What is Harlem like today?
MURRAY: Well, I think people are very confused or run into certain types of confusion when they talk about Harlem. In its heyday, Harlem was a segregated community. It developed its own, you know, idiomatic character. It was fascinating. It was much more exotic. It called for a more exotic experience than it called for xenophobia, you see — that is, the hatred of strangers, a fear of strangers. With the expansion of acceptance of the mulatto status of American culture, the mulatto nature of it, you don’t have the same type of concentration of that particular idiom that you had at that time. They had to be there, you see? So that it’s not like it used to be is not necessarily a matter of decline; it’s a matter of expanding. Those people, they don’t want to live there. They want to live in Scarsdale, they want to live in St. Albans, they want to live on Park Avenue and whatnot. I live in Harlem because that was where I’d found a place when I came in 1962. But if I had had the money, I p
Rod Gustafson has worked in various media industries since 1977. He founded Parent Previews in 1993, and today continues to write and broadcast the reviews in newspapers, on radio and (of course) on the Internet. He currently serves as the President of the Alberta Association for Media Awareness, a provincial non-profit society. He also authors a regular column for The Parent’s Television Council in Los Angeles. He and his wife Donna have four children.
