the danger of exceptional thinking: gentrification

I helped compile a panel of speakers for a discussion on important issues facing the people of Nashville last year.  I was most excited to hear from an African American woman who is the CEO of a transformative non-profit in town.  Her organization helps kids from the inner city understand themselves as the valuable children of God.  They accomplish this by providing consistent interaction with adults who love them, celebrating the wisdom of God through academic tutoring, and the creativity and beauty of God through training them in fine arts.

Because she is an expert in kids who live in the inner city, she has now reluctantly become an expert-of-sorts in the effects of gentrification on such neighborhoods.  She has seen what happens when we decide the profits of one group of investors are exceptional, and more important, than the history, jobs, schools and livability of people who are hanging off the edge of society.  She has seen what happens when we decide the comfort level and entertainment needs of the upper class are held as exceptional in a city’s landscape.  When homes are destroyed so hipsters can take over a neighborhood and walk to dinner.  

As this panel was forming, I asked this speaker to send the title of her talk so slides could be prepared.  The organizer, responding to those of us involved, presented her title, “Gentrification, Does the Rising Tide Lift All Boats?”, and then felt the need to clarify, saying, “What she calls gentrification, most of us know as urban renewal.” His response exposes the lack of understanding about the issues that face our cities, and of the changes damaging those in our urban center.

“This is a chronic problem in much of wealthy white America: If I don’t see it or know about it then it must not exist. ”

A white, upper class man calls this process “urban renewal” because his notions of “urban” are that those centers were abandoned decades ago, and that only crime, poverty and homelessness stayed behind.  This type of thinking comes from a place that privileges his perspective as authoritative, or exceptional, rather than knowing the limits of his experience.  This is a chronic problem in much of wealthy white America: If I don’t see it or know about it then it must not exist.  A majority culture perspective might sound something like this: Urban centers were dead and dying after we left them behind during the integration movement of the Civil Rights Era.  Now that we want to return to these centers, we are only bringing “good” along with us.  Hence the term, “renewal.” 

“From a marginalized perspective, gentrification is the result of investors and city officials who have decided the needs of the few with plenty are exceptionally important, while the needs of the many with nothing are not.  ”

At its core though, gentrification is about displacement and renaming.  In the same way that the organizer wanted to rename “gentrification” with “renewal,” the magical genteel transformation of a city only happens when “wealth and whiteness” replace “marginalized others.”  Wealth and whiteness, since the founding of our country, have a way of overlooking poverty, people of color, and systemic injustice.  From a marginalized perspective, gentrification is the result of investors and city officials who have decided the needs of the few with plenty are exceptionally important, while the needs of the many with nothing are not.  Gentrification does bring renewal to cities, and an influx of investment and people with money to spend along with it.  However, this practice of prioritizing the needs of a few as “exceptional”, and therefore as vital to the city, has some devastating implications:

First, gentrification necessitates displacement.  Brown moves out so white can move in.  Yes, when homes have been owned by people of color for generations, they are often complicit in selling their own property.  However, lest we get on a “their choice” high horse, remember that the vast majority of such sells are below market value and a small fraction of the expected profits when the property is rebuilt or renovated.  Further, for many families this is their only asset, and many do not possess the networks needed to demand a fair deal and then to use the windfall wisely.  It is also worth noting that many of these folks are relentlessly pestered with multiple calls, letters and visits per week from pressingly eager profiteers.  Finally, families who sell or are displaced when their rental or governmental homes are torn down are most often the very people least able to accommodate the changes such a move necessitates. 

In my urban—formally perceived as ghetto—neighborhood, there were dozens of small rental homes, multiple bus stops, good sidewalks, 5 churches, a park with a community center, 2 grocery stores, and 2 drugstores within a ½ mile radius.  For a family who can only afford low rent or to live in a home paid for long ago, who might not have a car or multiple cars, these assets are not just perks but absolutely vital!  Such urban realities are necessary to function for their kids, to get to work, to get by. 

When these folks are displaced, they cannot simply move to a new place.  When gentrification moves at an accelerated pace due to investors, these families have to move 10-30 miles away to find comparable rent.  In Nashville, the communities absorbing such displaced persons do not offer bus lines, neighborhood centers, and walkable grocery stores.  Why would they?  These communities are far outside the urban center, where such commodities are superfluous.  In short, displacement is not just inconvenient or awkward for the poor who no longer recognize their neighborhoods.  Rather, it usually initiates a cycle of loss, including but not limited to one’s job, method of transportation, dependable groceries, neighborhood school, community center, and church.  It is devastating.

“These experiences can undermine the deadly grip that stereotyping has on our society, replacing assumptions based on ignorance with nuanced understandings based on real relationships.  ”

Second, even though this trend might be inevitable, the way in which we experience and even trumpet gentrification has devastating implications because of the speed with which it moves.  When one or two white or wealthy families decide to move into an urban neighborhood, they are typically motivated by a few common passions.  They often have rejected a life oriented around fear and protection.  They often are passionate about pursuing perspectives different from their own.  They usually have a love for restoring broken or old things.  This process, even if it initiates the eventual displacement of the majority of the original residents, can take decades.  And these decades see beautiful, awkward, hard, enlightening integration.  Slow, honest relationships with people not like each other.  New-found understandings of what neighborliness is.  These experiences can undermine the deadly grip that stereotyping has on our society, replacing assumptions based on ignorance with nuanced understandings based on real relationships.  Gentrification might indeed still dominate an area, but it takes time, and that time can foster a new foundation to society that will radically change the way we relate to one another. 

All too often, our versions of “urban renewal” in no way resemble the painstaking description above.  Instead, a handful of investors, armed with profiteering builders and real estate agents, move into a neighborhood like a swarm of locusts.  This does not produce slow change infused with knowing relationships; it is rather characterized by entire blocks being knocked down, while fast, tightly-packed houses replace them.  And then, as a reward, families with no passion for or appreciation of the urban center and its place as a refuge for marginalized people pay over-asking prices to move into this manufactured version of the American dream.  This is not slow gentrification.  This is displacing the poor to make room for the rich on steroids.  People, their livelihoods, their culture and the one place they call their own in American society is lost in the process. 

As a people who say we are committed to the common good, who believe in the power of community, we must examine how our addiction to our exceptionality results in making decisions with no awareness of our impact on others.  If we believe all people are created in God’s image, then we must consider those people when we think about where we live, how we make a living, and how we contribute to displacing others.

contextualizing confederate monuments: part three

what should we do with them?

Last week I discussed the origin and popularity of the myth of the Lost Cause in the Southern United States.  Confederate monuments were erected as a permanent public reminder of the Lost Cause, which revised the history of the South, making it a kind and loyal place, gently controlled by Christian men who protected their women and nurtured their slaves.  Many of the organizations that funded the monument movement were openly founded on the Christian legitimacy of the South and on the supremacy of the white race.  We now find ourselves in a battle over this contested past.  Many proponents of the Lost Cause, mostly white people who love their Southern heritage, are understandably frustrated that some non-whites, liberal whites, or Northern whites, want to remove Confederate monuments, erasing history.  They feel defensive, as if their entire legacy is being vilified and erased by people with no right to speak into Southern history.  This viewpoint makes perfect sense if the only history of the South is the Lost Cause. 

However, most Southerners—of all races—do not know the full history of the South.  They don’t know that most plantations were owned by absentee landlords, and were simply plots of land, worked by people under the lash of an overseer, with no “humanizing” white family nearby.  They don’t know that Christianity and baptism were twisted and manipulated, finally shared with slaves only when evangelism could be used as a tool of coercion against the new converts.  They don’t know that the vast majority of white people did not own slaves, and were victimized by a system that allowed huge plantations with a self-replicating work force to thrive while they struggled to get ahead.  They don’t know that the institution of slavery fueled, funded and built every economic gain America experienced, and that America itself owes a deep debt of gratitude to the people of color who made America great and possible in the first place.  They don’t know that statues of men who prioritized personal gain over loyalty to America were erected to honor a fabricated Southern legacy.  This historical ignorance must be confronted in order to think clearly about the current Confederate monument debate.

“The institution of slavery fueled, funded and built every economic gain America experienced; America itself owes a deep debt of gratitude to the people of color who made America great and possible in the first place.  ”

Here are the two sides of this debate as I understand them:

For many, the Civil War and the Confederacy are part of our history, and the men who fought in the war were valiant warriors loyal to their families, fighting for the rights of those in their states.  Honoring them has nothing to do with slavery, but instead commemorates the noble leaders who fought and died for their values in the bloodiest war America has ever known.  They are part of our history, and should be remembered.

For others, the monuments of Confederate leaders honor men who betrayed their country through legislated mutiny, and then fought for the right of their fellow statesmen to own, abuse, and control every aspect of the lives of their human chattel.  For these folks, the antebellum South, the Confederacy, the flag, and the soldiers who fought for the states who seceded are all fruit of the poisoned tree of slavery.  This past is fluid and invasive and one cannot separate part of the memory for honor when slavery was the reality that created the whole.

“The antebellum South, the Confederacy, the flag, and the soldiers who fought for the states who seceded are all fruit of the poisoned tree of slavery.”

So what are we to do with this history?  I do not think that we can praise every confederate honoree as an unblemished hero or as a despicable tyrant who should be shunned.  That said, we cannot pretend that this debate is about a choice to honor history when the statues themselves were created to erase history.  America is a mixed bag; we are brave and free and fair, while also being cowardly and abusive and greedy.  The idea that this debate has a side who want to ignore or erase history (those in favor of removing them) and a side who wants to learn from or honor history (those who want to leave them alone) is problematic.  The history memorialized by confederate statues is a history created after the Civil War to erase the evil of the history that established, paid for and built our country.  

“We cannot pretend that this debate is about a choice to honor history when the statues themselves were created to erase history. ”

As a Southern American, I agree that we cannot erase or ignore history by removing confederate statues.  We have inherited a legacy of erasing and white washing the very histories of hierarchies based on race left to us by our ancestors, and this debate gives us a chance to reckon not only with our past, but with the ways we continue to remember and disremember that past.  We are responsible, each of us, for what we do with the legacy left to us by our ancestors.  For my part, I do see a place for confederate monuments in public life, under these conditions:

1)   The monuments should be joined by other conflicted “heroes”, like slaves, slave rebellion leaders, abolitionists, and leaders who spoke truth to the power of white supremacy when it was dangerous to do so. (It still is dangerous to do so, in fact…) The commemoration of others will create a robust dialogue about the role of individuals in promoting or confronting systems of injustice.  America has a legacy of abusive oppression, but we also have a legacy of resistance and seeking justice for all.

2)   Existing monuments should be moved to museums or accurately contextualized with posted explanations.  Nathan Bedford Forrest was a brave confederate general AND a violent promoter of racial hatred as a slave trader and the Grand Wizard of the KKK.  Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence AND forced a teenage slave he owned to have sex with him and bear several of his children, whom he freed while continually writing that interracial mixing was an abomination and abhorrent to God.  Robert E. Lee was a tenacious general who believed slavery was “evil”, supported abolishing it, AND held racist views that slavery civilized Africans and that he would kill soldiers who fought to abolish it.  The question about moving statues to a museum instead of honoring them in public parks is not a question of who is willing to remember history, it is a question of who is willing to place these statues in the historical context in which the men they honor lived and died, rather than the manipulative context in which they were originally placed. 

Our history is neither all progress nor all degrading shame; we are and always have been mixed bags.  We would do well to take an honest look at what our “heroes” accomplished on their best and worst days, allowing that knowledge to explain the legacy we all carry, and what we are to do with it today.

Next week, a look at interracial dialogue happening at Lipscomb University this month.