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The Subtle Violence of Gentrification
Covid-19 has exacerbated a class divide in major cities as it disproportionately affects people of color
As Kovie Biakolo writes for ZORA, “Between concerns of an ‘eviction apocalypse’ in the country, the Covid-19-inspired economic fallout that has left 13.6 million people unemployed as of August, and a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York stat[ing] that almost half of all Black small businesses had dissolved by the end of April,” things are looking pretty grim for communities of color throughout urban America. “Pair the economic losses with the medical effects of the pandemic, including death, and it is easy to hypothesize that Covid-19 may provoke a new era of acute gentrification nationwide.”
Biakolo notes that “white flight” won’t help matters — just because wealthy white people leave cities doesn’t mean the people left behind are in improved financial or housing situations.
Scholar-activist Magie Ramírez, PhD, crystallizes the issue this way: “The current moment that we’re seeing with people being displaced from urban areas is deeply tied to these longer histories of displacement tied to slavery, tied to racialized dispossession from the land, tied to indigenous genocide. It’s not thinking about it as something in the contemporary moment, but rather, thinking about it as an ongoing process of displacing Black and Brown people from the land.”
