Commentary

Unsustainable? Then Build the Space. Do Not Erase Us.

The NYPD’s denial of the Trinidad and Tobago Independence parade is a logistics problem with a logistics answer. Reading it as proof that our individual parades were a mistake gets the lesson exactly backward.

The first-ever Trinidad and Tobago Independence Day Parade, set for Sunday, August 30 in Brooklyn, will not happen. The NYPD denied the permit days before the flags were due to fly, and a celebration of 64 years of independence was called off.

One of the more thoughtful responses I have read comes from Louis Straker Jr, who wrote recently in Caribbean Life News about his concern over the proliferation of individual Caribbean parades. He says he is torn. He believes the denial was, in his words, “rightfully so.” And his real argument is not that our people should stop celebrating. It is that the celebration has outgrown the space we keep trying to hold it in.

That deserves a serious answer, not a dismissal. So let me give it one.

Straker’s strongest point is capacity. He notes that the NYPD planned for 2,000 to 3,000 people at the inaugural Jamaican parade on August 8 and saw a crowd many times that size. He argues that Church and Flatbush avenues cannot sustain events of that magnitude, that they will only grow larger, and that this is, in his capital letters, unsustainable.

On that narrow question, he is right. You cannot take the Big Truck experience, built for the width of Eastern Parkway, and pour it into a residential corridor without the sound, the crowds, and the traffic colliding with everything around them. I will not pretend otherwise.

Here is what I would add: my own answer to this problem already concedes his premise. When I call for designated corridors capable of carrying large cultural events, I am agreeing that Church and Flatbush cannot hold what is coming. That is Eastern Parkway logic. It is the same reason the West Indian American Day Parade is staged where it is staged.

So the disagreement between us is not whether the route was a problem. We agree that it was. The disagreement is about what that problem means.

Straker reads the ceiling and concludes that these individual parades should not multiply, that perhaps they should never have started. I read the same ceiling and conclude that we must find the venue built for this, apply earlier, plan harder, and negotiate for the space. Same fact, opposite lesson.

This is also where the Jamaican parade cuts the other way from how he uses it. He treats that turnout as a warning. I treat it as evidence. A crowd that shatters the city’s own projections is not proof that the event should not exist. It is proof of demand that we have been underestimating for years, ourselves included. The lesson of ten thousand people is not “do less.” It is “this belongs somewhere built to carry it.”

Straker also raises the rise in 311 noise complaints and ties it to the gentrification reshaping our neighborhoods. As a concern about the future, that is worth investigating, and he is right that new neighbors who neither know nor care about a culture older than their lease can weaponize a complaint line.

But we owe our readers the discipline of separating a concern from a cause. The denial form obtained by PIX11 does not mention noise. It cites the NYPD’s prior experience with the proposed route, traffic interference that includes established bus and truck routes, and a demand on police resources that would affect emergency coverage in the area. Whatever role gentrification is playing in the life of our neighborhoods, it is not the reason written on this paperwork. Correlation is not causation, and a newsroom that blurs the two forfeits the authority to be believed on the day it matters most.

Caribbean unity does not require Caribbean uniformity.

The part of Straker’s post that moves me most is his fear of division. “If you do it for one, you have to do it for all,” he writes, and he worries that “if Jamaica can have theirs, why can’t we” will curdle into resentment between two proud islands.

I understand the fear. I do not share the conclusion. We can march together on Eastern Parkway as West Indians and still let Jamaica celebrate Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago celebrate Trinidad and Tobago, St. Vincent and the Grenadines celebrate St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Grenada celebrate Grenada. One does not cancel the other.

Italian Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Irish Americans all keep their own traditions without anyone calling it excess. The honest difference in our case is density, several large communities sharing a handful of narrow corridors. That is an argument for staggered dates and a proper venue. It is not an argument for asking anyone to fold their flag.

A denied permit is not a verdict that our parades were a mistake. It is a test of whether our community is organized enough, and powerful enough, to negotiate the space our culture needs in a Brooklyn that is changing under our feet.

Straker and I agree that it is changing. That is exactly why I would be careful about answering displacement by making ourselves smaller. Shrinking our own footprint to avoid a fight is not preservation. It is a slow surrender dressed up as good manners.

The answer to displacement is not disappearance.

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