Kashana Cauley writing at TPM:
The problem is that America has one official gentrification story. Gentrifiers are white, middle- to upper-middle class people who move into minority-filled neighborhoods, drive up rents by paying much more than the natives can afford, and entice expensive coffee shops and farm-to-table restaurants to move in, thereby displacing older businesses simply by existing.
This does happen. But it’s not the whole truth….
It took me a couple of years after I realized I was a black gentrifier to admit it to others, to tell people who assumed I grew up in the East Village that I’d moved to New York from the Midwest to practice law and that I was comfortable with the objectively huge sum I paid in rent. I didn’t want to identify as a member of a group that forced people out of their homes. But after a couple more years of legal practice, I’d grown comfortable with my job and my new socioeconomic status. I realized deciding not to identify as a gentrifier wasn’t going to make me a native. So when a particularly curious bodega owner asked me a ton of follow-up questions after I said I didn’t grow up in the East Village, I told him I practiced antitrust law at a large Midtown firm and chose to live in the neighborhood because it was full of luxurious apartments and high-end bars—a sentence that promptly ended our chat.