Dissatisfaction can lead to real change

Vulnerable Discourse: Considering gentrification as a compassionate community member

After graduating I want to move back to my hometown. I know that’s a little boring, but I feel that we are unfinished. I was born in Queens, my dad grew up there and so did his mom. You can hear it when we say ahh-range instead of orange. Walking around the city with my dad would unfailingly consist of a story of how this block, or that neighborhood, wasn’t the way it was when he was growing up. And unfailingly, this was the result of either the hipsters or the yuppies or the trust fund babies, some kids like us.
Can I gentrify my own city? Part of the reason I’m reluctant to move to another city is because I don’t want to mirror the post-grads hanging out in Bushwick bars or riding the L train with their nose in a David Foster Wallace novel. I don’t want to be the San Francisco or Seattle version of that. So if I go back home, can I escape that trope? I’ve decided it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what I look like in my city, or in a new city. What matters is what I do in that city.
I like to think I’m the same kid who took the subway to my 4,000 student, mediocre, public high school. In many ways I am, but now I am that, plus a girl with a liberal arts education from an elite institution. That entails opportunities and sets of knowledge that aren’t available to most people—particularly the ones who are most often negatively impacted by gentrification. And though I don’t have a trust fund for gentrification rent money, or parents willing to fund my anticipated gentrification, I will probably find myself in this web of real estate domination. At least I hope to have a job that will provide that possibility.
The place we choose to move is going to affect someone else. That is unavoidable. But this process of displacement is somewhat out of our control, unless you find yourself dabbling in real estate. The major issue I have with people who gentrify isn’t the simple fact that they move into a certain neighborhood—it’s how they refuse to interact with it.
Over the summer, I spent a lot of time talking to muralists in the South Williamsburg community of Brooklyn. Williamsburg provides a fascinatingly unfortunate example of gentrification—the worst-case scenario. Over a very short period of time, the entire character and landscape of the neighborhood has changed—racially, spatially and economically. A particular anecdote of one of the artists encapsulates the wrong way to move into a community: South Williamsburg has historically had a large and culturally lively Puerto Rican community. Over the years, that community, like many others in New York, has grown accustomed to hanging out on brownstone stoops and playing live music. One new, culturally unaware resident decided to call the police with a noise complaint. That is not how you interact with a community or try to become part of it.
To be a compassionate community member is to interact with the community, and try to learn from it. It doesn’t mean instinctively calling the police when you hear music. It means talking things out and having a willingness to learn. It doesn’t mean forging a separate community from the one that has historically been there. I believe that the damage that gentrification inevitably causes to low-income communities can be effectively lessened if those who move in engage with the community. This engagement can take the form of participating in existing community organizations, supporting local businesses or using your educational privilege to help local residents. If someone is being pushed out of his or her apartment, see if there is something you can do to help. In many cases, people are pushed out illegally, and when they are pushed out, they don’t have the resources or means to find a new apartment.
As future graduates who will have a particular know-how, which includes dealing with bureaucracy, we should feel empowered to help those in our future communities. Don’t just move somewhere and engage with the coffee shop intelligentsia or the rooftop bar hoppers. Try to have a positive impact on your community, while acknowledging your role in a complex and unfortunate historical process. Use your education to strengthen what’s left of the community that you choose to make your home.

Vulnerable Discourse: Radical politics and compassion intersect

Vulnerable Discourse

Dissatisfaction can lead to real change

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

November 20, 2015

There is an assumption of satisfaction at Bowdoin College. When you are constantly rated as some of the happiest college students in the United States, you are expected to be happy. When the dining hall is the best in the country, when there are Bowdoin “hellos” and “how are you’s” and you have a cuddly administration, you are expected to be happy.

Not just happy, but satisfied. And if you are not satisfied, you are spoiled. You are asking for too much. You need to relax. Get off campus. Just have fun! These are the best four years of your life, why can’t you just appreciate them? A lot of people would kill to be in your place.

That’s just my problem. A lot of people would kill to be in my place. And if anyone is the poster child of gratitude, it should be me. I am the daughter of an immigrant, a woman of color, the first person in my entire family to attend a four-year college and a recipient of generous financial aid. Like most of my classmates, I also worked really hard to get here. But a lot of people work hard to try to get here or somewhere like here and they don’t even come close.

And their absence furthers the existence of places like Bowdoin. Without our brand of selectivity, would this place be as wealthy and prestigious? Who is left out of private, elite education? And what do we miss because they are not here? Amenities do not make up for their absence. Maybe at first, when my major obstacle was homesickness, comfort was comforting. There was comfort in the form of ice cream sundaes, overwhelming friendliness and an endless stream of orientation events. There was comfort in the idea of a bubble of safety.

Now this comfort is what makes me uncomfortable. As graduation approaches, I think about what it means to have a Bowdoin education. My most treasured gift from this education is my “sociological imagination:” the awareness of the connection between my personal experience and societal issues. The paradox is that this gift is what has alienated me from Bowdoin College—my education has heightened my critical gaze. Yet whenever I put this critical gaze to use, I am inevitably told to cool down.

I have grievances because I know Bowdoin is a real place that can play a real role in real change—not because I don’t know how to have fun or how to relax. I pride myself on knowing how to do both very well. I believe happiness and criticism can coexist. I will not go into explaining these grievances, but I will list a few for the sake of clarity. I don’t support the recruitment of athletes, I am concerned by the lack of student-led, administration free social activism, the weak ties between the Brunswick community and Bowdoin students, and the continuous denial of racism on campus (not cultural appropriation or political incorrectness, but racism).

I understand these are controversial points of view, but I can promise you I have spent a lot of time thinking about them. That is why it upsets me that grievances on campuses are so often met with thoughtless remarks along the lines of telling me to be appreciative or considerate.

This is my response. I show my appreciation through my critical gaze. I believe that if Bowdoin takes certain stances and changes, it will be a better place for those who were not groomed to become Bowdoin students. I care about that community. I am not concerned with showing an unnecessary sensitivity towards the segment of the Bowdoin community who has had a comfortable life and has an investment in continuing that comfort at Bowdoin and beyond.

Comfort with the status quo is an acceptance of structural inequalities that I will not avoid critiquing, especially not for the sake of someone’s comfort. Denying the validity of a critique is the denial of an experience, and that is a form of silencing.

When I think about how lucky I am to have this education, I don’t think to silence myself. I think about those who aren’t lucky enough to be here, and what their experience would be like on this campus. I am critical because this institution wasn’t built for someone like me. And very often, those who silence critique were born to go here.

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