Two subway stops, equidistant from my Brooklyn place—which to use?

One is reached through a predominantly middle-class enclave before it spills you out onto the chaos of Flatbush Avenue. The route to the other takes you through streets of diminishing wealth to Nostrand Avenue, as busy as Flatbush but of an entirely different character. Both routes take one through racially mixed areas, but the white person is rarely “alone” when heading towards Flatbush. That is, there are generally other whites in sight as one dodges through the crowd. And a number of the blacks one sees look successful, as comfortably middle class as the whites. Towards Nostrand one hears much more Haitian Creole and music blaring from the open doors of double-parked vans.

Now, here’s the question: Is it racism that inclines the whites in the neighborhood to gravitate to the Flatbush stop?

It all depends, as Bill Clinton might say, on what the meaning of “racism” is.