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Our Zip code 4412



The Zip Code 4412 in New Zealand, the address of our first rental home.

This zip code on the map is Highbury.

Highbury, a space that is the site of racialized classist stigmas.

Highbury, labeled as the poor area of Palmerston North. As the crime-prone area of New Zealand. As the place to avoid.

Deciding to live in Highbury as a family in our first years in New Zealand has beautifully shaped our sense of space and our relationships.

How we belong, how we craft our identities, and how we understand our aspirations are weaved into our understandings of this community.

Much like Gary, Indiana, where our team carried out our heart health advocacy project in collaboration with African American communities, Highbury bears on itself the stigma of the forbidden place.

Negotiating people's responses when we say "we live in Highbury" is a reminder of the many racist comments made by Indians in the diaspora when I would share our work in Gary. Questions such as, "Oh aren't you scared of the crime?" or "there are lot of drug problems there" or "there are so many broken families there" are racist signifiers that get thrown at a place.

This racism is especially sad when unfurled by Indians in the diaspora who in one breath talk about their experiences with racism, and in the next breath, refer to some myth of "broken families" in Highbury. Signals of broken families, drugs, and crime circulate to prop up and legitimize racist ideologies that are deeply intertwined with place.

In middle class, upwardly aspiring discourses, you drive past Highbury. You don't stop at Highbury at night. It is an area marked in middle class narratives as home to children from broken homes.

Living here has shaped deeply how I relate to our advisory board in Highbury and our emerging fieldwork. The Highbury shopping center, a few blocks of walking distance from our home, shapes our affective, embodied and cognitive relationship with the space.

Being labeled as the "Highbury riff raff" by the upwardly mobile classes is an anchor to understanding the stigma and to committing to fighting it.

When our advisory group comes to a consensus that our media advocacy campaign will address the stigmas about Highbury, through stories of love, community and social support, narrated in Highbury, the commitment becomes real. Embodied in our own negotiations of living at 4412.

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