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Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

If a neighborhood is mostly black, whites and Asians moving in is pernicious "gentrifying". But if a neighborhood is mostly white, blacks and Hispanics moving in is considered progress -- an increase in diversity. I reject this double standard. People of any race should be able to live where they can afford to, and it's not the role of government to preserve the racial mix of any neighborhood.

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Gentrification is not an issue of one race displacing another, it is an issue of wealthier people moving into a poorer area and displacing the people who live there and destroying their communities. The racial aspect of it is related to the uneven distribution of wealth in America.

That may be your perspective and the academic treatment of gentrification, but it’s use almost entirely seems to have been racial in recent years.

Wealthy black people moving into a neighborhood of other black people, and displacing them, gets no attention. Wealthy POC moving into a poor white neighborhood happens all the time in Atlanta, no mention of gentrification.

The word may having a different meaning in the dictionary, but it’s actual use almost always seems to be racial, and almost always about white people displacing non whites

Something can only be racist and talked about if it happens to select people. /s

If people spoke more in terms of wealth than color, a lot more people would be on board.

Wealth and race is inextricably tied in the US though. Any wealth issue like gentrification will inevitably bring up racial passions as well.

It's not the race, it's the economic and class changes that happen when whites move into a mostly black or hispanic neighborhood. And concerning US cities, it's pretty much never an instance of middle/lower class whites moving into a middle/lower class black neighborhood.

That's because postmodernist journalists like those in the NYT reject economic class as a valid or primary category and instead privilege racial categories (referred to as marginalized groups). This is often referred to as intersectionality and that perspective both dislikes the Marxist and also classical liberal economic understandings.

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