I have just finished reading Eula Biss’s fine article which appeared in the 2008 copy of Believer magazine. About six times during the article I started to open an email to send to Andrew telling him to read it, or this very blog post to tell whoever is reading this to read it, but I sat still and continued.
Laura Ingalls Wilder and the pioneer mentality is taken to a logical conclusion in the modern problems of gentrification.
Most victims of violent crimes are not white. This is particularly true for “hate” crimes. We are far more likely to be hurt by the food we eat, the cars we drive, or the bicycles we ride than by the people we live among. This may be lost on us in part because we are surrounded by a lot of noise that suggests otherwise.
Biss articulates something that I have felt for a very long time, (ever since I began to explore and love Los Angeles) but have been left largely unable to articulate. The subject matter is one that I have felt timid when approaching or discussing for fear of apparent or real racism. College only amplified this fear when my enlightened ass began to get annoyed at the barrage of Racial Reconciliation meetings, and the endless attempts to bring together these “opposing forces” on campus. I began to protest that this wasn’t a problem that kids growing up in California faced. The conversations could become paralyzing, discussing race relations from a middle-class white background entirely devoid of integration. I feel as if college bred racism, I know for a fact that it certainly bred resentment.
“It’s not racism if it’s true,” how often I have repeated that when motoring along behind a slow Asian female driver, buzzing past them snarling. Or heard someone remark while watching a home security ad, “Oh of course it’s a middle aged white man breaking into that home.” (Perhaps he used to work at Goldman-Sachs?) Racism can often feel safe, comfortable, smug.
This year, because of my extensive traveling I have answered many questions about the area in which I live, and have come to the conclusion that I live in a bubble, removed from any urban environment and from anyone who is different. I drive from my home to my job, to my stores. There is no walking to and from a corner market or engagement with anyone I do not know intimately. This isolation from others is a product of my living environment, and something I have been considering in the possibility of moving to another city. There’s something tactless and embarrassing about a white girl attempting to find a more wholly integrated city to partake in, but I believe it may be important enough.
My feelings about Portland (6.2% black population), which come to me through a year or two’s reading of the internet (which functions much like a large reflecting pool upon which various threads of thought are visible, and it takes time to gather them all up and see what you have) and through conversations with various friends, have lead me to believe it is a white city where white artistic people live. I mentioned this to a friend while I was in Kansas City (22.7% black population) and he said ‘That sounds great!’, but I can’t shake the idea that there is some sickness in moving to a place where everyone is the same, and happily so.
“I think you should define the word gentrification,” my husband tells me now. I ask him what he would say it means and he pauses for a long moment. “It means that an area is generally improved,” he says finally, “but in such a way that everything worthwhile about it is destroyed.”
This is interesting to me, given what happened in Los Angeles’ neighbourhood of Silverlake over the past four years. I first remember the stirrings that Echo Park and the adjacent area was becoming hip, and now it has already lost it’s cool edge, but the rents have risen, the area is mid-transformation, and it has become a mecca of insufferability.
I am as guilty as anyone of the wrongs Biss outlines, the adherence to fear and to allowing Fear Mongering by others to affect my opinion of others and of places. Though one wishes to avoid such bleak attempt as a college professor who told us that he moved his white family into an entirely black neighbourhood, or my parents who attended an entirely black church until my sisters reported that after a year, none of the other kids would interact with them. (This all is interesting when I consider how much importance I place on adoption as a necessary element of life.)
Ted and I talked about this extensively during my visit to Chicago. His neighbourhood, Pilsen, was predominantly Hispanic, though it had been originally settled by Polish immigrants. We walked the streets and the only other white people I ever saw were mid-20’s white artistic types. Ted said that he was worried the area would gentrify, that it was already beginning, and immediately acknowledged that his presence there was a part of that.
What is to be done, then? Like Biss, I want to believe in the promise of what real diversity and unification might mean, but have not yet discovered how to actualize this process in my heart and life.
