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posted by
LaminatorX
on Thursday February 27 2014, @03:30AM
from the Xenophobia:-the-Universal-Language dept.
from the Xenophobia:-the-Universal-Language dept.
fx_68 writes:
"A sharp rise in the foreign population has ratcheted up racial tensions. Does Singapore have a problem with xenophobia? It seems that barely a month goes by these days without news reports highlighting friction between Singaporeans and foreign workers in the tiny multi-ethnic city-state."
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 27 2014, @02:46PM
And the term Gentrification is pure unadulterated Black Racism (also used by stupid whites thinking they are oh so liberated).
I'm sorry, I don't see how "gentrification" is racist at all. It's a term that describes a process whereby a run-down urban (usually downtown) area (frequently called a "ghetto") is transformed when richer people start moving in and cleaning the place up, building nice buildings, and driving the prices for everything up. Pretty quickly, all the poor people who used to live there are forced out, because they can't afford the rapidly-rising rents.
It's not racist, and it doesn't even have a bias as far as I can tell, it's just a term to describe a process or phenomenon. Gentrification does indeed suck for the original (poor) residents, but what can you do? Since they're usually renters, not owners, their rent is controlled by landlords, who will rent at the market price. When the place is more in-demand, the rents go up, so poor people are forced out, as richer people move in. You could halt the process by not letting the richer people move in, but then the place stays run-down and people complain how awful it is that all these poor people have to live in such a slum. Move in a bunch of rich people and the prices rise, and now people complain how it's awful the poor people can't afford it any more. Some places try to mitigate this with rent-control laws, but it's mainly a band-aid, leading to fancy and expensive high-rise condos next to run-down older buildings with rent-controlled apartments; the rich people live in the fancy building and the poor people in the run-down building. The run-down building's landlord eventually figures out how to sell his building off (because the land is so valuable now), the people are thrown out, it's demolished, and a new fancy building is built in its place, with high rents.
We can bemoan the problems here all we want, but regardless of your feelings, the phenomenon is real, and it needs a term to label it, for efficiency's sake (the same reason we make up words to describe anything else, like "hurricane", 'continent", "subduction", etc). "Gentrification" is the term most people have adopted for it.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday February 27 2014, @06:59PM
That may be how you interpret it, but when an angry black man uses the term
he does not mean what you think he means. He means "white gentrification" and he's being
as polite as he can stomach when he leaves of the "white" part.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014 /02/27/spike-lee-gentrification-expletives/5859995 / [usatoday.com]i nflux-will-erase-West-Oakland-history-4874291.php [sfgate.com]
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Fear-white-
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 27 2014, @09:09PM
Um, I think it's somewhat obvious, given the demographics in this country, that gentrification is frequently going to result in poor minorities getting pushed out and richer (usually) white people moving in.
Spike Lee's rant basically echoes the complaints natives have when immigrants move in in large numbers. "They don't respect the culture" (which is true), they're changing things too much, etc. In the case of gentrification, it's even worse, because the "natives" end up getting pushed out because they can't afford the jacked-up rents that result from higher demand.
Personally, I don't have an answer for it. This is what happens when a bunch of people move into a new area and start asserting themselves around the natives. The natives' culture is cast aside or ignored, things are changed, since the newcomers have voting rights, they change the local government and laws more to their liking, etc. The only way to stop it is to not allow new people to move into a certain area, or to place limits on how many new people can move in, or limits on what kind of people can move in. But when you do these things, you're usually labeled a "xenophobe", "racist", etc. So is Spike Lee a racist xenophobe? Or are his concerns for the preservation of the local (black) culture valid? Usually, this argument is about (mostly white) culture vs. immigrants (either Latin American, in the US, or Muslim, in Europe), and the natives are always called "xenophobic" and "racist". So are the black people complaining about gentrification also xenophobic racists?