There’s also a deeper reason that will make it hard to challenge gentrification in the United States. This country was founded on displacement—on the idea that white men have a greater right to space, and even to people’s bodies, than anyone else. That’s taken the form of slavery, segregation, the genocide of Native Americans, and now, to a certain extent, gentrification. As one Bushwick activist group called Mayday says in its chants and the signs it puts up around the neighborhood, gentrification is the new colonialism.
