Our Black Year

BY EARLY FALL WE’D FINALLY BEEN ABLE TO TRANSFER some of our investment and retirement savings to a Black-owned financial firm, Ariel Investments LLC, where owner John Rogers Jr. is chairman, CEO, and chief investment officer. We encountered so many restrictions on accessing and moving these funds that making the switch took until October.

At the same time, generating ongoing attention for our cause was proving to be a challenge, at least with the mainstream media. We had received an enormous amount of press, but it did not lead to the groundswell of support or the corporate sponsorship we’d hoped for. Eleven months into the project the media inquiries were fading, in part because we’d decided to focus on the Black community via speaking engagements and events. Between running The Empowerment Experiment on a daily basis, managing our appearances and speeches, and trying to deal with our growing anxiety over Mima’s condition, we were on overload.

Plus, as the harvest season ended, the farmers’ markets disappeared, which meant once more we were having trouble finding decent, nutritious food at Black-owned stores. Facing our own version of a food desert, we resigned ourselves to completing this journey right where we’d started: J’s Fresh Meats. It was dreadful, yes, but it was relatively close and we basically had no other choice.

One morning I hopped in the truck and headed for the West Side. About a half block away from the store I slowed down, scanning ahead for a parking place as close to the door as possible. The sidewalk and curb were clear. There were no unsavory characters or cars—just space. I pulled up right in front and then I saw why. J’s was closed, and not just for the day.

I jabbed the button for the hazard lights and peered inside the store. No lights. No people. Nothing on the shelves but a few six-packs of what could have been applesauce, fruit cocktail, or pudding. Whatever they were, they were probably expired long before J’s did. The dust-caked ATM looked right at home. I didn’t see a “Closed” or “For Rent” sign. Why would I? No one cared that J’s was gone, and no one was rushing to rent the space. Just to be sure, I called J’s phone number and was greeted by the all-too-familiar EE refrain: “The number you have reached . . . ” Another one of Austin’s sorry, Black-owned grocery stores was gone.

Of course, I thought. It’s just so fitting that this place closed. This is what our businesses had come to—a dilapidated, poorly run convenience mart that, inevitably, was doomed along with the battered, forgotten neighborhood around it. That deserted, forsaken store said it all.

And it’s part of an ongoing trend. According to a 2007 article published in the Journal of Labor Economics, the probability of a Black-owned business closing is nearly 30 percent, compared to less than 23 percent for White-owned businesses. In addition, average sales for Black-owned businesses are often only 25 percent of the average sales for White-owned businesses.

Here are a few other unsettling findings reported in that article:

—Only 13.9 percent of Black-owned firms had annual profits of $10,000 or more, compared to 30.4 percent for White-owned firms.

—Nearly 40 percent of all Black-owned firms operated in the red.

—White-owned firms hired nearly three times as many employees as Black-owned firms, and median sales for Black firms were one-half that of White firms.

The reasons for that dismal scenario, according to Robert Fairlie and Alicia Robb, authors of the study, are the lower education rates among African Americans compared to Whites, the scarcity of resources—meaning money—in Black homes, and the much lower rate, compared to Whites, of Black business owners who had worked for a family member’s business before starting their own.

The authors also cite US Census Bureau figures from 2005 showing a household net worth gap. According to these data “the median level of net worth for black households is $6,166 as compared to $67,000 for white households.” As staggering as it may sound, more recent figures indicate the gap is widening. In 2009 median net worth for Black households was $2,200. For White households, that figure was nearly $98,000.

These statistics bring to mind another fraction: our status as three-fifths of a man during and right after the era of slavery. Almost 150 years later our wealth remains ridiculously low compared to our former owners. We were worth more as slaves.

But research highlights the sorry conditions for Black start-ups. Consider that the survival rate for non-minority-owned businesses was nearly 73 percent from 1997 to 2001, compared to 61 percent for Black-owned companies. Business expansion rates for Black-owned businesses during that period also were disheartening. About 26 percent of Black-owned businesses expanded from 1997 to 2001, the lowest expansion rate of all ethnic groups. The highest was Hispanic, at 34 percent, followed by 32 percent of Asian- and Pacific-Island-owned businesses and 27.4 percent of non-minority-owned businesses. Key factors for Black-owned businesses continue to be less access to capital and less management and technical training.

Further, Black-owned firms trail well behind White-owned firms in that important category of start-up capital. In general, businesses perceived as having a greater potential to succeed can generate more of those essential funds. According to the article in the Journal of Labor Economics, just “8.1 percent of Black-owned businesses required at least $25,000 in start-up capital as compared to 15.7 percent of white-owned businesses.” Don’t let the word “required” throw you; the salient fact is that far fewer Black-owned start-ups were viewed as potentially successful compared to their White-owned counterparts and thus fewer Black entrepreneurs received crucial start-up capital, even though they still needed it. These differences, Fairlie and Robb write, “explain a substantial portion of the black-white gaps” in the success and failure of small business ventures. “Clearly lower levels of start-up capital among black-owned firms are associated with less successful businesses.”

Experts note the absence of role models within Black families and posit that the lack of family business experience may contribute substantially to the sorry number of Black-owned businesses. Research shows that 12.6 percent of Black business owners had worked for a family member’s business, whereas the rate for White business owners was 23.3 percent. Experts call this “restricting [the black business owners’] acquisition of general and specific business human capital.” In other words, as Black people living on the West Sides or South Sides of America can tell you, we view each other as workers, not owners. Only Whites, Asians, Indians, or those from the Middle East are perceived as business owners capable of powering a family enterprise. It’s so damn discouraging.

When I speak around the country, I don’t need to cite these statistics or detail what the experts have discovered because people in the Black community witness these phenomena every day. There is nothing revelatory about the fact that most young Black kids do not have family members or neighbors in business—aside from the in-home day care proprietor, barber shop, or braid salon owner.

I’m grateful that some government, philanthropic, and academic institutions have explored the reasons behind Black business failure and have responded with lending assistance and training programs. But we need to pay more attention to the cyclical, interrelated, and interdependent nature of the problems the Black community faces. Difficulty obtaining capital, lacking family business experience, and lower educational attainment aren’t only causes; they are also effects of centuries of racism, exploitation, and sabotage.

That’s one dark place we hoped EE would illuminate. Sure, we want more consumer support of Black businesses, but we also want to spark real conversation about the reasons behind the reasons, and we want to do something concrete about those core issues, not tinker at the periphery.

Not that any of this information would save J’s Fresh Meats, obviously, but it did suggest that the place was probably doomed from the start. What the data did not explain was why Farmers Best suffered the same fate. If anyone could defy the statistics, it would be Karriem. For a while after his store closed, I thought that Black business owners had no way to succeed unless they were rap stars, super athletes, corporate sensations, one of their offspring, or just plain lucky. John saw things differently. He felt that KB was proof-positive of our original point—that many quality businesses exist and are critical to rescuing our community, but they are dying solely due to a lack of support.

In my files I found a default grocer of sorts, Community Mart, another Black-owned store a little over a mile from J’s Fresh Meats. Our friend Terry Dean, a reporter from the Austin Weekly who wrote about EE early in the year, had been sending us articles about local Black businesses. One of those featured the headline, “Corner Store Teaches Youth about Business: Minister Operates Grocery with a Sense of Mission.” That was Community Mart. From the picture in the article I could tell the store was pretty small. In fact, it was really nothing more than a convenience store like J’s, which meant that it, too, probably resembled something out of a postapocalyptic minimart.

Community Mart was in Austin, the same distressed neighborhood as J’s, but the church next door, New Philadelphia Christian Ministries, owned it, and they also operated a soup kitchen and homeless shelter. To the hardworking people of the West Side, New Philadelphia’s pastor, Bobby Butts, was a true hero. He took in drug addicts, at-risk youth, and felons, and he helped them change their lives for the better. I really wanted to believe in the place and would have spent more time at Community Mart just to support Pastor Butts. But too many raggedy, unsteady-looking men always hung around the store and the area in general. John was so concerned that he wanted to inspect it before I went there by myself. After stopping at Community Mart on his way to an appointment downtown and checking out the men hanging around the store, John declared it a danger zone.

I went anyway because I had no choice. One afternoon in the late fall I drove there to buy a few basics, but the milk cooler was empty. The cashier, a hulking teenager, said the delivery guy had missed last week’s drop but was supposed to come today, except that he hadn’t. We got to talking—him, mostly—and the kid told me about his life. He had been an abused foster child turned gangster until the pastor gave him a second chance. The story wasn’t the only thing that stole my heart; he was so anxious to tell me about it. So when he said the milkman would probably be there in the next few hours and that I should drop by later that afternoon, I gave him my cell phone number and asked him to call me either way. Then I reached in my purse for a credit card to buy the couple of things in my basket.

About four hours later I drove back to Community Mart. At this time of year it gets dark pretty early, and I questioned my decision to go trekking back as the sun set just for a jug of milk. I knew John wouldn’t be happy about it either. But I wanted to support an honorable venture and a fragile kid, and we needed milk.

I walked in and found no milk. My shoulders slumped. I sighed as I stared at that refrigerator case and thought about Pastor Butts, the church, the men outside, Karriem, John, the girls, and driving home without milk, past all those clean, well-stocked stores. I cursed under my breath. I was about to walk over to the cashier to scold him for not calling me, but he was a long-winded kid and I just didn’t have the energy for an extended encounter. I was done.

By this time it was dark, casting a fairly frightening aura over the place. I could taste the gas fumes. Like so many of these stations, unsettling characters were drifting in and out of the store and through the half-lit parking lot. The second I stepped from the car, some shabby, elderly guy hobbled over and started hassling me. He was shorter than me, missing teeth, and had an extreme, almost exaggerated limp. I could detect a fairly strong odor of what I thought was vomit. I felt sorry for him, thinking maybe he was a lost vet. But at that point, even if he was one of the Tuskegee Airmen, I didn’t want to talk to him. I just wasn’t in the mood. Please, oh Lord, I thought, please don’t let him bother me.

Dudes like him—and women too—roam the parking lots of retail food establishments in devastated urban landscapes across America. They find someone who looks like he or she doesn’t rely on food stamps and then they make that someone a profitable proposition. Lots of people take up the offer, which only expedites the drunk/junkie/thief’s downward spiral and helps entrench neighborhood rot. It makes me crazy.

I pointed at the food stamps in his hands. “Why don’t you quit hassling people and use those things for what you’re supposed to use them for? Just for tonight, for a change,” I said. “Get yourself some food and take a break from the drinking. Just for one night. Okay, sir? Make an effort. Just this once.”

I stomped past him and headed for the lights of the store. Feeling the anger begin to dissipate, I started babbling to myself about the miserable history and the dreadful current conditions that put this guy in this predicament: the racism, the poverty, the lack of jobs, the hopelessness. And I started to feel ashamed of myself for yelling at him.

Inside, the mart was filthy, impersonal, like some store you’d see in a war zone, which I guess wasn’t all that far from the truth. The cashier was walled off by what looked to be six-inch-thick bulletproof glass. He spoke to customers through a speaker linked to a mike on his side of the barrier. The only thing close to actual contact could occur through a slot at the bottom of the glass where money exchanged hands.

I sighed, shook my head again, and went looking for milk and any other reasonably edible food. I did locate milk and Pop-Tarts and knew the girls would be excited about the real cheese I found. Near the line at the cashier, some large, menacing guy was speaking in a loud, deliberate tone, talking smack about “the A-rabs.” Of course, the cashier, who was probably the owner or a relative, looked Middle Eastern.

“I don’t want to be givin’ my money to these people,” Angry Brutha said. It was obvious why he was upset. Like a lot of Black folks in these areas, he was disgusted with how his neighborhood looked and how everyone in it was poor and suffering. Seeing these thriving business owners making money from him and his community, coupled with the certainty that they did not employ locals, live, or otherwise reinvest here, fueled an ugly anger. “For all I know, they’re turnin’ right around and givin’ it to Osama. Shit.”

As I stood in line and tried to tune out his tirade, all I could think was, What are you doing to change that, asshole? Angry Brutha was still going on about “motherfuckin’ terrorists” when I reached the front of the line. I used my gas card, and the cashier slipped me some plastic bags through the slot at the bottom of the glass.

Angry Brutha abruptly stopped his rant and came over. He started helping me bag my groceries. I just looked at him and thought, So much is wrong here. His small gesture of kindness, helpful as it was, seemed to serve as more evidence of my growing belief that the situation is intractable. Here is this angry, hate-filled man who has stopped to help me. Despite his animosity, he clearly has a basic desire to lend a hand. I’m sure he has a sense of community spirit too, somewhere deep within him, and yet he is so frustrated. He’s expending so much energy on the bitterness that he is incapable of focusing on the bigger issues.

I trudged back to my car, dropped the groceries in the backseat, and drove home, all the while thinking that what we’re doing isn’t going to make a difference. The Community Mart will probably be closed in a month, and why am I helping that place, anyway? I don’t want it to grow. The lost brothers and sisters who wander in and out of that place, other shops like it, and the miserable Citgo will always be there. Everything is so messed up and has been for so long. Once home, I walked in the door and collapsed in John’s arms, sobbing.

That time of year, maybe more than at any other point in our odyssey, was full of contradictions. One moment I’d be foraging for food in a frozen, gray urban landscape. The next moment I’d be attending or planning an event at a swanky establishment. Our latest was another wine tasting and fund-raiser, envisioned as an EE victory party, to be held in December in Bronzeville, the South Side neighborhood known in the early twentieth century as the Black Metropolis. The neighborhood became a haven for thousands of African Americans fleeing the hostilities of the South. Over the decades it developed into a vibrant community, home to some of the most famous African Americans, including Joe Louis, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ida B. Wells, and Andrew “Rube” Foster, founder of the Negro National Baseball League. At that time, apart from those folks, Bronzeville supported several Black newspapers, 731 businesses—including several Black banks and seven insurance companies—106 lawyers, 192 churches, and one of the top Black hospitals in the country. By 1929 Bronzeville Blacks had accumulated real estate holdings totaling $100 million.

After World War II, however, Bronzeville started slipping, in part because of less restrictive housing elsewhere in the Chicago area, and the community became one of those rough, somewhat deserted sections of town. Things started picking up again in the mid-1990s, when folks began to appreciate its undervalued real estate, battered but beautiful houses, and its proximity to downtown, McCormick Place, the University of Chicago, US Cellular Field, and the beaches along Lake Michigan. That residents had easy access to a pair of major expressways didn’t hurt either. All of that blended together to make Bronzeville a textbook example of gentrification, one of the thornier issues for Black America.

In Chicago much of the gentrification of the 1990s first occurred in neighborhoods like Bronzeville, places close to the Loop that were low-income and predominantly Black. That revitalization sparked a huge jump in home prices. According to Derek S. Hyra, an associate professor at Virginia Tech University who studies gentrification in Chicago, “Between 1990 and 2000, real estate prices in Douglas and Grand Boulevard, the two contiguous districts that make up Bronzeville, rose 67 and 192 percent, respectively.”

The population of Bronzeville, while still 92 percent Black, has become increasingly White. In 1990 census figures showed that a total of 2.5 percent of the community’s population of 66,549 was White; by 2000, when Bronzeville’s population actually shrank to 54,476, the White population grew to 4 percent. Some research suggests the White population is now closer to 6.6 percent.

Though we’re all for diversity, the mix doesn’t necessarily mean that Whites are being inclusive and welcoming Blacks to their neighborhoods. Rather, what seems to be happening is that Whites are coming to an all-Black neighborhood on its way “up” because of the amenities it offers.

The problem, according to Professor Hyra, is that “we typically see whites moving in and taking over all the public spaces and putting [in] their own cultural values, and making the community their own, as opposed to integrating the values of individuals who have lived in these communities.” Professor Hyra and other experts have noted that retail growth in urban areas is occurring where the White population is rising. The research says that those merchants are following the money. I say that they are following White money.

And it’s not only middle- and upper-class Whites who are elbowing out lower-income Blacks; it’s also middle- and upper-class Blacks too. In fact, researchers suggest that middle-class Blacks are playing a larger role than Whites in driving out lower-income Blacks from once-impoverished neighborhoods like Bronzeville. Members of the Black middle class have had their options limited due to discrimination from banks and realtors, what scholar Sheryll Cashin calls “integration exhaustion.” As a consequence, those Blacks are moving to poorer, predominantly African American neighborhoods and exerting their influence.

When wealthier newcomers push for economic growth so that property values will rise and more upscale businesses and restaurants will be lured to the area, it’s often done with complete disregard for the original residents. Large financial institutions, government agencies, and land developers also influence the changes that occur in a neighborhood. According to Professor Hyra, “it is undisputable that the black middle class and their preferences for ‘community improvement’ are associated with rising property values and the displacement of the poor.”

The efforts to drive out poor Blacks along with the threats they supposedly represent to property values are becoming less and less covert. Hyra affirms that upwardly mobile Blacks cooperate with various entities in gentrifying neighborhoods to exclude the most impoverished Blacks, so that those who have enjoyed “individual success and achievement” have pushed the neediest to other high-poverty neighborhoods.

The situation obviously generates a fair amount of hostility between longtime residents and the recently arrived middle-class Blacks and Black professionals, but some neighborhoods are working to minimize the tensions. In Bronzeville, for example, several African American community groups started collaborating in 1990 with the city government and private entities to encourage economic development while retaining longtime residents. Together they devised a plan, “Restoring Bronzeville,” which emphasized “historic preservation and racial heritage tourism.” The tours of “historic Bronzeville” featured signs and monuments paying tribute to local entertainment, business, and political heroes as well as pointed out sites of civil rights and music history interest. The plan also called for mixed-income housing and pushed for owner-occupied units.

Longtime residents and recent transplants liked the idea of economic development because they agreed that Bronzeville was dying economically and had been for some time. Instead, their goal was to attract members of the Black middle class, which is why their campaign emphasized, in part, racial heritage tourism.

The logic, as I see it, was to honor Bronzeville and to restore some cultural identity, which would prevent outsiders from taking over and converting the neighborhood into just another pretentious, overpriced, pseudosuburban enclave. The strategy did foster a sense of ownership in Bronzeville that only the people who were from there could feel, while indicating to the gentrifiers that the pride of Bronzeville was not for sale.

To ease low-income residents’ concern of being displaced just when the neighborhood was becoming a safe, desirable place to live, supporters of that middle-class influx promoted the belief that middle-class folks needed to embrace “group advancement” as part of their civic responsibility—a version of the “rising tide lifts all boats” aphorism.

According to Michelle Boyd, an associate professor of African American studies and political science at University of Illinois–Chicago, there is an assumption “that whatever class differences do exist among blacks are easily overshadowed by similarities. Blacks were united by the common threat of whites.... [But] the problem lies in how reference to these commonalities can be used to sidestep the issue of competing interests” between middle-class and low-income Blacks. Poor families in Bronzeville and other low-income neighborhoods want affordable housing, jobs that pay a living wage, and child care that suits their schedules in those jobs. Owners of higher-priced housing “want to increase the price of housing as well as the quality and cost of neighborhood goods and services,” Boyd notes.

“One reason poorer residents do not present sustained opposition,” Boyd writes, “is that they are filtered out of the community development process.” Not only were their needs less likely to be discussed, but they experienced a great deal of friction with more affluent residents during the planning process. This “homogenizing” is a classic political technique used not only with gentrification but also in any process in which lower-class Black buy-in is needed to achieve the goals of others, including middle- and upper-class Blacks. Politicians, both Black and White, use it to get votes. Likewise, gentrifiers, both Black and White, use it—the “we’re all in this together” line or the “we are doing this to create jobs and improve schools” cant—to get approval for the profit-driven upheaval in their neighborhoods.

The Black middle-class alliances with outsiders complicate the dynamics of gentrification. Often White-owned development firms, financial institutions, and political power brokers convert middle-class Blacks into what sociologist Mary Pattillo calls “brokers.” Perhaps a better term would be sellouts. They bridge the gap between powerful Whites and neighborhoods looking to catch a break.

As Pattillo explains, “disputes between black residents with professional jobs and those with no jobs, between black families who have been in the neighborhood for generations and those who moved in last year, and between blacks who don fraternity colors and those who sport gang colors, are simultaneously debates over what it means to be black.”

This is exactly what is so disturbing about gentrification: its tendency to divide Blacks along economic lines. Wealthier Blacks need to be concerned about the displacement and exploitation issues that affect poor Black people in neighborhoods with rising property values. It is our duty as members of the Talented Tenth. Our ascendance was supposed to facilitate new systems and ideas, like gentrification, that would lead to our collective advancement. Instead of ensuring a higher quality of life for all of us, those developments created an environment that breeds the perpetual Black ghetto.

See what I mean about how complicated this can get? You have these honorable folks like Joslyn Slaughter of Jordan’s Closets and Tracye Dee of WineStyles scratching out an existence as they present wonderful role models and clearly help their neighborhoods. Yet conditions being what they are, the people most in need seem to have been abandoned.

These two women had slightly different experiences with gentrification. By the time Tracye had moved to the South Loop, it had already been gentrified, and she was grateful, as a businesswoman, for the neighborhood’s new cachet that, in her opinion, helped with community building. Joslyn, however, had located her boutique on the outskirts of Bronzeville because that was pretty much all she could afford. She witnessed former residents of the ’burbs rehabbing and inhabiting the buildings.

“They would go to work and go home and that was pretty much it,” she recalled. “They still didn’t feel safe shopping in the neighborhood. Their disposable income was not being spent here.” Part of the reason, Joslyn said, was that higher-end stores in Bronzeville were somewhat scarce.

“I had mixed emotions [about gentrification],” Joslyn said. “Bronzeville had been a beautiful area and . . . I’d love to see it return to that,” but she worried about a nicer neighborhood forcing out residents who’d lived there for decades. Still, she thought gentrification would improve the area.

And then there is my buddy, Mell Monroe, who has lived in Bronzeville since 2002. With nearly three decades of corporate, entrepreneurial, and community-organizing experience, Mell moved to Chicago in 1992 and then to the South Loop. In 2002, nudged by his wife, Angela, they moved to a historic, seven-thousand-square-foot, red-brick Romanesque Queen Anne in Bronzeville. He fell in love with the history, beautiful homes, and prime location of the neighborhood. Mell founded and became president of the Bronzeville Area Residents and Commerce Council and created the Annual Historic Bronzeville Bike Tour. In 2006 he ran for city council. We met him in the middle of 2009, when he’d heard about us and asked, through a mutual friend, if we would have brunch at his home, which he was converting to a B & B. We enthusiastically accepted. He liked what we were preaching and, a few months later, agreed to host the December wine tasting at his elegantly restored home.

“I don’t know how to respond to that word when I hear it,” he told me. “It actually puts middle-income people on the defensive. I think a better way to put it,” he said, “is that middle-income people want neighbors to behave in a manner that doesn’t interfere with the public or social order, just like in any neighborhood. We would like to have nice amenities like everybody else.”

Low-income residents concerned about middle- and upper-income folks’ supposed plans to push out the less fortunate should stop worrying, Mell said. In Bronzeville the objective—as in virtually every neighborhood that may be experiencing the G-word—is safe, clean streets with decent services and businesses that provide jobs. Forget about all the class warfare, he said. If everyone pulls together to tout Bronzeville’s rich history, location, and housing stock—and everybody behaves—everybody wins.

Yes, those businesses needed our support and we loved them. The more their businesses grew, the greater the chance that other Black businesses could find success too, and probably, the more the neighborhood would improve, which would create the wonderful ripple effect John and I like to talk about.

But like I’ve said, we were hoping The Empowerment Experiment would reach those most in need of help. Supporting Black-owned businesses in gentrifying places like Hyde Park and Bronzeville funnels dollars to those businesses that, in effect, would expedite the displacement of the most vulnerable folks. By no means were the African American entrepreneurs of the South Side’s Bronzeville any less or more courageous and committed to the community than those on the West Side’s Austin, Lawndale, or Garfield Park, and neither one was more deserving of our support than the other. But for every leg up the owners in gentrifying areas received, in effect, the West Side lost something. Blacks from the South Side and West Side have a long-standing disregard for one another that boils down to class distinction. But both were once at least united in the struggle—win or lose. Gentrification was eroding that, and fast.

I wanted to shop on the West Side but just couldn’t. At the moment our objective to reach brothers and sisters who most needed a hand was looking increasingly improbable, which brings me back to a variation of the question I posed earlier: Where does gentrification leave places like the West Side? Who is going to rescue the children there?

Gentrification is not designed to preserve a neighborhood’s racial and socioeconomic demographics, which is why I’m highly suspicious of it. Virtually everything I’ve read indicates that it works to drive out the economically distressed, not empower them, so that they won’t impede the economic development that’ll elevate property values. It’s a calculated, even heartless scheme. At worst, it is a modernized form of racist economic exploitation.

I can no more be a proponent of gentrification than I can be for giving tax cuts to the richest 1 percent as a way to build small businesses, infuse more money into the economy, and counter unemployment. Gentrification resembles the false promise of trickle-down economics: It just doesn’t work. The wealthy folks, politicians, and groups that back these tax cuts are adamant, as if our very liberty and democracy were at stake. But when it comes to the trickling part, folks seem to just sort of wait and hope, and the trickle turns out to be more like a single drop. I’m all for waiting and hoping as long as we eventually ride the river of prosperity.

One of my biggest fears is that in promoting gentrification as a means to rescue underserved Black areas, its shortcomings would become acceptable. We’d expend all this energy and celebrate the benefits of the “urban pioneers”—the arrival of locally owned businesses, stable home ownership, a general cleaning up of the neighborhoods—but somehow ignore the needs of the residents who were there to begin with. That’s unacceptable in my book.

I don’t want to minimize the impact gentrification can have on the residents of these areas, but I can’t get on board because it does not respect the people living there nor does it acknowledge the potential of these communities. These locales aren’t being valued for what they are but only as a “blank canvas” on which the developers, businesses, and corporations can build.

However, if gentrification can be used to improve the welfare of those who would be displaced, then I think it can help achieve glorious things. If more Black people—young professionals, grad students, and even older, middle-class Blacks—take charge of the gentrification process with that overall goal in mind, this would fit The Empowerment Experiment’s ideals and the essence of Du Bois’s Talented Tenth doctrine. This is possible, but it will take a lot of sophisticated thinking, hard work, and, maybe most difficult of all, trust. If gentrification can’t accomplish economic development in distressed areas via empowering “indigenous” residents and businesses—especially the least powerful—then it contradicts what we stand for.

In thinking through these issues I’ve found it useful to keep in mind the words of Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, a professor of sociology and African American studies at Columbia University. In a 2007 piece for the Boston Globe, he wrote, “What is the responsible position of the black middle class? . . . The question goes back at least to the 1890s, when W. E. B. Du Bois wrote his seminal study of urban development, ‘The Philadelphia Negro.’ Du Bois wrote that the indigenous and more cosmopolitan Black middle class will forever oppose the newly arriving Southern migrant, unless the two recognize their conflicts only serve to strengthen the whites in power.”