Isegoria

Single, white professional Sarah Courteau recently moved into a 90-percent black DC neighborhood, where she guiltily admits that she’s a gentrifier — one of the good ones:

The very origin of the word “gentrification” to describe the process by which an urban area is rendered middle class is not neutral. The eminent sociologist Ruth Glass is credited with coining it in 1964 to decry the changes in working-class London neighborhoods. Though the word has only been in circulation for a few decades, gentrification has become another of the litmus test issues that define who we are on the political and — in the eyes of some — moral spectrum.

The lines of conflict are readily apparent in the comments readers leave on blogs that cover Washington’s transitional neighborhoods. Some writers are angry that the neighborhood is changing at all; others are angry that it isn’t changing fast enough. Some want to control the change, ensuring that a curated mix of businesses is established — no chain stores, please, but nothing too “ghetto,” either. And some want to curate the people. Gentrification, though driven by economic change, often boils down to issues of race, even among diversity-celebrating gentrifiers. Elise Bernard, a 32-year-old lawyer who bought a house off H Street in 2003, has for years written intelligently and reliably about the area on her blog Frozen Tropics. Bernard, who is white, recalls a conversation she had with a college friend when she was contemplating renting out a couple of rooms in her house. “She wanted me to somehow racially balance the house, like bring in an African American and an Asian, and I’m like, ‘This is not The Real World. This is my house.’ ”

When I started reading Frozen Tropics, I was taken aback by the racial tension running through many of the discussions. Most of the comments appear to be left by whites, though anonymity reigns. Last summer, when Bernard posted news of gunfire (no one was injured) outside XII, an H Street club that attracts a largely black clientele, the item drew more than 70 comments. “Post all the ‘oh it could have happened anywhere’ nonsense you want, bleeding hearts,” sneered one anonymous writer. “This type of crap only happens at joints like XII…. Cater to a predominately younger, black, male population, and violence will likely follow.” Another, enraged by the “entitled racist yuppie mentality” of the neighborhood, wrote, “May your home values go to shit and may you each find a Burger King wrapper on your lawn!”

Courteau goes on, by the way, to describe a teenager — of conspicuously unmentioned race — casually dropping a white plastic bag on the sidewalk, leaving her in a moral quandary about what to do.:

I ponder whether to stoop and pick it up and throw it into a nearby trash can. Wouldn’t that constitute a censure not only of him, should he turn around and see me, but of the whole neighborhood, where trash blows into streets and yards and forms middens in alleyways? But wouldn’t walking by it be a kind of acquiescence? It’s this sort of minute social calculus that’s the mark of the self-conscious gentrifier, not quite sure of her status in the community.

(Hat tip to Ilkka, who mocks the progressive Scylla and Charybdis of gentrification vs. white flight.)

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