There Goes the Hood: Views of Gentrification From the Ground Up by Lance Freeman

Author:Lance Freeman [Freeman, Lance]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, Public Policy, City Planning & Urban Development, Social Science, Sociology, Urban
ISBN: 9781592134380
Google: 7GYL-g6_lnUC
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2011-01-19T20:39:09+00:00

YOUTH: Damn, Furious is deep. He used to be a preacher?

YOUTH [FURIOUS'S SON]: Nah, he ain't no preacher, he just reads a lot. Pops was talking, speakin’ the truth.

YOUTH: Your pops is like motherfuckin’ Malcolm, Farrakhan.

Furious is a man who reads a lot and is assumed to be a learned man or preacher. The message conveyed here is that the conspiratorial view of neighborhood dynamics is one worthy of respect. Indeed, the director may have been attempting to plant the seeds in the audience as much as he was reflecting current wisdoms in the black community. Gentrification as conspiracy would appear to have deep roots within the black community. The narratives depicted earlier in this chapter clearly touch on this current of thought.

Some scholars look askance at such conspiracy theories. Attributing such thoughts to angry people with flawed judgments who withdraw from society, this school of thought sees conspiracy theories as something to be challenged and corrected.

I choose, however, a different tact taking heed of what Duneier (1999) warns as the ethnographic fallacy. As described by Duneier, such a fallacy occurs when a researcher takes respondents’ stories at face value, without considering the larger context or macrolevel forces that shape the respondents’ realities. In Duneier's study of homeless sidewalk vendors, he found that his respondents typically attributed their homelessness to their own actions without any reference to deindustrialization, discrimination, the lack of affordable housing, or other society-wide forces that contributed to their predicament. Duneier wanted to allow individuals to tell their stories but also wanted to inform these stories with what he saw as the larger picture. Despite ignoring the larger forces that may have predisposed the men in his study to become homeless, the men's stories still had meaning—namely, that these men still felt that they exercised control over their lives in the face of overwhelming structural obstacles. Thus, the men's claims to be solely responsible for their homelessness can be interpreted as a way of maintaining their sense of control over their fragile and vulnerable existences. Taking a similar analytic tact here suggests the meaning of the whites equals better services or gentrification as conspiracy narrative may be as important as the empirical veracity of it. This approach seems warranted in a situation where residents are asked to voice opinions about a complex phenomena like the forces that change amenities and services in gentrifying neighborhoods for which their firsthand experiences are necessarily limited.

Turner (1993) describes the currency afforded to many malicious conspiracies in the African American community. She attributes beliefs in these rumors not to inadequate education but rather to a historical legacy of oppression that makes such stories credible. Although the rumors described in Turner's work are typically untrue or unverified, the collective memory of having whites control blacks’ fates makes these stories believable. For example, the notion that AIDS is a disease created by white doctors to harm blacks or other marginalized groups may seem incredible to some. But then the notion that the federal government

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