as i gentrify

I talked to a woman last spring who, after only a few minutes, began talking about those gentrifiers and how she wouldn't want to go to the same birth classes as them. I felt naked when she said that--I'm a gentrifier in that sense, if I were pregnant, I would be the woman she'd be avoiding. We met at  my church. It was Easter Sunday. She invited me to her house for lunch. When I declined out of uncomfortability, I felt like she wasn't surprised. I was just a gentrifier after all. Or a white girl. Or whatever. I spent the rest of that afternoon alone, cleaning my apartment, probably eating rice or a kale salad out of a tupperware container.

***

I talked to a friend of mine a couple of months ago, on the sidewalk in front of my apartment. It was the time of sukkot, and many Jewish men were carrying around the branches to hold and ask Jewish people to pray with them. During this time, they approach as many people as possible asking Are you Jewish? My friend and I had been standing together for a while, when two young Jewish men walked up and asked me, only me, directly: Are you Jewish? I'm not Jewish, I told them that, and then Mary looked at me and said, Now why didn't they ask me? She laughed almost immediately, made a joke about there being no black Jews in the world, and then turned a little grim: They're just coming in here to buy up our buildings buildings and gentrify everything. She paused for a second and then: Oh, you're not like them though, you're different, you see us. You're not like the rest of them people moving in around here. 

***

Before I moved here, a friend of mine told me of the day he moved into the neighborhood three years prior. He and his roommates moved in on Labor Day, which in Crown Heights means the West Indian Day Parade. They moved in all their stuff, set up their apartment a bit and set out to look for their new neighborhood bar. They walked out of their building and found that their whole block was within police lines because three people had been shot--gang violence started it, police weaponry ended it, and a ricocheted bullet left one uninvolved woman dead on her stoop. A year after I moved a girl my age was mugged and robbed of her cell phone and empty wallet. The Upper East Side woman I worked for at the time warned me about Brooklyn.

***

Gentrification really refers to the process of purchasing property and renovating it in order to make more money. Technically speaking, I'm not a gentrifier. But I am the demand to which the gentrifiers respond, and when I walk down the street, strangers see me as synonymous with it.

When I moved into Crown Heights, I had never heard of gentrification before. All I knew was that campus housing was too expensive, and that Crown Heights was off of the train lines that led straight to my school and my work. I don't remember at this point the first time I learned the word, but I do know that it gave me mixed feelings:

Gentrification means new bars and coffee shops opening for me. It means old shops closing for others. It means rising rents for others, lower rents for me. It means loss of local history to those who have been here for years. For me, it means new beginnings. It means a cultural experience for me, who grew up in the segregated suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama. But it means whitewashing to my neighbors.

So where do I put my guilt? Where do I put my gratitude? Where do others put their frustration? To whom do they point their righteously, sadly angry fingers?