Thursday, March 31, 2011
Confessions of a Black Gentrifier
Shani Hilton has a piece in the Washington City Paper that's generated a lot of discussion in blog-world. She highlights how her experience as a black gentrifier both overlaps with and remains distinct from the experience of white newcomers:
Crack cocaine hit D.C. and many black people with money—like most people with money would—headed to the suburbs. Those who couldn’t leave, and those who stayed to fight, had a ravaged city to contend with. This is the story we know.
But now, living in the city is cool again, thanks in no small part to development incentivized by government investment. And because we live in a “nation of cowards” (as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder put it) where perhaps the only thing harder to talk about than race is class, it’s unsurprising that worries about gentrification boil down to white versus black, instead of educated and privileged versus uneducated and underserved.
That’s not to say that what we talk about when we talk about gentrification has nothing to do with race. The opposite is clearly true. White people don’t just “happen” to be better off, in general, than blacks. There’s systemic injustice that’s obviously based in racism. But instead of using that knowledge to spark a discussion about larger societal issues, there’s just pearl-clutching aplenty about the color of the new faces in the neighborhood.
Steve Clowney
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/property/2011/03/confessions-of-a-black-gentrifier.html
She poses some very serious and complex issues. My question would be how is the property law system designed to help or hinder folks like Aisha Moore? This was a very interesting piece and I thank you for sharing.
Michael
Posted by: Michael | Mar 31, 2011 10:19:09 AM