The Gentrification of the Mind Quotes

“There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It’s a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It’s a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. 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.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“The drag queens who started Stonewall are no better off today, but they made the world safe for gay Republicans. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but the people who make change are not the people who benefit from it”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“When there is no context for justice, freedom-seeking behavior is seen as annoying. Or futile. Or a drag. Or oppressive. And dismissed and dismissed and dismissed and dismissed until that behavior is finally just not seen.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“Since the mirror of gentrification is representation in popular culture, increasingly only the gentrified get their stories told in mass ways. They look in the mirror and think it's a window, believing that corporate support for and inflation of their story is in fact a neutral and accurate picture of the world. If all art, politics, entertainment, relationships, and conversations must maintain that what is constructed and imposed by force is actually natural and neutral, then the gentrified mind is a very fragile parasite.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“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.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“There is a weird passivity that accompanies gentrification. I find that in my own building, the “old” tenants who pay lower rents are much more willing to organize for services, to object when there are rodents or no lights in the hallways. We put up signs in the lobby asking the new neighbors to phone the landlord and complain about mice, but the gentrified tenants are almost completely unwilling to make demands for basics. They do not have a culture of protest, even if they are paying $2,800 a month for a tenement walk-up apartment with no closets. It's like a hypnotic identification with authority. Or maybe they think they are only passing through. Or maybe they think they're slumming. But they do not want to ask authority to be accountable. It's not only the city that has changed, but the way its inhabitants conceptualize themselves.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“[W]e currently live with a stupefying cultural value that makes being uncomfortable something to be avoided at all costs. Even at the cost of living a false life at the expense of others in an unjust society. We have a concept of happiness that excludes asking uncomfortable questions and saying things that are true but which might make us and others uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable or asking others to be uncomfortable is practically considered antisocial because the revelation of truth is tremendously dangerous to supremacy. As a result, we have a society in which the happiness of the privileged is based on never starting the process towards becoming accountable. If we want to transform the way we live, we will have to reposition being uncomfortable as a part of life,
as part of the process of being a full human being, and as a personal responsibility.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“These are stories but the pain they contain is immeasurable. The impact of these losses requires a consciousness beyond most human ability. We grow weary, numb, alienated, and then begin to forget, to put it all away just to be able to move on. But even the putting away is an abusive act. The experiencing, the remembering, the hiding, the overcoming—all leave their scars.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“The deaths of these 81,542 New Yorkers, who were despised and abandoned, who did not have rights or representation, who died because of the neglect of their government and families, has been ignored. This gaping hole of silence has been filled by the deaths of 2,752 people murdered by outside forces. The disallowed grief of twenty years of AIDS deaths was replaced by ritualized and institutionalized mourning of the acceptable dead. In this way, 9/11 is the gentrification of AIDS. The replacement of deaths that don’t matter with the deaths that do. It is the centerpiece of supremacy ideology, the idea that one person’s life is more important than another’s. That one person deserves rights that another does not deserve. That one person deserves representation that the other cannot be allowed to access. That one person’s death is negligible if he or she was poor, a person of color, a homosexual living in a state of oppositional sexual disobedience, while another death matters because that person was a trader, cop, or office worker presumed to be performing the job of Capital.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“As in the mid-twentieth century, one of the things we need to work out for ourselves is a true definition of happiness. Are we being duped by gentrified happiness, and can we find pleasure in something more complex, more multi-dimensional, and therefore more dynamic? Can we be happy with the uncomfortable awareness that other people are real?
Gentrification replaces most people’s experiences with the perceptions of the privileged and calls that reality. In this way gentrification is dependent on telling us that things are better than they are—and this is supposed to make us feel happy. It’s a strange concept of happiness as something that requires the denial of many other people’s experiences. For some of us, on the other hand, the pursuit of reality is essential to happiness.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“No one with power in America "comes around." They always have to be forced into positive change.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“The replacement tenants had a culture of real privilege that they carried with them. I know that's a word that is bandied about, and can be applied too easily in too many arenas. 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.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“Will everything (books, music, pornography, education, movies, friendship, camaraderie, love, and television) all be free if they're consumed online and prohibitively expensive to experience in person?”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“On the way home these images were reeling in my mind. The truth of complexity, empowerment, the agency of the oppressed, replaced by an acceptance of banality, a concept of self based falsely in passivity, an inability to realize one's self as a powerful instigator and agent of profound social change.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“I think the thing about gay people in that era was that we were not really especially caustic or campy, we just were so far ahead of the regular culture that we got bored very easily, and moved on to the next thing just to keep ourselves interested.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“Like all the living and the dead, I think I see him everywhere, but it is just new versions, young versions of guys like Stan. Most of us seem to be recreated every fifteen years. I see a twenty-year-old me almost once a month, and a twenty-year-old, forty-year-old, sixty-year-old Stan passes by on the street often enough.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“The problem is that most people are average. This includes people who run universities, publishing companies, and the rewards system in the arts. Most people look at something that is not familiar and think it is wrong. Very few people are able to look at an authentic discovery and be grateful. For that context to exist there has to be a true avant-garde, a large, vibrant community of people willing to think, fuck, love, live, and create oppositionally.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“Under gentrification our lives became more privatized. That zeitgeist had broad implications, hard to challenge. We had to “act out” in a characterological sense, to stand up to it. Gentrification culture was a twentieth-century, fin de siècle rendition of bourgeois values. It defined truth telling as antisocial instead of as a requirement for decency. The action of making people accountable was decontextualized as inappropriate. When there is no context for justice, freedom-seeking behavior is seen as annoying. Or futile. Or a drag. Or oppressive. And dismissed and dismissed and dismissed and dismissed until that behavior is finally just not seen.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“Although I have spent thirty years of my life writing about the heroism of gay men, I have also
come to understand their particular brand of cowardice. There is a destructive impulse inside many
white gay men, where they become cruel or child-like or spineless out of a rage about not having the
privileges that straight men of our race take for granted. They have grief about not being able to
subjugate everyone else at will. Sometimes this gets expressed in a grandiose yet infantile
capitulation to the powers that be—even at the expense of their own community.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“This kind of conundrum is permitted by a cultural idea of happiness as something that requires absolute comfort. In order to transform the structures, we who benefit from them would have to accept that our privileges are enforced, not earned. And that others, who are currently created as inferior, just simply lack the lifelong process of false inflation and its concrete material consequence. Facing this would mean altering our sense of self from deservingly superior to inflated. That would be uncomfortable.
Herein lies the problem. We live with an idea of happiness that is based on other people's diminishment. But we do not address this because we hold an idea of happiness that precludes being uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable is required to be accountable. But we currently live with a stupefying cultural value that makes being uncomfortable something to be avoided at all costs. Even at the cost of living a false life at the expense of others in an unjust society. We have a concept of happiness that excludes asking uncomfortable questions and saying things that are true but which might make others uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable or asking others to be uncomfortable is practically considered antisocial because the revelation of truth is tremendously dangerous to supremacy. As a result, we have a society in which the happiness of the privileged is based on never starting the process towards becoming accountable. If we want to transform the way we live, we will have to reposition being uncomfortable as a part of life, as part of the process of being a full human being, and as a personal responsibility.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“Comment en est-on arrivé là? Comment le mouvement de libération gay, que Huey P. Newton, président des Black Panthers, avait cru “peut-être le plus révolutionnaire”....un mouvement dont les slogans étaient “Démolissons la famille, démolissons l’état” et “une armée d’amants ne peut pas perdre”...une collectivité qui envisageait une révolution totale des rôles de genre et de sexe, une nouvelle responsabilité sociale et communautaire….une communauté qui faisait face à la crise du SIDA avec une unité et une imagination sans limites...comment cette force radicale, vivante et créatrice a-t-elle (...) pu dégénérer en un groupe de couples racistes, refoulés, aisés, privatisés, prêts à sacrifier tout leur héritage juste pour se marier? Et échouer ?”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination