"The White-ification of the Hood": Power, Politics, and Youth Performing Narratives of Community

Headnote

This study describes how an African American teenager documents the gentrifying urban landscape of New York City's Harlem, critiques the increasing presence of whiteness in the area, and makes connections between his urban community and the rural community of a 6th-grader by performing narratives of place.

"Whose story is going to be told? I see this on the regular-how this black community is changing from how it was back in the day, how black folL· being pushed to the edge, and from the edge to being completely pushed out of Harlem. Who can afford the cost ofgentrification?1 Who can say, 'I'll pay that high rent with no problems, so long as you increase police presence and clean up the hood? Oh, and get better grocery stores and restaurants. 'Not my family and not my friends 'families, and we 've been living here like forever. I call this process the white-ification2 of the hood. " (Quentin, 12tii-grader, 2006)

In countless cities across America-from Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Houston to New York and San Francisco-conflicts over the reappropriation of urban space, what Freeman (2006) describes as "there goes die 'hood" and Quentin names "white-ification," are becoming increasingly public. Images of abandonment, decline, and strife are too quickly narrated into the spatial landscape of urban life, an act that situates decline with renewal, collapse widi gentrification, and fortification with efforts at democratizing "urban," "innercity," and "public" locales as safe spaces. This narration, which involves the documentation of stories, die ways people see relationships between power and politics in relation to "urban," and the ways people interact across spatial, racial, and cultural differences, tells contradictory stories about existing conditions within urban communities. Such conditions are often publicized as dangerous, criminal, and nefarious in juxtaposition with conditions diat are experienced as positive, culturally rich, and participatory. Such contradictory ways of seeing urban communities position die telling of community stories and die telling of community truths along various social, political, and economic trajectories that too often work against the protection of communities like New York City's historic Harlem.

What, dien, of the conflicting stories that get told about urban communities? In what ways are some stories privileged over others, and what are die detriments, particularly for youth, of this act...