The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination QUOTES

1 " One of the organizing principles of gentrified thinking is to assess everyone based on what they can do for you, and then treat them accordingly. "

― Sarah Schulman , The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

3 " There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It’s a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It’s a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free. "

― Sarah Schulman , The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

5 " When there is no context for justice, freedom-seeking behavior is seen as annoying. Or futile. Or a drag. Or oppressive. And dismissed and dismissed and dismissed and dismissed until that behavior is finally just not seen. "

― Sarah Schulman , The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

7 " There is a weird passivity that accompanies gentrification. I find that in my own building, the “old” tenants who pay lower rents are much more willing to organize for services, to object when there are rodents or no lights in the hallways. We put up signs in the lobby asking the new neighbors to phone the landlord and complain about mice, but the gentrified tenants are almost completely unwilling to make demands for basics. They do not have a culture of protest, even if they are paying $2,800 a month for a tenement walk-up apartment with no closets. It's like a hypnotic identification with authority. Or maybe they think they are only passing through. Or maybe they think they're slumming. But they do not want to ask authority to be accountable. It's not only the city that has changed, but the way its inhabitants conceptualize themselves. "

― Sarah Schulman , The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

9 " Comment en est-on arrivé là? Comment le mouvement de libération gay, que Huey P. Newton, président des Black Panthers, avait cru “peut-être le plus révolutionnaire”....un mouvement dont les slogans étaient “Démolissons la famille, démolissons l’état” et “une armée d’amants ne peut pas perdre”...une collectivité qui envisageait une révolution totale des rôles de genre et de sexe, une nouvelle responsabilité sociale et communautaire….une communauté qui faisait face à la crise du SIDA avec une unité et une imagination sans limites...comment cette force radicale, vivante et créatrice a-t-elle (...) pu dégénérer en un groupe de couples racistes, refoulés, aisés, privatisés, prêts à sacrifier tout leur héritage juste pour se marier? Et échouer ? "

― Sarah Schulman , The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

11 " This kind of conundrum is permitted by a cultural idea of happiness as something that requires absolute comfort. In order to transform the structures, we who benefit from them would have to accept that our privileges are enforced, not earned. And that others, who are currently created as inferior, just simply lack the lifelong process of false inflation and its concrete material consequence. Facing this would mean altering our sense of self from deservingly superior to inflated. That would be uncomfortable.
Herein lies the problem. We live with an idea of happiness that is based on other people's diminishment. But we do not address this because we hold an idea of happiness that precludes being uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable is required to be accountable. But we currently live with a stupefying cultural value that makes being uncomfortable something to be avoided at all costs. Even at the cost of living a false life at the expense of others in an unjust society. We have a concept of happiness that excludes asking uncomfortable questions and saying things that are true but which might make others uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable or asking others to be uncomfortable is practically considered antisocial because the revelation of truth is tremendously dangerous to supremacy. As a result, we have a society in which the happiness of the privileged is based on never starting the process towards becoming accountable. If we want to transform the way we live, we will have to reposition being uncomfortable as a part of life, as part of the process of being a full human being, and as a personal responsibility. "

― Sarah Schulman , The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination