The City We Became suggests that communities gain strength from diversity—so long as they do not ask, due to prejudice, for community members to give up their diverse individual identities. In the novel, cities with idiosyncratic histories and cultures eventually come to life and select a human avatar to embody them. Sometimes, if a city has distinctive neighborhoods or other sub-areas, those sub-areas will also select “sub-avatars” to embody them during the city’s birthing process. At New York City’s birth, New York City’s avatar repels an attack from an extradimensional invader known as the Woman in White—only to fall into a coma, leaving the city vulnerable. At this point, each of New York City’s five boroughs (the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island) selects a sub-avatar; these five embodied boroughs must find and revive New York City’s avatar to protect the city before the Woman in White destroys it. Clearly, the novel’s plot suggests that the diverse people embodying the boroughs not only can but must cooperate—form a community—to defeat the Woman in White, saving their own lives and the lives of all New Yorkers. Moreover, prejudice is the greatest threat to their survival, as the Woman in White uses humans’ racism and other forms of bigotry to divide and conquer. In particular, she convinces Staten Island’s avatar, a racist, xenophobic white woman named Aislyn, to turn against the other avatars, all of whom are non-white.
Yet, while emphasizing community’s importance, the novel hints that community can destroy individuality. This implication comes through most clearly when the Bronx’s avatar Bronca, Brooklyn’s avatar Brooklyn, Manhattan’s avatar Manny, and Queens’s avatar Padmini learn that usually, when a city’s birth is complete, its “primary avatar” consumes its sub-areas’ avatars, killing them. This fact suggests that “community” is not always a good thing—joining a community and accepting a group identity can lead to one’s individuality being destroyed, figuratively or literally. Ultimately, New York City’s avatar does not devour and annihilate the embodied boroughs—but the novel hints that this good outcome only occurs because he lacks prejudice and can accept a diversity of races and genders into his identity. Thus, the novel highlights both the importance of community and the necessity of accepting diversity to have a truly good community.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Community, Diversity, and Prejudice ThemeTracker
Community, Diversity, and Prejudice Quotes in The City We Became
Back when I was in school, there was an artist who came in on Fridays to give us free lessons in perspective and lighting and other shit that white people go to art school to learn. Except this guy had done that, and he was Black. I’d never seen a Black artist before. For a minute I thought I could maybe be one, too.
The tendril mass looms, ethereal and pale, more frightening as the cab accelerates. There is a beauty to it, he must admit—like some haunting, bioluminescent deep-sea organism dragged to the surface. It is an alien beauty, however, meant for some other environment, some other aether, and here in New York its presence is a contaminant. The very air around it has turned gray, and now that they’re closer, he can hear the air hissing as if the tendrils are somehow hurting the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen they touch. Manny’s been in New York for less than an hour and yet he knows, he knows, that cities are organic, dynamic systems. They are built to incorporate newness. But some new things become part of a city, helping it grow and strengthen—while some new things can tear it apart.
“Heard they were calling in emergency personnel from the whole, what do you call it? Tri-state area? for this mess. God, I can’t wait to see which entire ethnic group they’re going to scapegoat in the wake of this one.”
“Maybe it’s a white guy. Again.”
“A ‘lone wolf’ with mental health issues, right!”
I am Manhattan, he thinks again, this time in a slow upwelling of despair. Every murderer. Every slave broker. Every slumlord who shut off the heat and froze children to death. Every stockbroker who got rich off war and suffering.
It’s only the truth. He doesn’t have to like it, though.
“Just getting sick of these immigrants,” he says. He’s always careful to use acceptable words when he’s on the job, rather than the words he says at home. That’s how cops mess up, he has explained to her. They don’t know how to keep home words at home and work words at work.
So when she’d seen this man step out of the crumbling entryway of an old building shell, with a smirk on his lips and his hand prominently resting on the handle of his gun, she’d felt like she does now, fiftyish years later in an art center bathroom. She’d felt bigger. Beyond fear or anger. She’d gone to the doorway, of course. Then she grabbed its sides to brace herself, and kicked in his knee. He’d spent three months in traction, claiming he’d slipped on a brick, and never messed with her again. Six years later, having bought her own pair of steel-toed boots, Bronca had done the same thing to a police informant at Stonewall—another time she’d been part of something bigger.
Bigger. As big as the whole goddamn borough.
It is the other place. The other him. The city he has become. New York City, as its whole and distinct self rather than the agglomeration of images and ideas that are its camouflage in this reality. He understands, suddenly, why he has seen that other place as empty; it isn’t. The people are there, but in spirit—just as New York City itself has a phantom presence in the lives of every citizen and visitor. Here in this strange, abstract mural, Manny sees the truth that he now lives.
And he knows as well: the person who is the Bronx made this.
That was what had made the paint-figures so creepy, really. To know that the things she was seeing weren’t just mindless, swirl-faced monsters, but things with minds and feelings? Minds as incomprehensibly alien as Lovecraft once imagined his fellow human beings to be.
“I keep thinking about how, at the park, she kept switching between ‘we’ and ‘I’ like the pronouns were interchangeable. Like she couldn’t keep the words straight, and they didn’t really matter anyway.”
“Maybe this isn’t her first language.”
That’s partly it. But Manny suspects the problem is less linguistic than contextual. She doesn’t get English because English draws a distinction between the individual self and the collective plural, and wherever she comes from, whatever she is, that difference doesn’t mean the same thing. If there’s a difference at all.
“Not sure I love New York enough to die for it. Definitely don’t love it enough to sacrifice my family for it.”
[…]
“Anything I can do to help your family, I will.”
Her expression softens. Maybe she likes him a little more. “And I hope you get to become the person you actually want to be,” she says, which makes him blink. “This city will eat you alive, you know, if you let it. Don’t.”
[T]he modified brownstone has been shorn of the stoop that once connected it to the neighborhood. This amputation is a still-healing wound that makes the building even more susceptible to attack by foreign organisms.
“Nothing human beings do is set in stone—and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to.” She shrugs. “People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”
Everything that happens everywhere else happens on Staten Island, too, but here people try not to see the indecencies, the domestic violence, the drug use. And then, having denied what’s right in front of their eyes, they tell themselves that at least they’re living in a good place full of good people. At least it’s not the city.
[…]
Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world. Aislyn’s ability to do the same is rapidly eroding.
“Okay, so.” Brooklyn visibly braces herself. “So what happens to those universes that our city punches through?”
[…]
“They die,” Bronca says. She’s decided to be compassionate about it, but relentless. None of them can afford sentimentality. “The punching-through? It’s a mortal wound, and that universe folds out of existence. Every time a city is born—no, really, before that. The process of our creation, what makes us alive, is the deaths of hundreds or thousands of other closely related universes, and every living thing in them.”
Brooklyn shuts her eyes for a moment. “Oh my God,” Queens breaths. “Oh my God. We’re all mass murderers.”
[…]
[Manny] takes [Padmini’s] shaking hands in his own, and looks her in the eye, and says, “Would you prefer to offer up all of your family and friends to die instead? Maybe there’s a way we can.”
[Aislyn] can see [Hong’s] filthy, foreign foot planted square on the dill.
The anger comes on faster than Aislyn’s ever gotten angry in her life. It is as if Conall has broken a dam within her, and now every bit of fury she has ever suppressed over thirty years just needs the barest hair trigger to explode forth.
“Living cities aren’t defined by politics,” he says. It’s almost a shout, so urgently does he speak. “Not by city limits or county lines. They’re made of whatever the people who live in and around them believe.”
