Blacks Being Ethnically Cleansed from NYC?
On Friday, Charles M. Blow, Black op-ed columnist at the New York Times wrote about the census data from 2010, which is showing that NYC, which has been a city with very large Black population (only 4 states have more Black people than New York), is seeing a major decrease in Black folks since the 2000 Census count. According to the op-ed,the 2010 Census data
“…will show the first drop in the black population of New York City on a census since at least 1880, according to Professor Andy Beveridge, a sociologist at the City University of New York. (The white, Asian and Hispanic populations are all expected to grow.)”
This is not surprising altogether. I have lived here since 1999 (and spent a college semester here in 1996) and I sometimes stand in NYC and wonder (often aloud) where did all these white people come from?
What’s interesting is that the NY Times itself has reported on Black migration out of NYC in the last several years, but their analysis has mostly come to people talking about better job opportunities in the South, moving closer to familial connections, cost of living and better quality of life. I think all these things are true.
However Blow’s op-ed is the first I’ve seen to point to a more sinister reason Black folks are fleeing New York: Police violence and harassment. Blow opines:
“But to the soup of reasons and recriminations I would like to add one more possible factor that must be considered if not studied: the hyper-aggressive police tactics that have resulted in a concerted and directed campaign of harassment against the black citizens of this city.
According to a report in The Times last year, there were a record 580,000 stop-and-frisks in the city in 2009. Most of those stopped (55 percent) were black (a large portion were also Hispanic), most were young and almost all were male. For reference, according to the Census Bureau, there were about only 300,000 black men between the ages of 13 and 34 living in the city that year. A mere 6 percent of the stops resulted in arrests...The Times article revealed that in one eight-block area of an overwhelmingly black neighborhood in Brooklyn, the police made 52,000 stops in just four years, an average of nearly one stop for each resident each year…If this is even part of the reason blacks are fleeing from, or simply not coming to, our great metropolis, then the city, knowingly or not, is engaged in its own subtle form of ethnic cleansing — a sort of eradication by intimidation.”
This is a really great point that needs to be explored. Similarly, police violence targeting Blacks in Oakland, California made headline news a few years ago with the murder of Oscar Grant. News has also circulated from the 2010 Census that Oakland, California’s Black population has dropped 25% over the last decade. Though more Blacks in Oakland are moving to surrounding areas like Richmond and Sacramento more than they are to the Southern states (although that is also occurring), could police violence still be a major factor?
Things to consider:
1. Does the white young urbanite migration to back to urban areas increase police violence (yes, that even means you, white activists who consider your selves, progressives or radicals) against Blacks-that, combined with rising property values force Blacks out? More bluntly, do white bodies (regardless of one’s stated politics) draw bullets to Blacks?
2. Does this migration of Black people back South mirror the Great Migration out of the South-migration caused both by the promise of better economic and living conditions as well as a fleeing a way from white violence (in one case by some police but often by white citizen mob violence, and in another by official and organized police forces.) whether staffed by people of color police or not, but that represent white interests-including those of the gentrifiers?
3. Do white gentrifiers see that they collude with the state violence against blacks? That is to say, the state speaks for you through the police, and what they perceive to be your wishes, or at least your value and purchasing power. So whether or not you feel bad about your place in a neighborhood you’re gentrifying, and try to combat that by being nice to your Black neighbors, or by doing activism at a nonprofit in the city in which you live, which you may see as a way to offset the conundrum of gentrification, none of that is the point. Black people become expendable in order to increase property values and bring luxury goods (indy and corporate coffee houses, bars, boutiques, bourgie restaurants including “ethnic” themed establishments.) to a new market-the white 20-40something urbanite. So to the state (government and the police) and to the market (capitalist forces including landlords), white gentrification (whether by bourgie yuppies like in Carroll Gardens and Park Slope or by radical punks, artist, and white antiracist devotees -who usually become bourgie yuppies-in Bed Stuy, Bushwick, and Crown Heights) represents an opportunity to make money, regardless of how you see yourself on the political spectrum. It’s not an easy question nor solution, I just wish some people would begin to engage it.
Great post and one that sums up some of my own fears about gentrification. A couple of points, tho: you assume that 1. is correct before getting to 3, while for example those stops - horrifying statistics - happened in Brownsville that isn’t exactly a hotspot for gentrification. There’s a motivation for the authorities to act a certain way but the relationship is not entirely transparent. That is, it could be a general, misguided policy rather than one linked to white gentrification.
Also, what questions should be asked by the black gentrifiers? Economically, they’re equivalent to the white ones: they also patronize the restaurants and the coffee shops and the juice bars. Are they contributing to the environment that’s hostile towards the those who are less well-off? And, in general, how can economic development happen without displacement?
Finally, is stopping gentrification the solution (how to do it?) or would it be better to try and influence NYPD tactics. Would the kind of negative exposure they’ve been suffering - and really thanks to Charles Blow for making that link - do anything to change it?
Thanks for replying. I do think #1 may be what is going on, at least partially, which is what I say in the piece. Even thought the stat blow quotes is related to Brownsville, the numbers in Bed Stuy, Harlem and Crown Heights (hotspots for gentrification) are no less alarming.
I am going to write about “black gentrification” later this week. Be on the lookout.
And as I say at the end-I don’t think there is an easy solution. It’s not as easy as a policy prescription like changing NYPD policies. That would certainly be welcome but would not really deal with the other forces named above-de-industrialization, massive black unemployment in northern cities, continued redlining by banks, etc. I don’t think the negative exposure (we’re 3 or 4 years into this conversation) has made one damn bit of difference.
And I guess, now seeing your facebook post, I have to ask the question. What for you constitutes ethnic cleansing or genocide?
Thanks for the response. I think, like you said, none of this should be considered in isolation. A friend just told me that by default police represents the interests of those with capital, which explains the stops in Brownsville even when there’s no white bodies present. Hm.
Another challenging question is also the kind of trajectory you’d want to see. Development is, broadly speaking a good thing. So is desegregation, or at least absence of forced segregation. We shouldn’t let a sentiment for keeping things a certain way get in the way of people’s well-being.
The “ethnic cleansing” point was just an alert to my friends that I disagree with the usage. I didn’t intend to talk about it here because it’d be a bit of a distraction but, briefly, “ethnic cleansing” was a euphemism devised to deal with mass atrocities, particularly in Bosnia and Rwanda. Using it to describe displacement of a race, while literally correct, seems to me a way of co-opting other people’s tragedy. Certain parallels aren’t entirely appropriate, and this might be a cultural thing, too. Since some of my friends are survivors of the mentioned cleansings, I didn’t want them to take offense, or start a discussion that would distract from the main point at hand. That’s all.
This is an excellent think-piece, Kenyon, and a good conversation between you and Lukasz.
I must say that I agree with Lukasz on one matter, though. Kenyon, you move from the *question* of whether white bodies draw bullets to blacks (a question that is not answered here) to *assuming* that white bodies do so and wondering if said white persons are aware of their complicity in this violence. My own politics tend to put me in agreement with your assumption, but I don’t think it should be limited to white gentry. Criminalizing black people has been the best way to get around emancipation, and every call for law and order since then has been a call to incarcerate, coerce, rape, and lynch black children and adults.
However, I’d also have to say, Lukasz, that assuming the ‘good’ of development and desegregation ‘broadly speaking’ is to ignore how they play out. While both of those things really have a lovely ring to them, they are part and parcel of neoliberalism’s commitment to redistributing wealth upward. They have been exercised simultaneously with neoloiberalism and they primarily work with its trickle-down economic logic. I would say that the notion of ‘development’ is as fraught in the internal colonies that are the ghettoes and barrios of the US as it has been for the decolonized world at large. The split between a wealthy gated oligarchy and a peasantry ground into poverty… sounds both like Port-au-Prince and like New York City to me!
Brotha Kenyon Farrow, I currently live in the Bay Area (Oakland), and I can tell you for a fact, that Blacks or not moving to Richmond or other parts of the Bay Area. As you stated, Richmond California has also seen a drop in it’s Black population. I would say Sacramento California has in fact seen a gain in Black People, but not by much, however. I will add Sacramento is not part of the Bay Area. Over all California has seen a net lost in Black People as well. This State is not friendly to Black People. Whites and Other Races or not friendly to Black People here in California, that why Black People are leaving this State. (Including me, here I come “Atlanta” get ready here I come.
Thanks for the comment, Kentari.
Right Kentari! I’m also from Oakland and I can say that many Black people from Oakland, if they are not leaving the state all together, are moving out to Pittsburg, Antioch, and so on.
Also, just wanted to say great post Kenyon!
Great questions, Kenyon!
Love –
mattilda
Thanks, love! Hope you’re well.
I really appreciate your writing, including the much-needed reality checks about the limits of white anti-racism – particularly the comfortable limits self-described “down” anti-racists establish in response to continued state violence performed for the purpose of reproducing more people that look, spend and behave like them in spaces that have been targeted for investment.
As a white person living in Prospect Heights, on a block that went through a pretty traumatic unsettling to prepare for resettlement years ago, I would answer yes to all 3 questions without a moment’s hesitance. Nearly 600,000 incidents of SQF in a single year is the modern corollary of white-capping in the same way that HUD’s HOPE VI plan is a contemporary urban version of the Homestead Act.
The solution seems much more complicated than the question. But when potential solutions are so rarely identified in these discussions, we pretty much guarantee that the problem remains on a precarious ethical terrain that expects voluntarism to combat an organized and entrenched political strategy. It’s one thing to be nice to one’s neighbors, or for principled white anti-racists to informally engage with white incoming tenants/buyers/shop-owners and try to complicate their understanding of what is required for the neighborhood they live in to be ”safe” for everyone (or, for white anti-racists to support the work of inspiring POC-led anti-violence groups like SOS and CopWatch taking the lead), or educate incoming neighbors and shop-owners about how to identify and engage with indigenous community organizations without colonizing them or arrogantly creating new ones designed to replace them. All of those are critical and a good place to start. But these need to be complimented through developing viable community-based structures that address the question of land use and housing commodification, like community land trusts and tenant-organized mutual housing associations, that preserve and expand housing and community space for people of color and low-income folks and strengthen community control, so speculators aren’t able to target these communities and mobilize racist/violent displacement strategies.
If we’re able to agree that, yes, black people are being violently marginalized from many cities and even white anti-racists receive preferential access as a result – if people are able to trust that some of the latter expend a lot of effort trying to figure out ways to undermine their complicity - maybe we can move in a direction where we build our capacity to halt/reverse and transform that process, and identify appropriate ways for principled white people to move beyond the position of reluctant beneficiary to principled ally?