My name is Christine Lambert. I'm a six-foot-tall, good-looking young Black woman of Haitian descent living in the city of Buffalo, New York. I work in real estate and it's depressing. The recession is in full swing and western New York is bearing the brunt of it in my opinion. There are scores of foreclosed homes in both African-American and White neighborhoods. Something has to be done and quickly. Otherwise we're doomed.
The city of Buffalo as it stands today isn't anything like the city I grew up in. When I was younger, the city of Buffalo was home to a thriving African-American middle class. Black men and Black women with money would leave the big city and raise their families in Buffalo. That was a long time ago. Before the recession. Now, Buffalo seems to be going to hell. Doesn't matter if you're black or white, you will feel the sting of the recession. I'm finding out that no one is recession proof.
My firm, Lambert & Russell Realtors, tries hard to thrive in the recession. Recently, I sold a nice house in East Buffalo to a black family from South Africa. I can't tell you how happy I was to sell a house to a black family. A nice two-story house with a big yard and a pool. The father of the family is Timothy Adewale, a London-born anthropologist who fought for human rights in The Republic of South Africa. He taught at a university in Johannesburg for ten years before moving to North America. He's going to head the anthropology department at Buffalo State University.
I liked the good professor and his family. His wife Carol was an attractive, kind of tall black woman in her early forties. She's an accounting executive with World Bank. Their sons Jerome and Andy are attending the local high school. Yeah, they looked good together. What they don't know is that the house I sold them used to belong to this wealthy Jewish guy named Michael Rosenthal. What happened to them was tragic.
Mike Rosenthal was a wealthy Jewish lawyer who lived in that big house with his wife Ira and their three daughters. When the recession hit, they tried to survive but eventually faced foreclosures. And what did Mike Rosenthal do? He committed suicide. Yeah, he sent himself to the next world. Sometimes, I wonder why so many white people seem self-destructive when things don't go their way. Blacks, Asians and Hispanics have been affected by the recession far more than white people have. Yet whenever I hear something about someone ending themselves over losing their house, it's never a person of color.
