“What It Means to Be a Black Gentrifier”
“both Lee (who moved from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side in 1998) and real estate marketers forget that black residents also have the financial means to gentrify. Kashana Cauley wrote about her experiences as a single black lawyer who moved from the East Village to Brooklyn’ Prospect Heights: “When cabbies and bodega owners and random people on the street repeatedly asked me if I was an East Village native, they erased my profession and demeanor and mentally stuck me out on Avenue D instead of calling me what I was: a black gentrifier.” The media’s focus on middle-class or wealthy white residents moving into previously impoverished neighborhoods not only erases the experiences of black newcomers — some that are looking for a home away from the racial discrimination in housing practices or within predominantly non-black neighborhoods — but also discounts the possibility of black success. “Not acknowledging that blacks can be middle class makes us always poor,” Cauley writes. “Always ‘the other,’ always too different to bother getting to know.””
This is really interesting and pointy, and the internal struggle with classism and recognizing one’s own complex of racist assumptions are real
