What It Means to Be a Black Gentrifier
I thought I would find community in Brooklyn. I did — but not because people looked like me.
For the first few weeks after I moved to Brooklyn from Toronto, I didn’t understand why they always asked “EBT?” at the grocery store. The first time it happened I thought the cashier had mispronounced a word. “Excuse me?” I responded, a bit nervous at interacting with strangers in this new country. She glared at me until I pulled cash from my wallet.
Finally, I asked my roommate, who had moved into our Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment a month before me, what EBT meant. “It’s welfare,” he said. “In New York, at least, people get money put into a debit account so they can use a card instead of food stamps.” I asked him if he had ever been asked the same question. He smirked. “Umm, no.” He was South Asian.
It suddenly — and uneasily — made sense: Why wouldn’t someone assume that a black woman in a predominately African-American, low-income neighborhood would be on some sort of assistance? At first, I was stung; did I look like I needed welfare? But I realized that was just my classist assumptions kicking in — and besides, as a graduate student of an advanced age, I frankly could have used some financial assistance (though as a Canadian I wouldn’t be able to apply for an EBT card even if I wanted to).
Still, even with student loans I was technically a gentrifier: one of the highly-educated interlopers swooping in on this poor neighborhood. I realized in that moment how much class differences would always divide me from my new neighborhood — how culturally different I was, even though racially I looked like I fit in. People are loud here, both in speech, manner and dress. If I want to indulge in my monthly metal music magazine binge or go to a metal show or record store, I have to anticipate a 30 -minute subway ride. Despite my ability to “blend in” because of my ethnicity, cultural differences would always set me apart.
Community was a word that I had often repeated like a mantra in my head as I navigated garbage-laden and uneven sidewalks, trying to get used to the blasting car stereos and loud arguments. I grew up in rural Canada as an adoptee raised by a white family and had always lived in neighborhoods where I was either the only black person or one of a few. Living in Brooklyn was the first time in my life where I was able to live in a predominantly black neighborhood. As a kid I would read about African-Americans in books and magazines and imagine that one day, I would find my identity, my true self by moving to another country. I’d been obsessed with filmmakers like Nelson George, who romanticizes the black creativity that came out of enclaves like Fort Greene, where all the black women wore vibrantly-colored clothes and fancy adornments in their natural hair. Moving to Bed-Stuy meant I could finally realize my dreams of experiencing “Brooklyn culture” like I’d seen on TV.
Despite my idealized notions, in the month before I came to New York, I had mixed feelings about my move. I’d settled on roommates, and they’d already signed a lease on an apartment in an area that I knew was experiencing gentrification. I’d read a plethora of articles bemoaning “rapidly gentrifying” Brooklyn, and I wondered if I wanted to witness young white hipsters destroying a historic neighborhood. Soon after I moved, film director Spike Lee critiqued the influx of white gentrifiers into once predominantly African-American neighborhoods like Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, which borders on Bed-Stuy. They didn’t respect the history and local businesses, he said, but city facilities like garbage pickup miraculously improved when they arrived. Within ten months of my move, the median price range in my slice of Bed-Stuy had doubled, and local websites bemoaned marketing ploys (“Bed-Stuy is the new Williamsburg”) from real estate brokers, who tried desperately to hustle potential homeowners into believing white people had “discovered” the neighborhood.
But 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.”
Cauley has a higher income than I expect to have for at least the next six years, but I’ve experienced the same erasure of my accomplishments. When I first moved in, I bonded with a local bodega owner over our mutual love for cats. Even though he knew that I was an author and graduate student, I was shocked when he asked if I had a rent-free apartment when I was living in Canada.
“No,” I said, surprised. “Why would you think I had a rent-free apartment?”
“Doesn’t everybody on welfare in Canada get a free place to live?”
I don’t know what was worse: the genuine look of surprise on his face when I told him that it is probably more difficult to receive assistance in Canada than in New York, or the disbelief when I said I’d never been on welfare. That brief interaction make me wonder about the hypocrisy of it all: Marginalized people, especially ethno-cultural communities, are continuously derided for not working or educating themselves enough to obtain the “American Dream,” but those who do still face deeply ingrained presumptions about their inability to elevate their class and social status.
Maybe, I started to realize, fitting in isn’t the only way to build community. I don’t think less of my neighbors who are on public assistance, and I recognize I grew up with class privilege — but I’m also proud of what I’ve achieved, even though it makes me an outsider. Maybe it’s possible for differences to strengthen a community, not just tear it apart.
Some of the things I’ve seen while living in Bed-Stuy bear out this idea. Though many of my neighbors are struggling financially, there are more people — both long-time residents and newcomers — making a concerted effort to create a safe and inclusive space. I might not currently feel included in the community, but I’m surrounded by people who are trying to build one. At a local demonstration in August protesting Eric Garner’s death at the hands of police, I was surprised to see young white and interracial families, gay and lesbian couples, and people from various ethnocultural backgrounds holding homemade placards and carrying signs. Every weekend during the summer and fall, my eyes teared up when I watched an older African-American man with a microphone lead a small group of people down my street repeating the mantra, “Black Power / For Black People.” In the months before and after the Missouri and New York grand juries’ decisions not to press charges exonerating the police officers involved in Garner’s and Michael Brown’s deaths, a few young white and Asian residents not only joined the predominantly black demonstrators, but also distributed flyers at the local subway entrance about community meetings to address community concerns. I realized that community meant active participation in trying to maintain the uniqueness of Bed-Stuy.
Over the past year I’ve come to terms with the fact that the romanticized black paradise Brooklyn I dreamed of doesn’t exist. Instead, I have a neighborhood (and neighbors) I genuinely like, a place where I belong in some ways but not in others. What I’ve always longed for has to be found within myself; it can’t come simply from living in a neighborhood of people with whom I share physical traits. I am a black gentrifier, no better or worse than the number of young white students who are slowly appearing on my street. I can’t wait for community to find me; it’s something we’ll all have to build.
