Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession in the Making of Everyday Life

3 Beyond Displacement: Gentrification of Racialized Spaces as Violence--Harlem, New York, and New Orleans, Louisiana

79 CHAPTER THREE Beyond Displacement Gentrification of Racialized Spaces as Violence—Harlem, New York, and New Orleans, Louisiana Paula C. Johnson The collusion among state, private, and institutional actors generates insecurity between primarily poor and working-class Black people in U.S. urban centers and secures accumulation among mostly economically affluent White populations through the practice of gentrification. Beyond the acquisition of property and accumulation of wealth on the one hand, and massive displacement of Black residents on the other hand, this chapter emphasizes the physical , psychological, cultural, and political traumas that are consequent from the forced removal of long-term residents of gentrified communities. The notion of gentrification as a benign and natural population shift that benefits all members of the community belies the realities of forced displacement. As Jonathan Wharton writes, “[g]entrification is part of man’s continual obsession with conquering , disempowering, politicizing and capitalizing over other individuals for their own gain” (Wharton 2008, 7). As argued in this chapter, gentrification must properly be perceived as the perpetration of violence—both direct and structural. In 1969, Johan Galtung, who pioneered the discipline of peace studies, developed the concept of structural violence to define constraints on human potential and deprivation of basic human needs resulting from economic and political structures (Galtung 1969, 167). Galtung’s definition has assumed broad disciplinary and practical application and encompasses the circumstances that are the focus of this chap- 80 • Paula C. Johnson ter; namely, that structurally embedded race and class inequality constitutes violence that results from the deliberate and avoidable denial of fundamental human needs—in this instance, housing and protection from displacement caused by gentrification (Galtung 1969, 167; Galtung 1990, 291). In light of the neoliberal state’s role in propagating housing insecurity by conspiring in global capital-inspired gentrification practices, it is legally and morally responsible for violence against populations who experience the severe harms of gentrification. Legally, such violence must not be viewed solely through the lens of the U.S. domestic legal regime, but must be recognized as human rights violations for which the state incurs responsibility to rectify the harms it has created (Farmer 2004, xiii). Gentrification is not a practice that is unique to the United States, the West, or the Global North. Indeed, as anthropologist and urban geographer Neil Smith demonstrates, it is rapidly becoming a worldwide phenomenon (Smith 2002). While Smith’s work highlights the present generalized nature of gentrification across global milieus, with its prioritization of global capitalist production over social reproduction and human need, he also recognizes that gentrification must be understood in the specific societal context in which it occurs (Smith 2002, 440). This necessitates examining the intersectionality of racial, gender, class, and spatial dimensions of gentrification in the United States. As Iris Young has observed, “Without such a critical stance, many questions about what occurs in society and why, who benefits and who is harmed, will not be asked, and social theory is liable to reaffirm and reify the given social reality” (Young 1990, 5). Critical race theory, Black geographies, and Black feminist theory provide useful frameworks to examine the power dynamics that facilitate gentrification (see Crenshaw et al. 1995; McKittrick and Woods 2007; Soja 1989; Collins 1990; James and Sharpley-Whiting 2000). Thus, these critical analytical constructs that examine the ways in which race, gender, class, and space are deployed to maintain subordination and inequality in American society inform my examination of gentrification in the U.S. context. Trends in Harlem, New York, and New Orleans, Louisiana, exemplify the pervasiveness and detrimental impact of gentrification occurring in Black communities across the United States. Harlem and New Orleans share distinctions as iconic centers of Black people’s long-standing historical, cultural, social , economic, and political roots. In the Harlem community of greater New York City, gentrification has been an ongoing process of public and private development and real estate market speculation for over twenty years, and has accelerated since the mid-1990s. In New Orleans, gentrification was precipitated by the putative recovery and rebuilding efforts following Hurricane Katrina in Beyond Displacement • 81 2005. Fundamentally, the causes and effects of gentrification in the racialized communities of Harlem in New York City, and the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans are much the same, despite recognized contrasts. The chapter begins by describing the central terms “gentrification” and “racialized spaces.” The next section discusses the creation of racialized spaces, including de...