Urbanist Series – Blood and Soil
One of the advantages in looking at community organizing and development through the field of social work is that it consistently invites you to dilate the lens from micro to macro. I am always intrigued, for example, by how communities act collectively in ways which reflect certain psychological types. Drawing from the strength of interdisciplinary work, like anthropology, this granular to bird’s eye view can incorporate all kinds of perspectives, knowledges and issues from the larger social discourse.
Immigration has certainly been a key issue in the larger social discourse. While a long debated topic here in the US, it has taken on a certain intensity and immediacy in the past year which I think most of us recognize, regardless of our stance. This has been coupled with a strong resurgence of vocal nativism. What I find most interesting is that these tensions at the national level are mirrored in neighborhoods all over the US, but in ways which remain hidden, glossed over, unrecognized.
In neighborhoods, we often call tension over immigration gentrification. The concept of gentrification is not limited to new demographic waves of settlement and subsequent impact, but that is the initial signal. A local Detroit comedian commented on seeing an apparently White patron in an otherwise all-Black audience, saying: “I see there’s a White woman here. I ain’t mad. When White people start sending scouts, it won’t be long before the buses start running on time.” New faces are often followed by new patterns. But by calling it gentrification, we get to ignore the same nativist or immigration positions which we might normally reject without qualm. This is particularly challenging in the field of community engagement, since groups who reject anti-immigration language as Xphobic often strongly embrace anti-gentrification language as virtue signaling.
Under the larger umbrella of social justice, the mantra is typically that one enters community with humility, waiting for invitation, continually in quiet petition for acceptance to be present, always cautious that one’s participation stay more on the side of witnessing than taking over. And that mantra comes from a long history which is a valid caution, for which there are many incisive critiques; entire social systems can be wholly disrupted in fairly short order – and have been – by legions of good intentions and obliviousness. For those practicing in communities in which they are neither native nor neighbor, we don’t want to replicate the mistakes of the past, marching in to tell the locals how to fix their problems. No matter what realm of power that comes through – expertise, money, race, religion – it’s not a good look.
But as I sat in graduate school, hearing this little ditty time and again, it fit poorly with my experience. My experience as a citizen activist was that whom we criticized most were those who floated at the edges. Whose presence had to be accommodated, in one way or another, but who didn’t roll their sleeves up – the university chancellor who lived in the foothills, instead of the historic neighborhoods directly impacted by university policies; the students who wanted to study community organizations; landlords who owned property, or business owners who ran businesses in neighborhoods where they didn’t live; police who lived outside of city limits. From our perspective, all the many categories of people whose lack of participation in the community which they either affected or could assist were considerably more offensive than a misplaced presumption. And so while many of my classmates were expressing a value of respectful distance, that struck me as unethical non-engagement. It changed someone’s role from citizen to consumer. The wisdom of “participant-observation” is that you begin to know by being and doing, while not forgetting that you don’t know what you don’t know – but rationalizing observation without participation feels like unseemly voyeurism which commodifies people’s lived experience and converts it into an aesthetic.
In these particulars, the defining difference is that I make the choice to live in the community where I work. But although I find parachuting in and out unethical, at least I can understand its logic. However, what I began to notice, in situ, is that the social justice protocol of how one enters a “foreign” community as a non-local practitioner has become conflated and applied to all forms of entry. Now, new residents are also being told and expected to structure entry into their own communities as perpetual outsiders, prostrate. This has had the consequence of fundamentally changing social dynamics in high-conflict ways. Instead of viewing communities as metaphorical dry mixes into which every new constituent adds a flavor and texture which, yes, changes both the consistency and flavor, now we are experiencing highly stratified “communities” in which not only is there minimal interaction among strata, they compete. In addition to the normal challenges of a perpetual ebb and flow of influences and differences, the focus now seems to be in identifying who is most authentic – but how, when, what and who remain contested.
I have thought of this before in terms of gatekeeping. Gatekeeping is a tactic which is often used to exclude participation, but viewed in terms of protecting a community’s authenticity, especially through endowing special status through tenure. The challenge is that for those of us who are conscious – and conscientious – about not repeating the mistakes of the past, the tenets of gatekeeping sound right: we want to enter a community in ways which support its character. We want to value the history of both place and people. But, living in a place is not the same role as working in a place. When I live here, I have a stake. My participation, my vision, my interests are now part of the weave which contributes to the continuous negotiation of space and place which is community – especially an urban community. There is no place and no time – especially in cities, which are defined and differentiated from the rural by their flow – where any group has been able to plant a flag in the ground and say, This is whom we are, how it is and what it looks like, forever more. Not that they haven’t tried. But cities, especially, can never be blood and soil, no matter how far back we trace our roots and no matter how deeply rooted we become.
And so in this way, we see that a community’s ability – or not – to integrate new residents, new participants, new views is the same frame as the nativist versus immigrant debate. The very same residents who would email a pro-immigrant message denouncing a Muslim ban will feel no qualm in denouncing the impending cafe Jihad advanced by the hipster front down the street. They are not immigrants, but gentrifiers. Loud assertions of tenure hierarchy in the neighborhood go uncritiqued: I have lived here 20 years; you have just arrived. Your presence counts less, if it should be considered at all. Isn’t that what nativism is all about? If we consider that idea for a moment, does it radically change our thinking about what we experience?
We see this discourse being echoed in the recent mayoral race, when the Younger asked aloud who has rights to the city and asserted that now we must decisively stem the tide which may see the city’s Blackness ebb. His Tale of Two Cities is not primarily about class, although that’s a safer dog whistle in the US: but perhaps it should be, because Detroit has always had large class divides, even among its majority-Black constituents in the past 45 years. The real question is what does the city, what do the neighborhoods look like – do they look like us, and how do we come to identify the us, instead of the them? In some cases, what it “looks like” is about race. In others, it is about age, heritage, point of view, class, orientation – even agency.
We understand the history which informs these feelings. In some contexts we relate to the nativist argument; in some, we reject it. Of course it largely depends on our own position in the system – are we defending our right to participate in community self-governance, even as immigrants, or are we defending our right to guard and hold ground, as natives (whether factually or relatively). We can never forget how culture also informs our underlying assumptions in this tension; because we share enough references in common, we often forget how big the US is, and how different in critical ways. My culture of origin dictates that it is the responsibility of the community to welcome newcomers, to orient them, to integrate them – even damned Yankees. If a newcomer does something whacky, it is a failure of outreach and it becomes the responsibility of the community to correct itself, responding with more assistance: sanction can happen, but at the end of a long road and even then, with debate. In a gatekeeping culture, welcome is not an open hand invitation, but the resigned acceptance earned at the end of proverbial (and sometimes literal) petitioning, hurdle clearing and barrier navigating. In my mind, that is no longer “welcome” by any definition I viscerally understand – it’s hazing. And while it’s necessary to know that not every place does it the same, and it extends from our ideas about what has the most worth and how we value the lived realities of heterogeneity, that knowledge doesn’t translate into more ease or harmony.
In the next blog in this series, I’ll continue with more discussion around questions of gentrification.