What My Neighbors Has Been Reading Library Sign
Invitee Essay
Is My Niggling Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?
Ms. Aubry Kaplan is a announcer and author who grew upwardly in the South Central section of Los Angeles and nearby Inglewood.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Well-nigh a twelvemonth ago, I decided to build a library on my front lawn. By library, I mean i of those little free-continuing library boxes that dot lawns in bedroom communities around the country — charming, birdhouse-like structures filled with books that invite neighbors and passers-by to have a volume, or donate a volume, or both.
I'd spotted the phenomenon on walks through upscale, largely white neighborhoods around Los Angeles and immediately resolved to bring it abode to Inglewood. Why not? A library is not so much a marking of wealth and whiteness as it is an affirmation of community and cozy, pocket-size-town esprit that Inglewood, a mostly Blackness and Latino city in southwestern Los Angeles County, has plenty of. We deserved no less.
Prepandemic, Inglewood was gentrifying, some other reason I'd been inspired to practice the library: I wanted to betoken to my longtime neighbors that we had our own ideas about improvement, and could comport them out in our ain style. There are organizations that assist people build these niggling libraries, but I did mine independently. I envisioned it equally a place for my neighbors to stay connected during the pandemic. The wooden post on which the library sat was a stake in the ground, literally.
The response to the library was boring at get-go — information technology was the first in the area, and some people mistook it for a birdhouse, or a mailbox. Simply I was pleased to soon see people stopping by to browse and take home books.
Then one forenoon, glancing out my front window, I saw a young white couple stopped at the library. Instantly, I was flooded with emotions — astonishment, and then resentment, and then astonishment at my resentment. It all converged into a silent scream in my head of, Get off my backyard!
The moment jolted me into realizing some things I'1000 not especially proud of. I had set out this library for all who lived hither, and fifty-fifty for those who didn't, in theory. I would not desire to restrict anyone from looking at information technology or taking books, based on race or anything else. Only while I had seen white newcomers to the neighborhood here and there, the truth was, I hadn't set it out to entreatment to white residents.
Now that they were in front of my firm, curious almost this new neighborhood attraction, I didn't know how to feel. By bringing this modern cultural artifact here from white neighborhoods, had I gear up myself upwardly, set up the neighborhood? Was I contributing to gentrification and sending the wrong bulletin about how I wanted the neighborhood to exist?
What I resented was not this specific couple. It was their whiteness, and my feelings of helplessness at non knowing how to maintain the integrity of a Black space that I had created. I was seeing upwards shut how delicate that space can be, how its meaning can be inverse in my mind, fifty-fifty by people who have no conscious intention to alter it. That library was on my lawn, but for that moment it became theirs. I congenital it and drove it into the ground considering I dear books and always have. But I suddenly felt that I could not ain even this, something that was clearly and intimately mine.
As the couple wandered on, no books in manus, I thought about how frail my feeling of beingness settled is. It didn't matter that I ain my house, every bit many of my neighbors do. Generations of racism, Jim Crow, disinvestment and redlining have meant that we don't really control our own spaces. In that moment, I had been overwhelmed by a kind of fear, one that's continued to the historical reality of Black people being run off the land they lived on, expelled by force, high prices or some whim of white people.
One of the most famous examples of that displacement happened several miles south of Inglewood. Bruce's Embankment, a Black-endemic resort, once thrived along the coast of tony Manhattan Beach, until it was seized past eminent domain in 1924 by white city officials. They claimed they needed the land for a public park, simply they didn't build i for more three decades. Information technology'southward clear they simply wanted the humming holiday and leisure spot and the Black people it attracted gone. That parcel was recently returned to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce, who owned it — an extraordinary example of reparation, only an isolated one that nonetheless leaves the problem of Black unsettledness intact.
When my uncle, Paul Aubry, bought a firm in Los Angeles in the predominantly white, working-class Due south Central neighborhood of the late 1940s, he wasn't just buying a house; he was putting his stake in the basis, making his claim to the American ideal of belonging.
My uncle's claim was rejected. A cross was burned on his lawn. As more than Black families moved to the neighborhood, white people moved out in droves. The basis shifted nether Uncle Paul's feet. That white flight forged the chiefly Black and brown Southward Cardinal of popular imagination and created like demographics in other city neighborhoods across the country, including Inglewood.
It has to be said that there's zippo inherently wrong with the Black-, Latino- and immigrant-rich neighborhoods that resulted from those flights. Community has always been our greatest asset, and its greatest source of capital. Simply at present, equally younger generations of white people move back to the neighborhoods their parents shunned, in the phenomenon I phone call "white return," it all all of a sudden feels up for grabs — once again.
Instead of the blatant racism of what happened at Bruce's Beach, nosotros now have gentrification. It's perfectly legal, merely ultimately information technology causes the same racial deportation, on a much larger scale. The stratospheric rise in home prices alone has meant that the Black population of Los Angeles has been declining for decades, and has dropped to around 9 percent.
The anti-gentrification strategy articulated by many of my longtime Blackness neighbors is this: Stay put. Don't sell. Stand your ground. While that is possible for some of the states (I won't exist selling considering, really, where would I get?), it's not for anybody, and it's non a permanent solution. Information technology also doesn't solve the bigger crisis of belonging.
Ultimately, the moment with the couple I saw through my window raised for me a serious moral question near how I should deed. Screaming at them to get off my backyard would be adopting the values of the oppressor, equally my racial-justice activist male parent used to say. Yet my resentment was not coordinating to the white resentment of generations past (and of now, I'd contend). White resentment has e'er been legitimized, and reinforced, by legal and cultural authorisation, a dynamic evident in everything from the rising of Trumpism to the electric current battle against the political boogeyman of critical race theory.
My footling library, affirming as information technology is, is also an illusion; information technology can't salvage our neighborhood. Nevertheless, in 2021, it has go increasingly important to maintain and grow Black space, on its own terms. As I watched the white couple peruse my petty library, the most complicated feeling of all was the brief, bloodshot satisfaction I took in watching them fatigued to my lawn, and to my idea. Information technology felt empowering and hopeful on the one mitt, defeating on the other.
So what message do I hope they took from my library? The same message I wanted to ship to the rest of my neighbors, my community: Black presence has value — in every sense of the word, and on its own terms.
That value should brand the casual displacement of Black people untenable, even immoral. And that volition accept much more than than a fiddling library to rectify.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/opinion/gentrification-los-angeles-little-library.html
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