Creating a gentrified guilt complex (op-ed)

 

Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

In 2006 author Shelby Steele published, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.  Steele described white guilt as the vacuum of moral authority that comes from simply knowing that one’s race is associated with racism.

Therefore, whites (and American institutions) must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed of it, but once they acknowledge it, they lose moral authority over everything having to do with race, equality, social justice, and poverty.  The authority whites lose transfers to the “victims” of historical racism and becomes the victim’s source of power in society. 

Steele went further: Anger is not inevitable for the oppressed; it is chosen when weakness in the oppressor means it will be effective in winning some kind of spoils.  Anger in the oppressed is a response to perceived opportunity, not to injustice.  Injustices create only the potential for anger, but weakness in the oppressor calls out anger, even when there is no injustice.  In both the best and the worst sense of the word, black rage is always a kind of opportunism.

Last month, in Kentucky, Black Lives Matter Louisville, created a social justice rating system to grade establishments in the NuLu Business District.  Grade A = Ally, meaning the establishment supported black liberation and met the requirements.  Grade C = Complicit, meaning the establishment failed to meet 2 or more of the requirements.  Grade F = Failure, meaning the establishment failed to meet minimum requirements including failure to create a safe space for black inclusion.  The requirements, which were actually social justice demands, were the following:

1). Establishments must have 23% BIPOC on staff

2). Establishments must receive 23% of inventory from BIPOC businesses

3). Establishments must make regular donations to BIPOC organizations

4). No dress codes that discriminate against BIPOC patrons or employees.

The activist expected NuLu business owners to sign a contract that stated: I, a business owner in the gentrified NuLu Business District, understand that gentrification targets poor and disadvantaged communities of color.  I acknowledge that the original residents of Louisville’s Clarksdale community, which was demolished to make way for NuLu, have been harmed by displacement.  I acknowledge that my business has played a part in the harm done to Clarksdale’s original residents, who have received no economic benefits from our occupation.

The reaction from NuLu’s business owners ranged from weak, to mild, to extreme.  Some owners believed they had a responsibility to admit gentrification occurred and they should play an active part in increasing diversity in the district.  Other owners felt the activists had a legitimate grievance, but disagreed that the NuLu district was part of the gentrification that took place at Clarksdale.  Then there were owners that insisted that the activists were using mafia shakedown tactics to achieve their goals.  In response to the last group of business owners one activist warned, “How you respond to this is how people will remember you in this moment.  You want to be on the right side of justice at all times.”

Another social justice demand centering around gentrification happened earlier this month in Seattle.  The Seattle Times reported that Seattle was the third most gentrified city in the United States.  The city’s Central District has seen a dramatic drop in black residents.  The paper estimated by the next decade the Central District will be 10 percent black, down from 73 percent black in 1970.  A small group of Black Lives Matter activists went on a march to demand for white people to give up their homes as a form of reparations for gentrification.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2014 article The Case for Reparations contained a list of historical grievances in the subtitle: Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy.  Then Coates wrote: Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

These activists just added gentrification to America’s compounding moral debt and will continue to guilt the present in an effort to gain from the past.

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 8/26/2020