Coming into view: Engaging gentrification and displacement beyond aversive racism

Abstract

Reflecting on Bloch and Meyer's exploration of displacement-by-gentrification and their use of “aversive racism” to address a lack of serious engagement with race and racism in gentrification studies, I offer a conceptual tour of both gentrification and displacement, specifically how some scholars have defined both terms and used them to explore various dimensions of socio-spatial shifts. Then, I clarify the incompatibility of aversive racism and a Black geographic framework, since Black geographies place Black agency at the center of spatial production and emphasizes Black spatial experiences in the expression of Black spatial imaginaries and geographic visions of society.

Commentary

As I read Bloch and Meyer's (2023) paper, I was struck by how much ground they were able to cover in the space of a journal article. The piece focuses on gentrification-induced displacement, or “how gentrification as a process functions as displacement,” but specifically the work of urban displacement. They call on scholars from various fields within gentrification studies, specifically geography, to reconceptualize and deploy alternative methods to measure displacement and integrate race and racism within their analytical explorations of gentrification. As someone trained in cultural sociology, whose scholarship and teaching are situated within cultural and urban geography, I acknowledge that it is important to open up designations of gentrification and use more analytically rigorous methods and theories to better understand processes of racialization (and spatialization) as they connect to gentrification and displacement. Bloch and Meyer seek to expand analyses of gentrification that simply map and count bodies in their literal accounting of gentrification and its material affects. I would argue, however, that there remains something methodologically important about mapping and counting bodies as a means to demonstrate the intensity of displacement rather than how displacement—via gentrification—works. Nevertheless, they want to offer a more nuanced analysis of “how racism takes place,” and end their article with a nod to the analytical merits of Black geographic theory and methods.

Bloch and Meyer build upon previous work (Bloch, 2022; Bloch and Meyer, 2019) by merging affect theory with the psychological theory, aversive racism, which attempts to explain subtle forms of racism expressed by white liberals. While this theory is notable, subtle forms of racism and white liberalism are not mutually exclusive. A central focus of white liberalism has been integration and assimilation. In practice, this has meant that Black people and other people of color are deemed culturally inferior and must behave like white people in order to achieve any significant social, economic, or political gains. Marginalized groups must be educated, if possible, and it is up to white people to deploy paternalistic civilizing missions to educate them. Further, Bloch and Meyer claim that white gentrifiers use contradictory logics of investing in white racial community formation in contrast to liberal social values, when liberal discourses of inclusion have always already eschewed equity for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people. From the New Deal to the War on Poverty to the Moynihan Report, liberal scholars, intellectuals, and policy makers have long embraced this kind of “contradictory” thinking when it comes to urban policy. In this way, contemporary “feel good” approaches to cultural diversity, investing in superficial markers (and markets) of diversity rather than integrating anti-racist practices, have become a natural extension of a not-too-distant past (Summers, 2019).

I will use the remaining space to think conceptually about gentrification and displacement, specifically how some scholars have defined both terms and used them to explore various dimensions of socio-spatial shifts. While Bloch and Meyer do not share how they define either term, their engagement with such a wide literature demonstrates the importance of considering both terms—conceptually and materially.

Gentrification studies remain important as we are experiencing the prolonged effects of urban austerity measures, a trenchant affordable housing crisis, an ever-expanding war on the poor, as eviction moratoriums come to an end in many cities of the Global North, if they haven’t already. Studies also show that these forms of dispossession and displacement impact Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people disproportionately. In my hometown, Oakland, California, for example, Black residents continually experience disproportionately high unemployment, poverty rates, homelessness (today, Black people account for an astounding 70% of Oakland's total unhoused population, while representing little over 20% of the total population), inadequate public transportation, and residential/commercial segregation.

Conceptually, gentrification has garnered great debate among urban studies scholars, with early definitions focusing on the processes by which working-class communities were rehabilitated by developers, landlords, and middle-class homebuyers. As a result, capital reinvestments of the urban core precipitated the replacement of lower- and working-class residents by more affluent classes of people (Smith, 1982). Over time, the definition expanded to include political-economic elements, including neoliberal governance and the financialization of housing (Lees et al., 2008; Slater et al., 2004; Smith, 1996). Less of this early research accounted for the racialized dimensions of gentrification. Nevertheless, more research demonstrates how racial formation and racialization, via racial capitalism, constitute the production of space and how land is valued (Dantzler, 2021; Kobayashi and Peake, 2000; Pulido, 2000; Rucks-Ahidiana, 2022; Woods, 1998).

The economic geography of gentrification, as Smith (1996) notes, is not a natural or random process, but a calculated one that is designed to privilege investors, developers, speculators, and real-estate companies. Gentrification is an ongoing, turbulent process, not an event. Its whole basis is both place-taking and placemaking, as Bloch and Meyer point out. Gentrification not only takes and makes places; the process also intensifies multiple modes of extraction and exploitation. Whether it is through political (Fraser, 2004) (Knotts and Haspel, 2006), cultural (Brown-Saracino, 2010; Howell, 2005; Hyra, 2017; Zukin, 2009), or residential displacement, central to these processes is the removal and replacement of working-class residents through various forms of eviction and renewal (Hackworth and Smith, 2001; Lees et al., 2008; Smith, 1996; Zukin, 2009). Blomley (2004) explains that the creation of cities requires placemaking, redefinition, and “creative reconstruction” that involves both erasure and production—an imaginative reconstruction of both the past and present. In this sense, displacement demands the removal of indigenous groups, and “the concomitant emplacement of a settler society,” a white place that comes to be via settlement and occupation (Blomley, 2004: 114).

There are continuing debates over whether gentrification necessarily induces the displacement of certain populations (Freeman, 2011; Larsen and Hansen, 2008; Marcuse, 1985; Purcell, 2008). In fact, some scholars have downplayed the existence of gentrification-induced displacement, which has led urban geographers to rethink the concept of displacement. As such, urban geographers have taken up the settler colonial framework to discuss the operation of settler logics of displacement and dispossession today. These scholars focus on the racialized dimensions of gentrification, and the violent place-taking processes intended to erase and tame racial “others,” by deeming them out of place, thereby recognizing gentrification “not solely [as] a manifestation of political-economic restructuring, it is also a spatial and racial project to reimagine the city and whom cities are for” (Addie and Fraser, 2019: 5). Elaborating the framework, scholars focus on how the “settler-colonial present” (Veracini, 2015) and ghetto colonialism (Paperson, 2014) lead to the violent disruption of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities (Addie and Fraser, 2019; Blomley, 2004; Maharwal, 2017; McClintock, 2018; Roy, 2017; Safransky, 2014; Veracini, 2011).

As a form of power, settler colonialism involves “being physically eliminated or displaced, having one's cultural practices erased [and] being ‘absorbed,’ ‘assimilated’ or ‘amalgamated’ in the wider population” (Veracini, 2011: 2). To that end, as Maharwal (2017) argues, both settler colonialism and gentrification engage “comingled and similar historical projects” (Maharwal, 2017: 36). Again, scholars have pointed to gentrification as a place-taking, settler-colonial project, and a persistent structural process of displacement and dispossession, as it “entails a violent remaking of place—tearing down of previously established social norms and imposing a new socially constructed reality with its own rules and regulations” (Seawright, 2014: 563). The settler-colonial logic of gentrification is expressed through contemporary discourses, institutions, cultural, and spatial practices (Safransky, 2014). Ultimately, gentrification is the continuation of white settlers politicizing, disempowering, and capitalizing on marginalized communities for their own gain. Longtime residents end up being priced out, as rents increase and new retail begins to serve wealthier customers, thereby increasing gentrification in that area (Lees et al., 2008; Smith, 1996). While some suggest that this is a natural occurrence of capitalism or that gentrification improves the condition of blighted neighborhoods (Atkinson and Bridge, 2004), the realities of removal driven by racism, elitism, and exclusionary politics belies these assertions.

The contemporary settler-colonial logics have been maintained through an “urban pioneer” imaginary, which advocates the settling of urban frontiers and wastelands, returning to a romanticized past when white pioneers “discovered” and settled racialized space (Blomley, 2004; Kinney, 2014; McClintock, 2018; Smith, 1996). Smith (1996) argues that urban frontier discourses and imagery “treats present inner-city populations as a natural element of their physical surroundings … the frontier discourse serves to rationalize and legitimate a process of conquest, whether in the eighteenth or nineteenth-century West, or in the late-twentieth century inner city” (Smith, 1996: xvi). These frames help us understand the processes through which Black people come to be dislocated from Black spaces and how displacement and dispossession is often justified. Several neighborhoods in Oakland, which alongside San Francisco was named the most gentrified cities of 2020, are emblematic of these shifts in population, where pioneers seeking new frontiers to settle descend upon black neighborhoods with the intention of renewing and redeveloping them.

Displacement, however, is always incomplete, leaving room for disruption “through which residents reclaim these spaces, while also provoking larger public conversations about dispossession in the city” (Maharwal, 2017: 37). While displacement signifies the removal of indigenous groups from the city, supplanted by white settlers, for a settler society, “displacement is a social achievement, but also an aspiration; it is an accomplishment and also an assertion” (Blomley, 2004: 109). To that end, displacement as placemaking/taking invites reimagining, resistance, and contestation.

As I have written previously, in gentrifying neighborhoods, poor and working-class Black residents experience cultural displacement, in which they feel unwelcome and uncomfortable in areas where they have lived for years (Summers, 2021a). The paradox of racial coloniality is that Black subjects are both “placeless” and intimately tied to the land—a plantation logic that “normalized black dispossession, white supremacy, and other colonial-racial geographies” (McKittrick, 2011: 949). Bringing this imaginary to the present, gentrification-induced displacement and dispossession cultivate this same kind of Black placelessness while tying blackness to the city, keeping blackness “in place” (McKittrick, 2011; Summers, 2019, 2021b).

The social and lived space of Black residents are shaped by material practices—evictions, shifting commercial landscape, historic preservation—and representational strategies that place boundaries around who belongs and who does not. These practices are enacted by several actors, including politicians, investors, developers, residents, business owners, homeowners, city governments, and cultural organizations. To that end, conceptually bridging Black geographies with the “aversive racism” analytic seems misguided as it brings opposing ideas to the same side of the equation; to center what amounts to the unconscious bias of white gentrifiers places the kind of focus on white people (and whiteness) that Black geographies expressly rebukes. What animates Black geographic work is that Black people find meaning in life and place in spite of precarious conditions and the structures that have made a Black sense of place seemingly impossible. They are constantly able to carve out space and meaning, emplace themselves, create stability, in spite of enormous structures of displacement. Part of the work of Black geographies that seeks to render visible is what has long gone unnoticed in the field of geography and beyond.