Racialized Order, Black Life: Gentrification and its Context
Comments delivered at Preserving LeDroit Park - Humanitini, Busboys and Poets, January 9, 2020
Gentrification is the metaphorical child of the Western project of private property, enclosure, and settler colonialism. These are themselves grounded on the principles of individualism and the erosion of the commons, movements that originated in European feudal societies and have transformed the world. In human history these ideas are recent, but in the last five hundred plus years, they have had devastating consequences. Until we understand gentrification against this larger backdrop, we will reduce the phenomenon to the complex, but simple desires of a group of professionals and their ambitions to live closer to where they work, a phenomenon responsible for displacement, both political and cultural, a volatile mix of urban politics, resentment, and the erasure of community. It is of course that, but much more.
The very idea of the town or city in Western history is necessarily bound up with the movement of capital. Market activity subsumed principles of life and living andoverdetermined the meaning of community from the very beginning. The features of city life found themselves in societies on the other side of the Atlantic, because the basic principles of market activity required expansion. The major difference,however, is that in order to extend the logics of the town, the market, and the rational society to this part of the world, there were additional requirements: settler colonialism and unfree labor. The lives of the indigenous and the forced movement of Africans made these societies what they were. Rural locales provided the produce that the town managed, refined, sold, and shipped. And this is no point of pride, to have “built” this behemoth, for building it required the displacement and forced removals in the name of capital of which gentrification is but the current iteration. Gentrification—literally the gentry’s desires—are and have always been racialized. Black life was never supposed to animate “the town” in the first place.
There were other plans for us. We were to be relegated to the ghettos, the holding pens of modern industrial labor. We were to be given the minimal requirements for life and living, because all that was required of us was our labor. And not all the time. We were sometimes considered the reserve army of labor. Last hired, first fired.
But we also had plans for ourselves. We gave life to the ghetto, through our song and dance, our ways of knowing and seeing, of believing. And through our philosophies of life, we began to desire more. So we imagined that we could transform not just the ghetto, but the town, the city, the nation, the world. This is the Black freedom struggle. But it was too much for others, because it called into question the very principles that animated Western society. So as we drew from independence movements for liberation throughout the world, we were in turntreated like an internal colony. Poverty, desperation, overpolicing. And even in historic Black neighborhoods of the middle class, things began to turn. Chronic disinvestment in the basic necessities for material existence where the harbingers of a neoliberal future. Though it was marked by the seeming suddenness of urban rebellions, these new times that were emerging had a long history.
Neoliberalism became in some cases the final nail in the coffin of the welfare state that had emerged in the twentieth century during one of the greatest crises of global capitalism. It was the political and economic theory of market fundamentalism, that individual actors might benefit from selling their labor and ingenuity more readily without government interference; that an economic order was rational, on its own. The state needed shrinking, so that rational actors could see to all of our wants and needs.
But that rationality was racially ordered. And housing policy is just one example. Without the state’s intervention, even wealthy Black potential homeowners had been racially excluded from participating in the market as equals. In the absence of that regulation, homeowner’s associations were free to discriminate, precipitating some of the greatest legal battles of the twentieth century, including some in Bloomingdale, Shaw, and LeDroit Park. .
What we have been seeing in DC is basically all of this and more. Whether it is the Shaw/U Street neighborhood, the H Street corridor, Petworth, Southwest and the Waterfront, the plans we know are in the offing if not fully executed in Southeast, the logic of displacement has resulted in development, which has resulted in the assault on Black life culturally and materially. The spiritual center of Chocolate City is under attack, and market forces are one reason. But there are others. There was something about the idea that a Black city, with a Black mayor, could become liberated space that had to be fully extinguished. So we have a Black elite which looks nothing like it once did, with very little connection to the people which is now pursuing a politics in convergence with those market forces to devasting effect. There is much blame to go around for the state of things. But we must also remember that this is structural.
It is important to understand now, that neoliberalism has rendered such government protections as increasingly moot. Developers now have free reign to build through dispossession and dispersal of that which is unwanted, that which is a threat to their goals of accumulation. Challenges to this order of arrangements, then have to begin to understand the historic political context. We have to understand the logics of the settler state, of racial capitalism, of the modes of existence that have made American and global modernity. It may not be enough to depend on notions of equal protection and other legal remedies that have been interpreted to deny any connection to Black human problems.
It will become necessary for our work to be foregrounded by a robust imagination that we can live and thrive while achieving that greatest good for the greatest number of people. In the maroon communities, the shantytowns, the ghettos, and the legacy Black communities, there is indeed a thriving way of life that might be recovered. People built out of perceived nothingness ways to be and live and love. It was always, however, under the duress of the structural conditions that seek to stamp out that life. Redevelopment just happens to be the product of those conditions. Gentrification is its outcome. We need not lie to ourselves that this is the best we can do. Against the protestations of neoliberal imaginaries like those of Margaret Thatcher, there are indeed alternatives, ones that are all around us.
