Black Lens - October 2021

Page 22
October 2021
www.blacklensnews.com
The Black Lens Spokane
Gentrification and the End of Black Communities
By Margaret Kimberley
BAR senior columnist
Reprinted from Black Agenda Report
(blackagendareport.com)
Brooklyn, New York is the epicenter of
gentrification, the displacement of Black
people from cities in this country. Recently
released census data shows that neighborhoods
like Bedford-Stuyvesant , which
was nearly all Black for decades, no longer
has a Black majority. Bedford-Stuyvesant’s
white population rose by 30,000
from 2010 to 2020 while its Black population
decreased by 22,000.
The devastation has been wrought by finance
capital, which has once again upended
life for Black people. Money was taken
out of the cities in the 1950s and 1960s,
creating what was known as “white flight”
to the suburbs. Now the same forces have
reversed themselves and are putting money
back into the cities, and Black people are
the losers. Neighborhoods that were once
afterthoughts and the butt of jokes are suddenly
declared “hot” if real estate speculators
target them for change.
The how-to of moving Black people out of a
community isn’t difficult at all. The median
price for a home anywhere in Brooklyn is
now $900,000 . A well-kept brownstone in
Crown Heights or Bedford-Stuyvesant can
now fetch seven figures. Home purchases
which once required living wage employment
and thrifty habits now require a small
fortune that Black people rarely have.
What is now called gentrification is the
latest salvo in a long history of making
the Black population disposable and dependent
upon the whims of racist reaction
and capitalism. Urban renewal, known as
Negro removal, destroyed entire communities.
Financial institutions used red lining
to determine where a mortgage could be
obtained. Often these rules were used to
keep any Black person out, regardless of
financial circumstances.
Those circumstances are usually tenuous.
Living wage jobs are no longer plentiful, as
the same finance capital interests sent manufacturing
jobs to other countries, leaving
nothing but low wage jobs or even socalled
gig work, which guarantees nothing
but the precarity that the system demands.
Gentrification even impacts the criminal
justice system. An increasingly white jury
pool in Brooklyn means that defendants,
mostly people of color, are more likely to
be convicted. Civil cases are less likely to
be decided in favor of plaintiffs and awards
are smaller as the borough’s income and
education levels rise.
Generations of culture are being lost, families
are dispersed, and even home sellers
who can make the proverbial killing are
saddened that their good fortune only accelerates
the process of displacement. Everyone
laments the process but they are
silenced because their losses are rarely acknowledged.
We are told that people have the right to
live where they want. But that right exists
only for those with access to lots of money.
The average Black working person depends
on a salary. Even those with higher
incomes don’t have access to cash or to a
family legacy of wealth, and they are automatically
out of the running.
The problem of course is capitalism itself.
Black people shouldn’t be blamed for not
pulling themselves up by imaginary bootstraps
when the paths to success are closed
to them by discrimination and when the
rules they were told to follow are suddenly
changed. Even a college education is
no longer a ticket to success. Student loan
debt is a burden to people who believed
they were helping themselves when they
took on what was once a key to success.
Black college graduates now start off their
lives deeply indebted while also relying
on incomes that are less than those of their
white counterparts. They are worse off than
their parents’ generation and they will be
left out of home ownership and other opportunities
they thought they would have.
Of course Brooklyn and Harlem are less
and less Black. Washington DC, once
known as Chocolate City, is now more of
a cafe au lait city, as its Black population
is no longer in the majority. The political
system offers no solutions. Real estate interests
are big political donors, and they
decide who will and who will not be in office.
Politicians won’t bite the hands that
feed them and people who expected to get
what they were promised if they played by
the rules are left out of contention.
At the very least we can name and shame
the bankers and the developers and the
craven politicians. They are causing the
deaths of communities and the destruction
of a people. There should also be no hesitation
in naming racism as the culprit of
Black peoples problems. Capitalism and
racism make one gigantic, two-headed
monster behaving as it always has. No one
should shrink from pointing out that fact.
Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column
appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted
elsewhere. She is the author of Prejudential:
Black America and the Presidents . Her
work can also be found at patreon.com/margaretkimberley.
Ms. Kimberley can be reached
via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.