by Harold McMillan

My cousin Daniel is thinking about moving to Austin. Like me, he's a country boy from beautiful Emory - that - small - town - northeast - of - Dallas, Texas. He's currently attending Texas A&M University at Commerce (it was East Texas State when I was there), and he plans to move here to attend college at Huston-Tillotson. Daniel is one of the best young writers I know. He's smart, writes with passion, fire and anger that shows insight and understanding of what's going on within and around him. He will find much inspiration here, I think. He will think deeply about what he finds here in this hip college town, cultural oasis, live music capital.

So, what should I tell this bright, intellectually and artistically gifted young person about life in Austin? How do I describe the cultural offerings, what do I tell him about the coffeehouse circuit, what cool hang-outs for the young-artist-underground do I recommend for him, where do I direct him for social and intellectual discourse with a diversity of other young poets, writers, artists of all kinds?

Now, I am using my cousin as a real life example so I can discuss some issues I've been thinking about for years. Daniel's move to Austin just provides another chance for me to think out loud about the scene here in the Capital City. My conversations with him -- and what I have to say here -- will in some ways parallel issues brought up in another conversation I had several years ago when one of my artist friends was packing her bags to get the hell out of here.

About 10 yeas I ago I remember hanging out with my friend Marcia as she packed up her tiny student apartment and readied herself for the long trek to the bright lights of New York City. Marcia was early twenty-something at the time, just out of college, a painter and poet with a good portfolio of original work. Marcia was the kind of artist who, it seemed to me, could have found a place in the local scene. She was cosmopolitan, young and energetic, gifted at the art of pseudoscholarly coffeehouse debate, well connected within the campus arterati and the local music/art cool-and-hip underground, and -- quite honestly -- she was really a beautiful young woman. She was the kind of woman, the kind of individual, that this arts scene needs, even more so today.

I wanted Marcia to stay in Austin. I wanted her to be bold and move around in this scene. Since she had graduated from the Art School of the University of Texas at East Avenue, she was in fact needed here. Those of us who had decided to stick it out, sweat blood and continue the struggle needed her in our ranks.

I invited her to roll up her sleeves and dig in, for a while at least. Would she consider putting off her trip to New York for a few months, a year?

No.

That afternoon in her apartment, Marcia was beyond second thoughts about staying in Austin.

Well, let's just cut to the chase and move on from there.

Marcia was well-traveled, just out of college, streetwise and urbane, and quite conscious of her ability to move about as comfortably in New York or Surinam, as in our little Capital City. I knew the answer to the question, but I had to ask her anyway. So I put it out there.

"Marcia, you're a promising young artist, you know your way around the scene here in Austin, we need you here. Why do you have to move out of Austin?"

Marcia's response showed understanding of what I was getting at, but she was fully resolved. She asked me the real questions, addressed the real issues at hand.

"Really, what is there in Austin to keep me here -- where is my community? Where is the multi-ethnic community of young artists/writers/intellectuals/activists who hang out, collaborate, are at the forefront making artistic statements that reflect what Austin is really all about? Just what is there about the scene in Austin to keep a young black artist here, feeling engaged, feeling like there is a vibrant, culturally inclusive and welcoming community in which to work?"

Now, that conversation took place a long time ago. What I just gave you was not an exact quote from our conversation. But the message is definitely the same. Ten years later as I welcome my young cousin to our fair city, the issues are still here, unresolved for many of us. I suspect that if my cousin happened to be a young Latino, many of the same issues would concern me.

If my cousin were a young Anglo poet from Small Town, East Texas coming to Austin hoping to expand his intellectual, cultural, social and -- yes -- ethnic horizons, I actually think I'd be just as concerned. When most young black and Brown folks move into this scene, thinking they are going to find a Rainbow Family of forward-thinking, hip, scene-making student artists, writers and future intellectuals of all kinds and colors hanging out in the coffeehouses, pubs, and on campus, they very quickly realize that our young/college hip-scene continues to be blandly oh-so-alternative -- largely an alternative to a scene that includes persons of color. We figure that one out pretty quickly.

My concern for my small-town-Texas-white boy cousin would be that he will not even notice, regardless of his very PC intentions, that he is not getting the benefit of a diverse cultural or ethnic milieu in his weekly dose of hangout time at the local college java house, hip club, or campus library.

Yes, it begs to be asked...so what, and who cares? Well, I'm not sure I have the answer to that one, or any of the other questions I ask here. But when I go out in Austin questions like this invariably come up for me. I think part of this, at least for me, has something to do with the idealism I had when I came to Austin more than 15 years ago. And I think it also has something to do with the myth of the Austin scene that continues to be kicked around Texas as fact.

There was something about my youth in North East Texas' culture of bigotry, social and political conservatism, and the real experience of Good ol' Boy justice in everyday life that made Austin appear to be the saving grace of life in the Lone Star State (by the way, this just might actually be true). Like oh so many small town Texas youths of the 1990s, in 1979 I too couldn't wait to move to Austin -- laid back, tolerant, progressive, non-segregated, hip and cool Austin.

The myth at that time was that youth culture in Austin was wild and wide open. In Austin, everybody was cool* -- even the cops. In Austin, everybody was liberal*, not necessarily politically left-leaning, but open minded and tolerant. In Austin, the radicals, hippies, cosmic cowboys, gays, and hip black, Brown, and White students, artists, and musicians all hung out and tried to show the rest of Texas what progressive* life in America is really supposed to be about. And being a college student in Austin put you right in the middle of the action. You could actually meet, debate, and collaborate with the next generation of Texas leaders here. That next generation of scholars, artists, politicians, publishers and activists was to be multiethnic, multi gendered, and represent a diversity of ideological points of view. And those folks, folks just like me and you, were the ones who were here because they recognized the potential for America's youth to spearhead some real positive changes* in our culture, our society. For Texas, Austin was the ideal place for this kind of movement.*

With that said, you get a clue of just how idealistic I was. As I present it here, there are threads of truth that underlie the Myth of Austin Past and Present. But, at least as it reads in my previous paragraph, the Myth contains a lot of naive bullshit, too. After all of these years, I've grown jaded and cynical about this whole thing, about the Austin Myth.

My curiosity got to me, though. For the last couple of weeks I've been hanging out in the coffeehouses, having conversations with young folks, asking them about this stuff, asking them if they have the same concerns, asking if they think my observations deserving of thought. From my point of view, and I admit mine is pretty crooked by now, most results of my informal polling do not produce any great spark of optimism.

What I found in my conversations was enlightening. Some of what I heard actually did make me feel that my concerns were valid ones. But too, some of what I heard made me think that I'm just this old guy who thinks too much, too much about shit that just don't matter anymore in Austin. And, some of my conversations gave me some new insights, made me look at this stuff in ways that I had not considered. Everything I've written here is influenced by those conversations.

I spent most of my time in the University area for this little project. It was hard to find black and brown folks (period) interested in talking to me, almost all were Anglo (surprise!).

It wasn't until my last visit to a Guadalupe Street coffeehouse, well after my deadline, that I found some young black folks to talk to. And although I did have an agenda, knew what I wanted to hear, I mostly found that my sentiments were out of touch with those of most of the students I encountered.

By and large, the white kids I talked to simply could not understand the basis of my quest. They hadn't noticed any absence of persons of color. Responses were more like, "well now that you mention it, I don't ever see any black folks around here." Similar comments also came from most of the Latinos and the one Asian student I talked to. "Now that you point it out to me, I guess it really is kinda segregated, but no, I don't think of it as a problem. People like to be with their own kind," seemed to be the prevailing attitude. Truth is, Austin is simply a very white town. The math bears that out.

I lump these responses together to save some space here. There was more said, but this is the meat of the matter. Responses like this were not exactly what I wanted to hear coming from the new generation of Austin cool. But that's what I got, mostly.

There were other responses that took a different view, took me by surprise and now give me a way to exit this ramble that, God knows, could go on for pages.

Surprise number one came from my conversation with two young women in their mid-twenties, writers. They sat together talking, drinking coffee, smoking, writing in blank books that had prose and poetry, and art doodles -- classic coffeehouse "types." Both identified themselves as "white" at first. Then one clarified that she was biracial, Latina/white. The surprise here was that one of these women was the first person I'd talked to who immediately said she thought the scene was defacto segregated. She complained about her friends' attitudes and apathy about racial/cultural issues and said she missed living in a more socially and culturally diverse community of artists. She thought that the "we so cool in Austin" myth obscured significantly problematic issues regarding race relations here. She was the white woman.

A nice piece of insight here came from her mixed race companion. The lack of cultural/ethnic variety in their set of friends and the places they hang out really was not such an issue to her. She acknowledged it, but it wasn't a problem she thought about. What she did think about, and in fact gave Austin's tolerance very high marks on, was gay/lesbian cultural and social issues. For her, Austin's appeal was her ability to move about and be openly "out." That superseded any lack of ethnic variety in the scene. For her, Austin really doesn't have a "race" problem.

After the three of us discussed the arts scene, the coffeehouses, lesbian bars and other cool places to hang out, my two interviewees together offered me what is probably the real finding of my little research project. They gave me a good portion of what I was looking for to describe Austin's alterna-hip youth culture.

According to my two young experts, just like themselves, a lot of young folks from all over Texas end up in Austin because of its hip reputation AND because they really need to get out of their hometowns. Let's face it, it would be fair to say that most college-bound Texas (especially rural Texas) youth live in Bubba Land, Rednecksville, or in the Whitesettlement suburbs.

The role that the move to Austin plays in the lives of these folks is actually a monumentally positive aspect of their development into full fledged adults. You see, if you get all of the "cool" smart country kids and good ol' cowboys, and mix them with the rich frat kids from the 'burbs, and mix them with the hipster city kids and "dopers," you really do get an interesting, diverse mix of types who end up here in Austin. And regardless of the contributing factors that make this group of young Austinites almost exclusively white (such as UT's inability to attract significant numbers of blacks or Browns), life in the scene in Austin IS 100 times "cooler" than the situations these youths come from.

If you've grown up to be one of the only hipster artist-types in your entire high school in Dime Box, Texas, I guess you really might not notice there are no black kids in your classes at UT, nor in your hangout group at Club DeVille or Casino El Camino. Chances are, you're just happy to be in a town where you're not the only one with green hair and pierced tongue. And, according to my young experts, this attitude is really what the Austin "alternative" scene is mostly about. Cluttering this comfortable cool to consider issues of race, access, or cultural diversity is likely something that your average college coffeehouse patron is simply not interested in doing.

By the way, I think this is a very accurate and insightful analysis of the scene. Don't you?

Like I said, it was difficult to actually find black students hanging out late night in the coffeehouses and bars I chose for this experiment. I finally did have some conversation with two young men right before going to press. Since I was almost finished with my piece, before I had conversation with them, I asked them to first read what I had written. I also asked their friends -- one Anglo, one Asian male -- to read my draft and react.

Since I want to end this part of my reportage with the sentiments of my only two black interviewees, let me just sum up what their friends had to say, generally, to my questions.

The Anglo student didn't really see the point of my article or my questions.

In fact, he took the opportunity to try to educate me on all that UT has done to make their campus more "diverse." In his view, there is no problem. UT's campus has "all kinds of students, just look at Jester."

Further, the issue of affirmative action at UT was not an issue he really wanted to talk about. His Asian friend simply refused to discuss any of this.

My two black student experts read my ranting, then looked at me with puzzled expressions, as if to say, "what are you trying to say here." I asked further about what they thought of what I said and the questions I asked. One of the young men, a lifelong Austinite, told me he really didn't think about this stuff so much. For him, and most of his friends, the coffeehouse thing was for whites and just wasn't appealing. He is an English major headed for law school. The whole "arts scene" held no interest for him; he didn't know any black students who considered themselves artists or intellectuals. His friends either stayed at home, went to house parties or, if they went out at all, they went some place that played rap, Serendipity for instance.

I'll end with his friend's critique of my notions. I would consider this young man a student artist. He is studying voice, an opera singer at UT music school. When he read my essay, he found nothing, stated as fact or question or opinion, that moved him to react. He neither agreed nor disagreed, it was simply "interesting."

Now, if what I am doing here fit comfortably into the realm of objective academic research or if I were really a "journalist," this young man's response (or lack of it) would simply be something to note and move on.

But I ain't doing an academic piece for school. I am thinking and talking about, and judging/analyzing, issues in our city that, for very complex reasons, I find disturbing.

I don't want to pick on my young respondents, but our opera singer's final response illustrated the underlying bias of this whole exercise. He illustrated just why I am so concerned, and sometimes worried, about the social and cultural milieu in which our new youthful Austinites -- new college students especially -- find themselves. The only part of my essay that rang true for him was the paragraph where I outline my Myth of Austin Cool, Past and Present. The problem is, he didn't "get" the sarcastic cynicism with which I had presented this line of argument.

Our young opera singer accepted my Myth as an accurate description of life in Austin. He thought I did a good job of describing for him, a young black man, what Austin is all about. My sarcasm when right over his head.

I know this little exercise is not social science research and this sample wouldn't meet academic standards of validity. But, my friends, this is just an example of why I am not so optimistic here.

And what do I want to be optimistic about?

I want to feel that issues of access, diversity, equity, social progress, and -- damn -- just simple variety, are issues that get talked about, are issues that find their way into the thoughts of Austin's youth. I want the new freshman at UT to notice and think about the fact that s/he has only three black kids in a class of 200. I want the graduating jazz major to question why there are no black faculty in the UT jazz studies program. I want the Huston-Tillotson music major to be upset that there is no jazz program at Austin's oldest institution of higher learning. I want the young writers, intellectuals, fine and performing artists of color in (and out of) all of Austin's colleges to spread out and make places for themselves in the local scene. I want Austin to buzz with new ideas that come from folks who are currently not being heard, or seen, or even thought of.

As things stand right now, I also want (and realize that they may not even be here) these kinds of folks to move here. I don't know how to get them to do that, but our local cultural scene is in bad need of some fresh flesh and blood.

Remember my cousin, Daniel?

Well, my advice to him, given the message that should emerge from this piece, is yes, Daniel. Please move to Austin. We need a lot more folks like you.

* See your 1970s subculture dictionary for this usage.