Andrew Milhorn, Contributing Writer
A sedan sitting on gigantic rims, a character airbrushed onto the hood of a car, half-legal squatted trucks, motorized tricycles covered in LED lights.
In the isolation of redlined, car-centric urban fabrics, people are forced into customizing one’s vehicle and riding down the street blasting music as an assertion of individuality and identity.
Maybe you have heard the complaints from other students about the “cars on Broad Street.” Maybe you have even overheard the complaints they direct at the cars themselves.
Complaints like this about the city and its people almost always serve as an assertion of sensibilities. To them, these cars and their music are garish, brash and disturbing “the peace.”
It is not the cheugy resentment towards customized vehicles that troubles me, but the wider range of complaints about Richmond from VCU students. They represent a bigger problem: a refusal to develop an understanding of place.
I am sure you have met these types. Identifiable by their palpable resentment for seemingly everything about Richmond, the South and urban life in general. These students constantly talk down on the place in which they live, taking any chance they get to show off how “above it all” they are.
VCU has tried to turn mid-town Richmond into a facsimile of urban life for students, paying millions of dollars to turn Mansion 534 and Ipanema Cafe into props for its attempt at a “Mid-Town Main Street USA.” However, Richmond is a city, not an amusement park, and to live in a city is to live in a sort of superorganism — the culmination of hundreds of thousands of different lives, experiences and tastes all differing from your own.
If you find that too hard to handle, maybe try a JMU, Liberty or playground instead.
VCU is in Richmond, not the other way around. That is why when we protest, we get tear gassed by the actual Richmond Police department and not a couple of Paul Blarts wearing university-branded athletic polos.
VCU students, faculty and employees broadly live off-campus in the city, commuting to campus on bike, foot, car and bus while they study, teach and work here.
This is the “uncommon” advantage that VCU markets to prospective students. Your tuition payment is not only for an education, but is also a ticket into the heart of Richmond. The hipsters, river and artsy students are all a part of Richmond, but so are the 808s shaking sedans, the wheelies down Broad Street and the rumble of engines.
As VCU expands, it is important to remember that we are guests of the city — studying and living here is a privilege and should be treated as such. We chose to move to a city that marches to the beat of its own drum, and should not be surprised when it does.