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I posted about this store before a few days ago and deleted it, but obviously you can still read the comments. All I said was: a new liquor store opened on Wyckoff/Linden, the owner is obviously an immigrant, a total sweetheart, and the only staff member at the store, the prices and variety of products is good and I really want the store to do well. The first few months are crucial! Some comments claimed it’s been there for years, one person said 20 years, almost every reply I wrote was downvoted. I actually assumed I was mistaken and told my partner like this was all a funny misunderstanding. Then he told me the first time he went there (without me) he asked the owner when they opened and his response was “THIS MONTH”. So, I guess I actually DO know what’s going on in my neighborhood. Here’s a photo of the very recent NOW OPEN sign. None of the comments called me a “transplant,” but that was the vibe. I’m so sick of seeing someone or the other bitching about transplants on half the posts in this sub. For the record: I’m a queer brown immigrant. Where I grew up, in the biggest city in my country and a middleclass household, we could go days without running water or gas (for cooking) and the power was out for hours a day every summer (it’s over 90 degrees at least three months a year). My school shut for over a month when I was 17 after 150 kids were shot by five Taliban at another school and mine got direct threats. For the 20 years I lived there, I can’t count the number of bombblasts that happened just in my city on ten fingers. Most of my childhood/adolescence, I couldn’t walk around outside, PERIOD, for fear of random kidnapping for ransom, muggings or worse. Both of my parents work full time (in education and medicine), we lived in a 1 bedroom (family of 5) until I was 12, and yes that’s relative privilege where I grew up. So no, I don’t feel moved by these “oh the shootings and the stabbings that happened when I grew up here” narratives. You tell me, where the fuck am I supposed to go? Before here, I lived in HH in a rent-stabilized building with no heat for a few years. I taught myself Spanish the year I moved there even though it’s not spoken where I grew up and I didn’t have the opportunity to learn it for free at public school like so many in this country who still haven’t bothered. I had a knife held to my neck for protesting the ‘Muslim Ban’ in the LES at 3 PM in 2017. I’m a good neighbor. I pick up my dog’s shit and leave food out for the stray cats. I am on first name basis with a few of the people nearby sleeping rough, going hungry and/or struggling with addiction in my vicinity and help them out and chit chat as often as I can. I’m not trying to paint myself as a saint, I see this as the bare minimum of being part of a community. I don’t want to read justifications for the “transplant” label or if it is meant to apply to foreign immigrants or not. I mostly see it thrown around bitterly and without nuance. Plus, a lot of QT and/or BIPOC people move here from other parts of the country because they are safer here and have better opportunities. I’m not here for the ‘cheap’ rent, I am not a privileged gentrifier nor should I or anyone have to prove that we are part of this community. Grow up and find a less lazy, xenophobic way to call out shitty behavior, you might even find out some of the assholes around you are ‘natives’, whatever the fuck that means. submitted by /u/feistyxcx to r/Bushwick |