyites look down on places like newark, so it’s hard to like the mid point of a cycle of oppression and hatred.
I beg to differ on Texas though…with few exceptions, they deserve every bit of their criticism. I think it comes back to the sense that many Texans have that they are indeed Special and Better than You purely by virtue of being a Texan. Food’s good and the Hill Country is mighty pretty, but I honestly cannot think of anything else good about Texas. And I was born and raised there.
Seconded! Anything off of 78 west of Irvington is no longer really part of the North Jersey category. It’s possible that places like Millburn might consider themselves North Jersey, but definitely not where I’m from.
“Because, people: ask yourselves: what does “New Jersey” mean to you? What does “Connecticut” mean to you? Does “armpit” come into play for the first but not the second?”
This is a little different for me…at least as I’ve always run into it, Dirty Jersey is about culture, class and ethnicity in terms of of speaking about “white trash” and the bridge and tunnel set. If anything, there’s an erasure of Black Jerseyites.
And CT definitely conjures the word armpit. Some of the most bombed out real estate on earth is in this state. The rust belt and joblessness have hit this place hard.
I seconded that: I think New Jersey I think “Kevin Smith”. I think “Clerks” and “Jersey Girl”. I never reflected on the industrial aspects of it, or the class aspects.
I grew up in NJ, but these days I live on Long Island. The town I live in now and the town I grew up in are pretty much identical – suburban, 45 minutes from NYC, and with a lot of strip malls – but believe you me, saying “I am from Long Island” gets a MUCH different reaction than “I am from New Jersey”.
However, I am moving back to NJ next year (to attend Rutgers, even!) and I’m pretty happy about it.
I agree with Antigone and Joe. I never really considered New Jersey one way or the other. But then, I’m from southern WV and I get a lot of the barefoot hillbilly and Deliverance stereotypes (even though that movie was set in N. Georgia and not WV).
I have never thought about New Jersey being looked down upon because there are a lot of black people in it; I thought it was because most people’s entire exposure came from the NJ Turnpike, which mostly smells like swamp gas and is ugly even in its prettiest parts.
My take on NJ is rather different, having gone to college and then lived four more years in Philly; in Philadelphia New Jersey is seen as the suburbs, the place white folks with money and a total lack of hipness run to to escape having to deal with anyone who isn’t like them.
But some of the most beautiful homes I’ve ever seen are in Jersey. I have always thought that stereotyping the entire state based on what you see from the Turnpike is ridiculous.
That being said, NJ civil engineers *are* on some kind of drugs. Jughandles are weird, traffic circles are always a terrible idea, and roads large enough for two cars to drive on side by side that have no lines painted on them is just dumb. But then, there are stupid features of civil engineering in every state, such as Pennsylvania, which randomly names entirely different unconnected roads in the same general area with the same name, New York, which thinks it’s a good idea to have traffic lights on an expressway (the Taconic), and so forth.
I would note that the fact that New Jersey has a lot of superfund sites doesn’t mean that it’s more polluted than places with fewer superfund sites. Places only ever get designated as superfund sites if there is an a local environmental authority with any power to force those designations. At the very least, having a superfund site means that it’s not being completely ignored. I grew up in another much-maligned state, West Virginia, and there are tons of sites that bear the byproducts from the manufacture of Agent Orange and other pesticide products which receive no attention at all. I’d be delighted if we could get as many superfund sites as New Jersey.
Also, to correct Donahue, New Yorkers (at least the ones from Long Island) ship their garbage to West Virginia via a likely mafia-dominated garbage cartel from Pennsylvania. I’m not pulling this out of my ass.
Anyway, closer to on-topic: I’ve always wondered what the mass-culture origins of peoples’ impressions of locations are. Some recent ones, like the Sopranos or Kevin Smith movies have been mentioned for New Jersey, and Connecticut’s got Martha Stewart. I grew up far from each state, but before I had ever visited either of them I posessed some of these stereotypes too. They can probably be traced back to a large number of mass-media moments at particular times throughout history, because they don’t come from thin air. And unlike racial or gender stereotypes that apply to people in your daily life and are probably transmitted more organically, state-based prejudices are pretty random steroetypes to have if you aren’t from somewhere nearby.
Mansion. “Ranch” implies livestock.
So true. When we first met, The Beau thought that since I was from Connecticut, my hometown (Southbury) must be just like Greenwich. He was shocked that there are actually trailer parks and poor people in Connecticut.
Chiming in, as another proud product of the Garden State.
I grew up on the beach, in Monmouth Co., and was honestly shocked by my fair homestate’s reputation when I left. Or rather went further away than the east coast (where I attended college) to the midwest. Liberal arts colleges on the east coast weren’t exactly full of folks who sneered at NJ, but what they were filled with was folks *from* NJ. Why is that? I think it must be our school system.
My pet peeve now, in NYC, are those folks who are fresh to Manhattan from far, far away who are immediately quite free with the insults against folks who grew up 30 minutes away.
No, no, no! Jughandles are *fabulous* and infinitely better than getting stuck behind someone waiting to turn left across a divided highway. The problem with the traffic circles isn’t that they exist, it’s that they have “historic patterns” instead of regular rules about how to drive on them.
evil fizz is right. Jughandles are genius.
Aside from flying into Newark (which is a horrible airport: right up there with Atlanta when it comes to horrible airport designs), I’ve never been to New Jersey. So, I have to ask those who are from there; do you think it is beneficial or detrimental to have Kevin Smith type views of Jersey? I always thought that Jersey was presented pretty neutrally: some liked Jersey, some hated Jersey, and some just lived there.
Count me in as another grew-up-in-Jersey kid….lived in Trenton until I was 14, then moved to the dairy farming community of North Buttboink, New York, population 1,000. Oh, the toxic waste and armpit jokes were a riot – considering they were coming from my chaw-spitting, trash-barrel-burning, cow-manure-scented classmates. Thank heavens in live in Chicago now. :)
Try being from West Virginia.
It may not have worked as effectively as if you said you were from Connecticut, but having grown up in Michigan and having, as an undergrad, attended the same university as you did for law school (I suspect our time overlapped there somewhat), there was a kind of geographic social hierarchy there. It’s not overly oppressive or anything like that, but there was, in some contexts, a sense that the “coastal” folks (wherever they were from) were the savvier students and the in-state and regional people were lucky to be able mingle with them.
Which, as an in-state student, annoyed me.
Certainly not, though where she lived along 8 Mile would make a difference. If she was from the west side, she likely would have been in a more prosperous neighborhood than elsewhere.
Antigone — the Kevin Smith thing is kind of funny. He and I are basically the same age and grew up within 15 minutes of each other. The Red Bank gazebo where folks hang out in Chasing Amy really is where us little punk rock kids would hang out and smoke circa 1985.
As an addendum, zuzu, I do know how you feel. Having grown up in Michigan (in suburban Detroit, I can tell you all kinds of stories about people’s perceptions of the state and of the Midwest generally. Mnemosyne’s anecdote is just one illustration.
I prefer “ranchette” myself.
Given that they would sometimes be mugged for their groceries when they walked home from the store, I think you can say that they weren’t in the most prosperous neighborhood.
Oh, yes.
I grew up in NJ, 1/2 hour by train from The City. Later I went to work for an NJ representative in DC and developed a fierce pride in my home state, somewhat is response to the constant denigration but mostly by realizing that we did so much right in comparison to most other states.
Low DUI rate? check. High high school graduation rate? check. Strong air quality laws? (check, though all that crap blowing over from PA doesn’t help). Gay friendly laws? check – not up there with MA yet but about as good as it gets otherwise. Stem cell research. Smarth growth planning. Highest rate of contribution in Federal taxes vs. return in federal money (IOW, we’re subsidizing many of the states of people who mock us). A generally sane and competent judiciary. Not that the state is perfect, many huge problems still, but compared to most states we’re doing pretty well. It makes the “armpit” jokes even sillier.
Having lived in NJ, I feel entitled to hate it. Some of the beaches are nice, and some of the southern part of the state is very beautiful, but there are nice beaches (free, even) and beautiful scenery all over. (People from NJ seemed just like people from anywhere else, except for that weird love for NJ.) Then again, I’m not American, so I was somewhat insulated from the usual stereotypes and don’t know which cities to be scornful of and which suburbs to be impressed by.
OTOH, jughandles are totally brilliant, though streets which have jughandles on some intersections and normal left turn lanes on others are really, really, really confusing. More jughandles, and better signaling of left turn priority on non-jughandles. Still, I might be the only person ever who thought NJ traffic signaling was quite clear and easily comprehensible.
Also, I’m a pro-roundabout person, only they need to have clearer usage patterns for cars, bikes and pedestrians.
My mom’s side of the family is from Jersey (Ocean County) and growing up I could never understand why so many people had a problem with it. I remember traveling out west with my grandparents and upon seeing that they were from Jersey, some random guy decided to make a joke like “watch your hubcaps.” My grandmother, who is normally quite reserved, went off on him. I was utterly confused.
I do think a lot of it is the fact that most people’s interactions w/ NJ are on the turnpike, next to all of the heavy industry. Meanwhile, we drove through the pine barrens in order to visit family so I had a completely diferent view of traveling in Jersey.
Spot on. New Brunswick itself has a sizeable minority population, and I think the stats at Rutgers are close to half nonwhites (this is off the top of my head). There are a lot of students not on the basketball team that could be slurred in the same way as Imus smeared the players, and it’s fueling the reaction here. (Yes, I go to Rutgers; I’m a grad student. I’d be attending the rally in support of the team this afternoon, if I didn’t have a headache the size of Bayonne.)
Oddly, I’ve lived here only since August, but I already feel compelled to defend the state to others. Maybe because I grew up in a state that doesn’t need to be defended most of the time.
I usually lurk here, but I also wanted to throw my two cents in. I understand where people from NJ are coming from in terms of misperceptions about the state. I’m from Kentucky, and we are pretty high on the list when it comes to states with bad reputations as well. We are high on all the bad lists (obesity, smoking, overall health) and low on the good ones.
I’m not that sure New Jersey has it worse than Kentucky and other southern states, though (like Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, West Virginia). Perhaps it feels that way because it is in popular culture a lot more- the Sopranos, Kevin Smith films, etc. But states like Kentucky are rarely in the spotlight. And when we are, its usually because of some natural disaster and the reporter interview the most stereotypical “Kentuckian” they can find- toothless, inarticulate, dirty, etc.
Also, my friends from New Jersey make fun of Kentucky, so they don’t seem particularly attuned to the plight of other states that suffer from PR problems!
Hey, I’m from New Mexico. At least no one ever says, “There’s a *New* Jersey?” or congratulates you on your excellent English or anything like that.
If Jersey had a hip, cool rep, I couldn’t have bought a luxury condo in Jersey City that’s less than a 1/2 hour commute to mjob in downtown Manhattan for just over 100K in 2000! So please, please, please keep them jokes coming!
oops…”mjob” isn’t a word…but “my job” is not only a word, but two! Sorry ’bout that. Feel free to make some Jersey jokes about me!
I know. The incest jokes alone are enough to justify massive anger issues. I even used to get it from other W. Virginians (particularly people from the panhandles or northern part of the state who lowered themselves to attend college in the ‘backward’ part of the state–I went to Marshall). The only other state I ever heard more/worse jokes about was Arkansas, and even those were the same sorts of things.
And to the superfund sites, at least Jersey’s messes are being cleaned up. WV’s most polluted sites (and there are plenty of them, what with the chemical plants and coal companies) will probably never get fixed.
I’m from New Jersey and proud of it. I always say, Tom Waits wrote a song about me. And jughandles are genius. (I now live in Rockland County, NY, about 5 miles from the NJ state line. I work in NJ.)
I totally agree that NJ gets a lot of unwarranted grief. We are associated with the mob (okay, rightly, but still), with pollution, and with corrupt cops. We have exactly as many Ivy League schools as Connecticut, and wealthy towns that would make Greenwich blush, but we don’t get the respect.
Meanwhile, both football and basketball were invented in New Jersey. Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, Count Basie, and Phoebe Snow are among our natives. LSD was invented here. All points of honor.
Kevin Smith gets it about New Jersey, as do Zach Braff and Bryan Singer. I like seeing my state depicted in ways other than the stereotypical mob-big hair-dirty politics-landfill meme.
New Jersey also has a great history with politicians. Not only have we had some terrific liberal Democrats, but two of the only Republicans I’ve ever liked are late NJ Senator Millicent Fenwick and former NJ Congresswoman Marge Roukema.
Hold on, don’t New Yorkers look down on everyone?
They look down on Jersey. They don’t think about the rest of the country much, which gets interpreted as looking down.
Conerning West Virginia jokes about inbreeding… I’ve come up with a novel tactic. When people tell those jokes, I tell them that I am inbred (which is technically true… two of my great-grandparents were cousins) and that I haven’t really experienced any problems. Reactions vary, but it’s usually a disarming response when I’m sick of hearing people’s crap (and there’s a lot of it where I live in Pittsburgh, so close to the border).
My perception of New Jersey was mostly shaped by my college experience, where I sort of thought of Jersey as a vast suburb with virtually indistinguishable componant parts. The students from Jersey identified themselves by Highway exits which just made the whole state seem interchangable. Everyone I knew from the state had virtually the same background, too: middle-middle to upper-middle class. While that was probably more a product of my school, it definitely fueled my land of suburbia impression.
Myself, I was from Connecticut. And not one of the nice parts. Its weird because there really is a very solid impression of Connecticut from other people that really just reflects a few towns on the south western tip of the state. Upstate you’ve got huge expanses of farmland and forrests. Then as noted, you’ve got very urban areas that I grew up in. In high school, I thought I lived in the suburbs because I was just over the line outside of New Haven. In college, I found out this is still known as the Inner City. To the folks from Jersey, anyway.
oljb, considering the stereotypes on Pittsburgh (Stillers fans in particular), you’ve got counter-ammo for life.
The identifying yourself by Turnpike exit is a defensive maneuver. One does it when one recognizes that some self-styled humorist is going to ask for it. In my case it never made any sense because I didn’t live close enough to the turnpike to think of my town as associated with a particular stop. I never really understood the implied insult anyway. Your state is small and has a major transportation artery running through it. Huh? Hey, Rhode Islander, do you nearer to exit 2 or exit 8a?
Deborah:
Uh, basketball was invented in Springfield, MA by James Naismith. Dunno what claim Jersey has on the sport.
a kindof related dialogue that i get a lot:
not-me: “so, where are you from?”
me: “new york…”
not-me: [asked with titilated excitement] “new york city”
me: “nope. new york state. 1/3 of my life in yonkers, then more a little over an hour north of The City.”
not-me: [no more titilation] “oh. yeah? what’s that like?” and or “oh, i didn’t know that was a real place and not just a play…”
i currently live in philly, (which, in case you haven’t heard got called the ’8th borough’…) and i get this all the time. like the rest of the state doesnt exist. or that it is infinately less exciting than The City.
Incidentally, my partner and i make trips to new jersey all of the time out of homesickness (she is from new brunswick….). i am italian, most of my family is originally from hoboken… and there is not much Jersey in philly. there is South Philly that is traditionally italian, but it isnt new york/jersey italian, and so i don’t feel as home there.
and the Imus thing i feel is sooo new york. like people are saying, those not from the north east, i think, think of industry (fast food nation) and white people (sanatra, braff, k. smith, trump, springsteen. etc.) when they think new jersey. not Queen Latifah. and not poverty.
and i wonder, too, to pull gender in, this seems to be about how are jersey women are thought of…..
Chicklet,
But I am a Stillers fan too… (a plurality of WV NFL fans are Steelers fans), so that takes away some of my ammo. But yeah, there’s no shortage of nasty things to say about Pittsburgh as well, and no shortage of people who harbor unfair negative stereotypes of it, too. Sad world.
I don’t buy the stereotypes, unless it’s to needle my Stillers-lovin’ beau about it (we live in Cleveland).
The newest Connecticut stereotypes are thanks to “Gilmore Girls” – Hartford is a center of wealth and privilege, and Stars Hollow actually exists. Although I have met some antiques shop owners who would give MamaKim a run for her money…
You know that’s an old (and bad) joke, right?
I think that’s exactly right. Jersey stereotypes are about working-class white ethnics. They tend to ignore people of color entirely.
I have family in Maplewood, and I have to say that, as suburbs go, it’s awfully nice. And anyone who thinks that everyone in Jersey is working-class has never been to the Short Hills mall.
I’m not sure where Amanda stands on the mansion/ranch issue, but personally — as a Texan, mind — I feel that Bush’s Crawford-area estate is a ranch in much the same way that monkeys regularly fly out of my ass.
Just sayin’.
I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, about a 20-minute bike ride from the Delaware river and the border, so our impression of Jersey wasn’t the industrial area of the north, but rather the central portion where the commuter zones of Philly and New York overlap. And we still thought of it as a benighted, ugly place.
I think part of it is the same reason L.A. has such a bad rep – it was one of the first areas of any density developed in the automotive era, so it doesn’t really look like anything else we were accustomed to. It didn’t have the density of cities or even inner suburbs, it didn’t have the rural look with separate village centers, it didn’t have the later suburban look of self-contained, developer-built housing tracts off arterial roads. Actually, that last point’s pretty critical: the fact that a lot of the houses and other buildings were designed and built piecemeal by the owners themselves means there’re a lot of bluntly functionalistic architecture that looks nothing like the bluntly functionalistic architecture next door.
And yeah, there’re class issues involved here. If all New Jersey was the leafy, rich kinda suburb, it probably wouldn’t get half the shit, but the way these areas rub up with working class commuter suburbs, blue collar areas based around local industries, and the Mt. Laurel pockets of “affordable housing” in a random-ass patchwork quilt doesn’t help.
Also, the combination of sparse road signage and traffic patterns found nowhere else in the country certainly isn’t going to help your reputation amongst outsiders.
Pretty much, the only really pretty-looking part of Jersey is the Shore, but the thing is, you’re only really going to see the Shore if you’re specifically going there already.
All that said, there’s still the fact that stylistically, the state always seems about a decade behind the rest of the country. Professional women everywhere were wearing big hair, hoop earrings, and bright-colored, shoulderpadded blazers in 1991, but it’s only in New Jersey that you still see them in any significant numbers. And I remember seeing a lot of mullets, ripped jeans, desleeved shirts, denim jackets, and other high-’80s paraphenalia well into the late ’90s. Not to mention the way that the whole state acts as if Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen are still major players in pop music.
Nah. That’s just you and the rest of your Philly tourist types looking at each other down in Wildwood. :)
Joking aside, this is essentially the sort of classist critique that folks have been mentioning the entire thread. Why can’t the fashion choices of the working class conform to mine?
So I actually grew up in East Brunswick (right next to Rutgers) and both my parents work in New Brunswick. Ask anyone who’s met me and the first thing they’ll tell you is that I’m from New Jersey. I’m really proud of that because everyone else picks on us all the time and in response to that we like to think of ourselves as tough and adaptable (at least it was that way with my friends in highschool). The thing that most defines NJ to me is the diversity. I could go down the halls of my highschool and hear five diffrent languages being spoken. I mean we have three Synagoges, a Mosque, several churches including a korean church and a Egyptian orthodox church and thats not including the surrounding towns. The best part is that we actually hang out with each other too. It could just be because there are so many people crammed into such a small state but I have yet to find another place that even approaches the diversity and acceptance I had growing up. And to anyone who thinks NJ is nothing but a wasteland, they clearly have never visited the Pine Barrens, the moutains up north or the shore. I can’t even tell you how happy it makes me to hear people actually defend NJ state rather than slam it.
What is this the “Regional Oppression Olympics” where we make of list of the pecking order of where one is from in the US? Otherwise known as “who has it the worst?”
I think he made the comments to pick on the fact these girls are from Jersey too, but regional prejudice was only a factor in it.
My ex from Connecticut used to say the fact that you have to pay to get out of New Jersey was proof of its inferiority. I have never been so I can’t say… though I find the Sopranos amusing. :P
Nomie, sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking.
I gotta say, everyone I know identifies themselves by what exit they live near (not necessarily Turnpike; more often Parkway). I think it’s because there is such a profusion of tiny suburban towns that it’s easier to identify a region by exit. I mean, the GSP (Garden State Parkway) has exits that actually match the mile markers; exit 165 (where I’m from) is at mile 165. If you’re from Long Branch (exit 105), you might not know Ridgewood by name, nor have ever been anywhere near it, but you can ballpark the location if you know the exit.
It’s like when I lived in Queens, every time you met someone else from Queens you right away lapsed into a conversation about what subway or bus lines you lived near.
I remember when we moved from our very small (4000 person) New Jersey idyllic suburban town to our new home in Connecticut. I will never forgot the drive three hours north… the I-91 corridor through the New Haven area was filled with smokestacks and industrial buildings and was just dirty.
As the new girl I would get asked where I was from. I would say New Jersey and people would either say “What Exit?” (which completely confused me since we had lived no where near a highway in NJ but did now in CT) or “Ew! that’s the armpit of America!”
To which I wanted to say… “Have you ever driven up 91?”
And everyone from Indiana is kind of slow, owns a pole barn, and loves basketball.
In any case, I’m not sure where Don fuckin’ Imus gets off on criticizing other people’s hair. Good god, look at the man.
Oh… and jug handles. Yes, brilliant once you get the hang of them. I told my husband before a visit that “you can’t make a left turn in NJ”. He thought I was making that up.
Oh, yeah, no doubt there’s classism at play here. Like I said, a lot of Jersey’s “dirty” reputation comes from the fact that it doesn’t segregate by class as effectively as other places, so that even rich people doing rich people things with their rich people friends will be exposed to the existence of the lower class. But I think you’re missing the point I was getting at there.
In my Pennsylvania hometown, a few miles from the Jersey border, we had working-class people, too. I had a girlfriend who lived in a trailer park, so I spent a lot of time there and unsurprisingly, a lot of people I saw wore styles associated with the poor, and thus low status: gym shorts, wifebeaters, sweatpants, beer and NASCAR t-shirts, leopard prints, skintight clothing on non-skinny people, rat tails, meshback hats before meshback hats got reappropriated, etc. Fair enough. And yes, I looked down on them for it, because I was raised as a proper upper-middle-classer. But the key difference is they didn’t wear nearly so much the “high-’80s” stuff.
That’s why I paired those examples with the hoops-and-shoulderpads ones, to make a point on how the behind-the-timesedness was a universal feature of Jersey: the professional classes wore professional-class styles of a decade back, and the working classes wore working-class styles of a decade back.
When I think of New Jersey, I think of two things. First:
PINE BARRENS!
followed closely by:
JERSEY DEVIL!
But hell, I’m from Buffalo, so it’s not like I’ve got room to mock people for the region they grew up in.
More on-topic with the general thread, tho: how hard would it be to find something Imus doesn’t spew vitriol about? I mean, lazy humor pretty much involves degredation or embarrassment, and if you don’t have an ego resilient enough to take debasing your own image, then you do things designed to demean and embarrass others. I wonder if Imus ever read Stranger in a Strange Land, and realizes he’s one of the cruel, violent monkeys that Michael laughs at.
@senescent: Well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. I’ve lived in all sorts of places and the persistence of the mullet is an unknowable phenomenon, by no means limited to the Garden State. Heck, at this point I call it Hockey Hair — as opposed to Camaro Hair — under the influence of more northern friends. I will dispute that the professional class in NJ is in some kind of time warp. NJ is a ridiculously prosperous state and it’s upper classes have the same looks and aspirations as their like in CT and NY. Cf.: The Mall at Short Hills.
Ugh (*blush*): its not it’s above. Bad philologist!
Well, there is San Francisco, also known to New Yorkers as The Other City Where I Could Live™.
But other than that, exactly.
My ex is a New Yorker from Queens. His brother summed it up this way, in regards to his feelings on New Jersey….
He said, “if I picked up the Post tomorrow and the front page said that New Jersey had fallen into the the sea and disappeared…
I would turn to the sports page to check the Rangers stats.”
@oudemia:
Fair enough. I think you’re probably right that the wealthy elite in New Jersey aren’t that much different. After all, that’s part of the idea of the wealthy elite, that they don’t have regional identities.
Probably a big share of my bad for wielding the term “professional class” poorly – I wasn’t trying to describe the CEO/doctor/stockbroker kinda person. (After all, how would my trips into Jersey reveal what their work outfits looked like? They’re all at their offices in Manhattan, or at least some office complex, right?)
I was more thinking of someone at the realtor/shopowner/middle school principal level, the kind of people that we would probably call “middle class”, if not for the fact that everyone calls themselves middle class. “Burghers”, maybe?
You know, I suspect there are a lot of people who feel this way about Queens. Just sayin’.
=)
Ha! Yeah, probably :) Except maybe they could save the Italian restaurants…
Really, some us don’t even have exits. (Strange as it might seem.)
I’m still doing battle with my fiance who lived in Park Slope until he was 8. He somehow thinks this justifies making cracks about NJ when his family now lives in Athens, Ohio (hardly a cosmopolitan mecca).
And jughandles: just try moving to Atlanta after living in NJ. I’ve had to memorize where all the left lanes spontaneously turn into “left turn only lanes” or where everyone makes left turns across six-lane roads. Sigh. Life is tough. :)
I know its a joke, but it wasn’t a joke I was aware of before starting school. My first exposure to it was as a joke the kids from New Jersey were making amongst themselves. Maybe they were being defensive, but they really seemed light-hearted to me. Maybe they just hadn’t gotten sick of it, yet. I actually live right off the highway in Connecticut, though I never knew my exit.
…you know, sometimes I’m glad to be born and raised in a state that has, as far as I can tell, no identity in the minds of the rest of the world. Like, *maybe* in the the immediately surrounding states, people can at least manage a “oh! Maryland! It… has a big bay in the middle!” but mostly we’ve been completely subsumed to DC. If I need a regional identity, I tell people I’m from DC and they get it.
Maryland: We have a bay! Oh, and Baltimore, home of a bunch of TV shows about crime.
I lived in Bloomfield, NJ for a year, and actually quite enjoyed it. In honor of that year, I would like to contribute this list of Jersey-themed songs. My favorite is here.
There’s also this list, which is more name-checking than “about” NJ for the most part. My favorite is Jets to Brazil’s “Morning New Disease”:
Oh god. This was an excellent post. I’m filled with all kinds of guilt now. I grew up in Maryland…that’s an inside joke all within itself, but I went to college in Philadelphia where everyone assumed I was from Jersey because I’m Indian and my last name was Patel by default. Neither of those facts were true and coupled with the fact that growing up in Maryland classically conditioned me to make New Jersey jokes, I would affectionately refer to my NJ friends (which were like 90% of them seeing as we were in Philly….) as “radiation babies.”
God god god, mea culpa! The fact that Imus’ despicable language was charged by the national Jersey prejudice makes me cringe. Now I’m going to appreciate the good parts of Jersey. The Turnpike (wide, open spaces), the accessible malls with reasonable prices, Tom’s River, the tight knit suburban communities…all those Wawas…*drool*….
And now, I’m going to find each of my Jersey friends and hug them…even if I get punched (not because they’re from New Jersey, but we’re not an affectionate bunch by choice)…I don’t care anymore!
Ah. That was a cleansing confession. I’m sorry, New Jersey, never again! Unless I get cut off on the Turnpike again, then I can’t be held responsible for my Mid Atlantic road rage….
LOL nona…we also have Annapolis. Remember that? It was like, a movie. And Frederick Douglass and *Maryland style* crab that a NY based friend tells me are all taken from Long Island. And I think the Baltimore aquarium and Johns Hopkins count as something memorable. Oh, and Terrapins.
And Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants took place in Silver Spring! Truly a momentous occasion for Marylanders everywhere!
*sigh* but mostly, just DC.
Ah Maryland, you stick to me like a bad case of crabs.
[...] y thing is I’m not sure I agree. In a change of rhetorical pace, Zuzu of Feministe posits that the Rutgers team made an easier targ [...]
If I could just go back to the basketball thing for one second:
I heard that when the players were interviewed, someone asked them if they were more offended as black people or as women.
HELLO?! That is so racist and sexist, it’s almost as offensive as the comment itself. It’s not as if Black woman can separate being Black and being women! And the statement also implies that women are not Black unless stated otherwise (IE, they are White until further notice. It also implies that black people are men, unless stated otherwise.) Obviously it was simultaneously racist and sexist as these women have both a sex and a race AT THE SAME TIME.
Ok, done now, thanks. Back to New Jersey.
FWIW, Brass is from Wallingford, not Waterbury. But that neither undermines the existence of CTHC or the tumbledown prospects of Waterbury.
I stand corrected: I should have done the research before I commented. Zuzu was right and my recollection was wrong, unless the fansite bio got it wrong. I did think I heard Darren say Wallingford in season one.
zuzu, at first I thought you were making a joke with Darren Brass’s name, seeing that Waterbury is the former “brass capital of the world”.
It’s funny – I grew up in a modest house across the street from the projects in Waterbury, and never realized that Connecticut had the reputation it does until I moved to New York. I would tell people that I was going to CT to visit my parents and they would say “oh, Connecticut” in a snooty voice. They had no idea that Waterbury is worlds away from Greenwich.
I spent an originally-Canada-bound spring break in college snowbound in a sorority house at Rutgers (let’s not get into how, despite the dire snowstorm reports blanketing the airwaves, there was no actual snow to this snowboundedness, which I’m not making up). My mom’s from New Jersey so I have no knee-jerk response to the state or to Newark (ok, Newark airport I will complain about), but I sure as hell had a prejudice against sororities. They were some of the smartest, most creative and motivated women I’ve ever met in one place, and I wish I could say that didn’t really surprise me. And one of them was an expert medicinal mushroom-grower and cultivated some of the fun varieties in her closet, which in no way establishes a bias on this observer’s part.
I remember walking around town with our hostess-friend, who had enough of a sense of humor to adopt a joking “And here’s where all those scary Newarkians live and hang around in order to frighten all the good people. You can always tell the Scary Newarkian by his/her totally-coincidental(-no-really!) dark skin.”
Heh. Pretending to be covered in snow is a scary attribute for any city to have, but somehow I’m guessing different scary people were behind that.
What was interesting to me was how much power just mentioning you were from Connecticut had in, say, Michigan.
Okay, off-topic but color me baffled. “I’m from Connecticut” would have gotten you a big “wha-huh?” as far as I remember from my Michigan days. Maybe your law school buddies were easily cowed.
Well, here’s the set-up. First year, Halloween (now, keep in mind my section started during the summer so has known each other 5 months already by this time), a bunch of us go to the joint business/law Halloween party at (of all places) Domino’s Farms. Mark, the guy from Muskegon (dressed as Uncle Sam) got the brilliant idea to toilet-paper professors’ houses. Michelle (pumpkin, from Chicago) thinks it’s brilliant. They need a driver — Mark has a car, but is too drunk to drive, Michelle is sober but doesn’t have a license.
I (dressed as the Statue of Liberty and in possession of both my sobriety and a driver’s license), say what the hell. So off to Meijer’s Thrifty Acres we go, for toilet paper, posterboard and magic markers (because of course we have to let the profs know that their own students did this out of love).
Mark stays up all night since he has a wedding in ht emorning. But he makes a few calls while he’s drunk implicating himself, but not me or Michelle, in the TP-ing. This gets around, and by Monday, it’s a big scandal.
Where the C-bomb comes in is this: this guy Rob, from Bloomfield Hils, is berating Mark at lunch about the TPing, and saying things like, “Maybe in YOUR part of Michigan, this is okay, but not in MY part of Michigan.”
So I piped up with (and keep in mind nobody knew I was involved), “Oh, you mean it matters which part of Michigan you’re from?”
And Rob, who, social-climbingly conscious as he was couldn’t tell the difference between where I was from and where the guy in our class who’d gone to Yale (and lived in Fairfield County) was from, shut the fuck up. As did many others in the class.
I have found the most awesome way to make Bay Area peoples’ heads explode is to:
a) Say I am from New Jersey.
b) Say I miss it.
c) Call San Francisco a cute little town.
The biggest comment I get is about how I don’t have an accent. I do get shit for saying I’m “on line” rather than “in line,” and I say “harrible” instead of “horrible,” but that’s not enough for them. I don’t have the North Jersey accent, and that makes them sad.
Also, jughandles: I miss them more than anything else.
Ok, this has bugged me for days, so I have to say something. I’m a 51-year-old single mom, my hair started going silver early, and the last two years have been horribly stressful, and it totally shows on my face. I really hate that you think it’s ok to use the word fossil and make the dessicated comment to show that it’s ok. It’s as if I called some woman a nappy-headed ho and then said, oh, sorry, I know that’s racist, but did you see the hair on that ho? I’m sick of the fucking assumptions about me because of my age, I’m sick of being invisible because of my age, I’m sick of being considered dessicated and therefore my brain is ossified, too. It’s even worse when it’s summer and the sleeves come off and the tattoos are out there, then suddenly I’m interesting, but as an old woman, I’m not – I have wrinkles, and age spots on my hands, and I’m turning into a dessicated old cadaver and therefore inherently worthless. At what age will you stop aging, have you decided yet? Going to kill yourself rather than get old? Going to stop thinking and go play bridge? Going to spend thousands every year to look as young as you can as long as you can?
I’m kind of shocked at how disappointed I am. It’s like the safe place you go to get away with the crap you’ve dealt with for 50 years, and suddenly they start making nigger jokes.
Jughandles are really the only good way to make left turns.
PS: Exit 14.
Hi folks, and Jill and Zuzu and Piny, I love reading your blog, you guys always write the most intriguing things about issues that people are, and are not, discussing in the mainstream or in other blogs. I have been following this Imus thing a lot and I am glad that people b**ched him out. However, a lot of people seem to be not noticing two crucial things: the fact that black women’s voices are not heard about the Imus issue (you only hear black men’s voices heard on the issue), and also the fact that Imus made horrid racist comments about Palestinians and Arabs on the same airing in which he made the comments about the basketball team:
“”DON IMUS: They’re (the Palestinians) eating dirt and that fat pig wife of
his is living in Paris.
COLLEAGUE: They’re all brainwashed, though. That’s what it is. And they’re
stupid, to begin with, but they’re brainwashed now. Stinking animals. They
ought to drop the bomb right there, kill ‘em all right now…
IMUS: Well, the problem is we have (reporter) Andrea (Mitchell) there; we
don’t want anything to happen to her.
COLLEAGUE: Oh, she’s got to get out. Andrea, get out and then drop the bomb
and kill everybody…
COLLEAGUE: Look at this. Animals. Animals!
In 1985, he referred to Arabs as “goat-humping weasels.” (Sunday Mail,
4/21/85)”
I got this excerpt from the blog Improvisations: Arab Woman Progressive Voice
I thought you folks would be interested and I am trying to spread the word about this because the complete silence or lack of dialogue about Imus’s anti-Arab comments speaks so much about the hatred and discrimination that Arabs and people of Middle Eastern descent face in this country. I also think that there are so many connections between anti-Black and anti-Arab racism and misogyny in our culture. I couldn’t find an e-mail to send this to Piny or Jill or Zuzu (of course understandably they wouldn’t post their e-mail addresses, especially with all the Internet violence against women bloggers lately), so I decided to post it here, and also because it relates directly to the issue discussed in the blog. I do not at all mean to try and “use” your blog in any way to promote only my views, I am rather just trying to call attention to this very related and pertinent issue. If there is any way to make this report of anti-Arab racism (in Imus’s same radio airing) a blog post that would be so wonderful and I think it would help spread the word and take Imus to task (again :) ). Thanks folks!