And Everyone Lived Happily Ever After, Stickers Still Affixed To The Brims Of Caps Cocked Sidewise

The Times finds that the younger generation of Howard Beach is “over” the kind of racism that led to some unfortunate events in the past:

Most teenagers in Howard Beach, of course, weren’t even born when the Rev. Al Sharpton led a march through their neighborhood to protest the 1986 episode, to jeering and taunting from the locals. During their adolescence, the city’s name ceased to be synonymous with violent crime and racial tension. Where their parents feared the ghetto, they romanticize it, idolizing the swaggering culture and music born there.

“I got friends from all over,” said Matt Martocci, a carrot-topped, buzz-cut 18-year-old, horsing around with some of them near a Howard Beach park on Thursday.

“We all listen to hip-hop. Look at how we’re dressed,” he said, pointing his thumbs at his immaculate navy Sean John track suit and gold chain.

Some of his friends live in New Howard, the neatly kept, almost entirely white district west of Cross Bay Boulevard where last year’s attack took place. Some live in Old Howard, on the other side of the brackish creek spilling into Jamaica Bay. Many hail from Ozone Park or Lindenwood, more racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods on the other side of the Belt Parkway.

But they have hip-hop in common. They listen to Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Cam’Ron, and Fabolous. They wear G-Unit, Sean John and other hip-hop labels like Rocawear, the same brand-new baseball caps, stickers still affixed to the brims, cocked sidewise. Some stick hair-picks in their headbands, though few of them, truth be told, have hair kinky enough to need one. Like any number of white suburbanite kids, they favor black slang, embellished with the Queens accents of their parents.

“Sometimes, when I’m talking to my friends, it’ll come out,” said Mr. Martocci. “It’s just slang. It’s the way we talk. You know, I’m like, ‘What up, my brutha.'”

His friends all nodded.