To the class of 2014:
Congratulations. You did four (or however many) years of a thing and may have worked hard on that thing. Good on you. Good luck in the job market and finding something fulfilling and significant. May we reclaim the world from the old and wipe up their mess before the earth devours us.
All that being said, can y’all just not be the fucking stereotype and not flock to New York? Please?
An alarming amount of the people I know are just flocking to New York City without jobs or much of a prospect. They expect to make it there. This is a part of some bullshit Disney fantasy where the white prince or princess does something out of their element and it just works out for them because they sing a tune, have a skill and make a bunch of friends with the locals and the new neighbors and become the bell of the ball. These people will find the intersection of Cool and Cheap and continue urban displacement, or gentrification if that makes you more comfortable.
There are three reactions to my accusation:
“Oh, I’m not like the others.”
“I know, but I will try really hard to ______.”
“The fuck you want from me?”
No level of awareness or guilt helps if you still decide to move to a developing neighborhood. Your placement is someone’s displacement. Your Starbucks was a furniture store. Your drunk adventure on the streets of LoHo is a beer bottle away from some of the poorest in the city. Your ability to move to a new city on essentially a whim affects those that lack. You put your life in a higher priority than someone making ends meet and expect sympathy.
For the white starving artist, maybe it’s time for you to not have your story told. It’s selfish for you to move yourself to an established place with established people, many of whom you’ll never see because they are working. Your stories have been told ten ten ten ten ten fold. Your active denial to participate may actually help start voices that get smothered and displaced as their families do.
Your white dream defers the dreams of thousands of others who are waiting to express repressed generations. Your mainstream culture has nothing more to contribute. You believe you are inherently special and that justifies an action to misplace the perpetually misplaced and plea innocence. There is no innocence for you. More appalling than unconscious violent action is fully aware action that is done in an “Oh me, oh my, I can’t help it” fashion. It ameliorates nothing, and you should be disgusted by yourself. You should hate that part of you that does that, your colonialist gene.
Acknowledging or “checking” privilege has become this hail Mary that white people use to exorcise guilt. As a person of color born and raised in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I get to be the patron saint of gentrifier’s guilt, because feeling really shitty about something and still doing it makes it better.
What should you do? I don’t know, and I don’t fucking care. If you really, truly gave a fuck about the economic and systemic violence you’re imposing on classes and races, you’d get the fuck out of the town and find careers elsewhere. Your struggle is illegitimate when put against years of institutional racism. Boo fucking hoo. If you can’t handle that, by all means gentrify as you would have all along. Make yourself an “ally” while ultimately misplacing another generation of underprivileged, and hope that this generation is not The Generation that gets fed up and empowered enough to do something about it and demolishes what you once called home, because it’s happened to them all too often.
Gentrification solves nothing. It advances an externality in economics. Capitalism was meant for white people to lord over everyone else. It still does. As an inherently white production, it is meant to advance whites and exploit all others. Neighborhoods never improve when gentrified; they lose their soul.
youkeepthemoney. 