This friend of a friend went out of her way to start a “discussion” about why gentrification shouldn’t be synonymous with race, and then after she ran out of white tears, she fell back on misanthropy and her love for animals.
White people in Brooklyn get mad tight when you dare imply that they are part of the wave of gentrification, especially if they’re a Good White Person who has all the right politics and #BlackLivesMatter in their Twitter bio.
But being a good person doesn’t change the trend. You’re a white person who decided to move to a crowded, expensive city and took the rent you could afford in a neighborhood where you probably displaced some brown folks who can no longer keep up with the new rent average bumped up by other white transplants in your income bracket. And no, white transplants are not only to blame. I know plenty of brown transplants, self-included, and some of us add to the trend of rising rents. If a landlord kicked out a tenant who couldn’t afford the rent increase and then you sign that lease, you contributed to the rising rents in that neighborhood. This is not a new trend and there’s nothing to be done about it. People move, neighborhoods change, populations shift – it is what it is. But race is an extra complication to any social, economic, or political topic in this country, and it has to be part of the topic of gentrification as well.
If I moved to Brooklyn right now to predominantly Black neighborhood where gentrification is starting to take root, I’m not really changing the neighborhood all that much because I know how to act in my new surroundings. I’m gonna get to know my neighbors. I’ma go to the block parties. I’m not calling the cops over loud music because I have earplugs and I don’t expect the neighborhood to change for me.
White people bring change. They bring businesses that displace the longtime mom & pops that were there. They bring condos that nobody else can afford because real estate developers follow Chad who has money, not Jamal who has money. And they bring more cops, either by directly calling them, or by dint of the police wanting to make Becky and Ellen feel safe in their new neighborhood, and Black people minding their own business never benefit from having more cops milling around.
Pretending to be colorblind and longing for the day when race doesn’t matter anymore is all well and good, but we still live in the real world where:
1) White people have most of the money
2) White people have most of the audacity to plant themselves literally anywhere and expect the world to immediately revolve around them
In the context of gentrification, that means most of the people moving into an “up and coming” neighborhood are white and most of the people who move in and act like privileged brats will also be white. I can’t tell anybody where to live, but I can implore you to act like the guest you are. You don’t go into somebody’s house and immediately start rearranging all the furniture to suit yourself. Pick a nice chair in the corner and behave.
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