The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

by Sarah Schulman

Unlike my generation, who were told we were despised, they are told that things are better than they are. And they have to go through the difficult process of learning to realistically evaluate from their own lived experience, instead of from what they are being told about themselves.

For some reason, neither has any cultural context for being able to imagine a more humane, truthful, and open way of life, in which their expressions and self-perceptions would not have to be diminished for the approval of straight people. To be more assertive about their own experience.

But what I mean in the case of the gentrifiers is that they were “privileged” in that they did not have to be aware of their power or of the ways in which it was constructed. They instead saw their dominance as simultaneously nonexistent and as the natural deserving order. This is the essence of supremacy ideology: the self-deceived pretense that one's power is acquired by being deserved and has no machinery of enforcement. And then, the privileged, who the entire society is constructed to propel, unlearn that those earlier communities ever existed. They replaced the history and experience of their neighborhoods' former residents with a distorted sense of themselves as timeless.

Gentrification is a process that hides the apparatus of domination from the dominant themselves.

communities. Of course, New York relies on new voices and visions. Our soul has always been fed by new arrivals from other countries and from around the United States who enrich and deepen our city. New York has also always been a utopian destination for heartland whites who were ostracized or punished in their conforming hometowns.

How East New York Became a Ghetto,

Key to the gentrification mentality is the replacement of complex realities with simplistic ones.

The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.

Autobiographically, the AIDS experience may be where I came to understand that it is a fundamental of individual integrity to intervene to stop another person from being victimized, even if to do so is uncomfortable or frightening.

One of the organizing principles of gentrified thinking is to assess everyone based on what they can do for you, and then treat them accordingly.