Two Kinds of Gentry

“Why don’t we talk about the meeting last night for those who weren’t there?” a neighbor suggested as eight of us sat in her living room after a community dinner. My feelings about the event in question were still rather jumbled, so I passed the torch to another neighbor who had also been there.

The night before, over 25 people had crammed into a small nearby living room to discuss the kids of our urban, low-income neighborhood. As the various teachers, professors, non-profit workers, and councilors introduced themselves, I realized something: not only were only three of them male, but only two of them were black. As a white woman in the room, I felt like a statistic.

Many ideas were shared—a summer ceramics class, more publicity for our community garden, some kind of Saturday school—but I had an eerie sense that we were crippled from the start by our status as outsiders, a bunch of white women who sit around eating hummus, teaching art classes, and wondering why these urban kids aren’t flocking to our community garden.

“...There was a lot of good energy in the room,” my neighbor concluded as I was jerked back into the postprandial dinner conversation. “There are good people moving into the neighborhood, and I think they’ll do a lot of good.”

“Speaking of that,” another neighbor interjected, “did you hear the neighborhood association is considering raising the income requirements?”

“No!”

“I know. I hope it doesn’t happen. I don’t want to see gentrification happening here. I want it to keep its native culture.”

I scratched my head again. Had no one else noticed that of the eight white people in the room, all were college graduates, most had masters degrees, and several were working on PhDs? I assumed whatever was meant by “gentrification” involved a different class of folks, ones with larger paychecks who wanted lower taxes, not our over-educated selves who taught ceramics classes and planted community gardens and experimented with vegan recipes and bought energy efficient appliances.

Either way, I knew both kinds of “gentry” were equally far culturally from the kids we longed to serve, and I didn’t know how I could point my finger and cry “gentry” at other folks. I will try to help my neighbors serve the kids who walk our streets, but I know we do so rather perilously: we respect some aspects of the urban culture, but to serve the neighbors with the tools we have we unknowingly call them away from that culture.

We are of course well-meaning, and can only give what we have to give. For now, that’ll be ceramics classes and community gardens. I hope we can meet our neighbors somewhere in the middle.