A few weeks ago social justice educator I follow on Instagram posted pictures of her parents' old neighborhood and said she sometimes wondered if there shouldn't be a limit on how many white people can move into a neighborhood. (Her family is black, and the area is slowly gentrifying.) I told her I understood that impulse emotionally (for one thing, her father had just died), but to what end?
If we went with the Kendi Equity model, what would happen if a black family wanted to move into an area that already had its roughly proportionate amount of black people? Would they be denied the opportunity to live wherever? "Sorry folks, this neighborhood has enough black people," does not sound like a sentence Kendi would get behind. Which says to me, a lot of this stuff is retributive toward white people.
I get it. I do. There's a lot of historic shame to go around. At what point, though, does the cathartic exercise of "now it's YOUR turn to experience discrimination" end?
When I was emerging from my woke fog, I remember thinking "maybe if what people need is to be able to yell at someone because of their pain, I can be that person. I can take it." Then I realized "this is not a political strategy." There's a difference between healing "spiritual" (as it were) wounds and making fair, helpful policies.
I really agree. It's a problem that many people cannot afford housing in safe, prosperous neighborhoods -- but the solution is to help people afford homes, not to keep crime and bombed-out buildings so a neighborhood remains undesirable. We need to build more housing and provide rent subsidies for those who need them.
In Seattle where I live, white lefties are constantly furrowing their brows, wringing their hands, and gnashing their teeth about gentrification and how blacks have been pushed out of their traditional neighborhoods.
Fair enough. But what never gets mentioned is the fact that working class folks, or the lower middle classes, mostly white people, moved away or were pushed out by high real estate prices and expensive property taxes decades ago.
No one talks about this when discussing gentrification. White middle class and upper middle class lefties don't give a flying fuck about working class people or the working poor if they're white.
One of the founders of Critical Race Theory, Derrick Bell, is on record as arguing that Brown v. Board of Education was a mistake -- that it would have been better to keep schools segregated and instead demand resources be redirected to black schools to fulfill the "equal" clause of "separate but equal".
I strongly believe a similar logic underlies many complaints about "gentrification": a belief that the best thing for the black community would be for black and white neighborhoods to be "separate but equal" so blacks can, per Bell, "utilize the real cultural strengths of the black community".
I've read several of Bell's essays, and at least in the early days, he was perfectly clear that "separate but equal" had been demanded by Black people since at least the 19th century, but it just never worked out. He definitely has big criticisms of Brown, but you could never pry the money out of the hands of the monied class to ever get to separate but equal.
Great article. I'm trying use your ideas to think through the ongoing controversy over Globeville-Elyria-Swansea section of Denver. This article hits a few of the main highlights
A few weeks ago social justice educator I follow on Instagram posted pictures of her parents' old neighborhood and said she sometimes wondered if there shouldn't be a limit on how many white people can move into a neighborhood. (Her family is black, and the area is slowly gentrifying.) I told her I understood that impulse emotionally (for one thing, her father had just died), but to what end?
If we went with the Kendi Equity model, what would happen if a black family wanted to move into an area that already had its roughly proportionate amount of black people? Would they be denied the opportunity to live wherever? "Sorry folks, this neighborhood has enough black people," does not sound like a sentence Kendi would get behind. Which says to me, a lot of this stuff is retributive toward white people.
I get it. I do. There's a lot of historic shame to go around. At what point, though, does the cathartic exercise of "now it's YOUR turn to experience discrimination" end?
When I was emerging from my woke fog, I remember thinking "maybe if what people need is to be able to yell at someone because of their pain, I can be that person. I can take it." Then I realized "this is not a political strategy." There's a difference between healing "spiritual" (as it were) wounds and making fair, helpful policies.
I really agree. It's a problem that many people cannot afford housing in safe, prosperous neighborhoods -- but the solution is to help people afford homes, not to keep crime and bombed-out buildings so a neighborhood remains undesirable. We need to build more housing and provide rent subsidies for those who need them.
In Seattle where I live, white lefties are constantly furrowing their brows, wringing their hands, and gnashing their teeth about gentrification and how blacks have been pushed out of their traditional neighborhoods.
Fair enough. But what never gets mentioned is the fact that working class folks, or the lower middle classes, mostly white people, moved away or were pushed out by high real estate prices and expensive property taxes decades ago.
No one talks about this when discussing gentrification. White middle class and upper middle class lefties don't give a flying fuck about working class people or the working poor if they're white.
One of the founders of Critical Race Theory, Derrick Bell, is on record as arguing that Brown v. Board of Education was a mistake -- that it would have been better to keep schools segregated and instead demand resources be redirected to black schools to fulfill the "equal" clause of "separate but equal".
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2004/april21/brownbell-421.html
https://blog.richmond.edu/criticalracetheory/files/2019/02/INTREST-CONV-BELL.pdf
I strongly believe a similar logic underlies many complaints about "gentrification": a belief that the best thing for the black community would be for black and white neighborhoods to be "separate but equal" so blacks can, per Bell, "utilize the real cultural strengths of the black community".
I've read several of Bell's essays, and at least in the early days, he was perfectly clear that "separate but equal" had been demanded by Black people since at least the 19th century, but it just never worked out. He definitely has big criticisms of Brown, but you could never pry the money out of the hands of the monied class to ever get to separate but equal.
I dont have anything to add to the discussion, but just wanted to pop in and say this is my favorite piece you've written so far.
Jeff asks, How, exactly, would one force someone out?
One way is via ever rising property taxes, which affect both renters and long time homeowners.
Great article. I'm trying use your ideas to think through the ongoing controversy over Globeville-Elyria-Swansea section of Denver. This article hits a few of the main highlights
https://www.cpr.org/2019/02/11/globeville-elyria-swansea-isnt-interested-in-gentrification-they-want-change-on-their-terms/
The article is a few years old but things haven't been magically resolved yet.