A Better Gentrification ? Moral Justifications and Race in A Small American City

Abstract :

Based on a forthcoming book, this talk addresses the puzzle of how stakeholders in gentrification come to justify the process as morally good amid racial difference and potential harm. Gentrification has long had two strong, intertwined associations. One is with White gentrifiers’ appreciation for racial and ethnic minorities and the working class, and the other is with the residential and social displacement of those groups. Combining them reveals a moral dilemma: gentrifiers put at risk the very people and conditions they appreciate and don’t want to displace. And small city gentrification’s distinct characteristics make this dilemma quite pronounced. When agents of gentrification know about the process’s harms toward vulnerable minority groups, what explains their optimism toward it? How do they come to identify themselves and gentrification as morally good? How do these moral ideas shape their actions within their city? And what roles do racial meanings play in how they make sense of the process? Based on the case of Newburgh, a small postindustrial city of 28,000 people located sixty miles north of New York City, this talk addresses these questions. It argues that when small cities revitalize through gentrification, the stakeholders in the process end up occupying powerful roles that lead them to morally justify their actions, which includes accounting for social differences in fundamentally self-serving ways that reproduce inequalities.