"[The white people who created gentrification culture] brought the values of the gated community and a willingness to trade freedom for security. For example, neighborhoods became defined as 'good' because they were moving towards homogeneity. Or 'safe' because they became dangerous to the original inhabitants..." (pg 53)

"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 just 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 way the city has changed, but the way its inhabitants conceptualize themselves." (pgs 57-58)

"... A gentrifying business might open on an integrated block, but only the most recently arrived gentry would use it. It had prices, products, and an aesthetical cultural style derived from suburban chain store consumer tastes that were strange and alienating to New Yorkers, many of whom had never seen a chain store... Gentrification [also] brought the 'fusion' phenomena -- toned down flavors, made with higher quality ingredients and at significantly higher prices, usually owned by whites, usually serving whites. It was a replacement cuisine that drove authentic long-standing establishments into bankruptcy and became an obsession for the gentrifiers, serving as a frontline, propelling force of homogenization. The fusion yuppie restaurant would open, and the neighborhood would know it was under seige. The new gentry would then emerge and flock to the comforting familiarity of those businesses, with their segregating prices, while the rest of the neighbors would step around them. " (pg 54-55)

These quotes have me thinking about how gentrification simultaneously sells itself as the solution to the moral panic around a loss of community in the US while producing it! I see places popping up near me that present themselves as 'third spaces' or places of community yet have little to no seating, no vocal opposition to the raising of rent, and generally no willingness to actually protect and shield the community.

This also has me reflecting on how the forced displacement of Black and Brown people from their neighborhoods, as detailed earlier in the book, has historically spread and served as enforcement of 'suburban values' aka completely normalized violence, whiteness, gender norms, consumerism, sameness, surveillance, etc which is a signifier and propeller of fascism.

"Since the mirror of gentrification is representation in popular culture, increasingly only the gentrified get their stories told in mass ways. They look in the mirror and think it's a window, believing that corporate support for and inflation of their story is in fact a neutral and accurate picture of the world. If all art, politics, entertainment, relationships, and conversations must maintain that what is constructed and imposed by force is actually natural and neutral, then the gentrified mind is a very fragile parasite." (pg 51)

By "only the gentrified," is Schulman referring to the literally and/or psychologically gentrified? Like, is she talking about those who get displaced from their homes or those who get displaced and specifically view assimilation as a marker for 'progress'? To me, this quote makes more sense if it's the latter since the co-optation of oppressed image/s via seizure and commodification by corporations to pacify and distract the oppressed is popular (but flimsy/unsustainable, like the last sentence of this quote implies). If it's the former, I don't think I understand because white, cis, het, non-disabled, wealthy, etc people and men still have hegemonic 'representation' in media. I'd love feedback on this, btw!

"...[Gentrifiers] did not have to be aware of their power or the ways in which it was constructed. They instead saw their dominance as simultaneously nonexistent and as the natural deserving order. This is the essence of supremacy ideology: the self-deceived pretense that one's power is acquired by being deserved and has no machinery of enforcement. And then, the privileged, who the entire society is constructed to propel, unlearn that those earlier communities ever existed. They replaced the history and experience of their neighborhood's former residents with a distorted sense of themselves as timeless. That 'those people' lost their homes and died is pretended away, and reality is replaced with a false story in which the gentrifiers have no structure to impose their privilege..." (pg 49)

Schulman's observations about gentrification are thought-provoking and insightful, but short-sighted because they lack analysis and consideration of how gentrification is an extension of colonialism. This detailed lack of self-awareness in gentrifiers about their privilege and erasure of history comes from and is the colonial mindset. The use of past tense and her prediction that gentrification would stop / slow down (this was written in 2012) also obviously do not match up with the reality we experience today, and I think her prediction may be due to her lack of connecting the dots between gentrification and colonialism.

"...These women were under seige by U.S. government policies, but had no political movement, only a social service sector to occupy." (pg 31)

"...The truth of complexity, empowerment, the agency of the oppressed, replaced by an acceptance of banality, a concept of self based falsely in passivity, an inability to realize one's self as a powerful instigator and agent of profound social change." (pg 33)

The context of these quotes is Schulman doing a talk with Black and Latina women living with AIDS and how their positions as social workers via bureaucracy masquerading as "activism" instead of, in my words, organization and political education, misguided them to being passive and not knowing their lineage/history of powerful freedom fighting.

The non-profit industrial complex runs on simultaneously co-opting and neutralizing liberatory movements; it encourages symbolic, non-confrontational gestures over political consciousness, solidarity, and material opposition to oppression. As shown in this section, this passivity creates a kind of self-absolving despair and acceptance that they have no power and need saviors (when they do in fact have power and agency). Seeing these patterns be addressed in this book and connected to a kind of self-abandonment in the queer community in exchange for assimilation has been on point!

(Trigger warning for mention of familial homophobia and internalized homophobia)

After being told a story by Michelle, a former student of Schulman's, where her parents force her to choose between sapphic lovers or them and the story ends in her parents welcoming a boyfriend that she simply feels "comfortable with", Schulman writes the following: "Later in my office, Michelle tells me, 'I know my parents love and support me. This is just too hard for them to understand.' I say nothing, but I know that her parents do not love and do not support her. All they care about is themselves. They do not see her as real. And for now, she agrees with them. Although the young queer artists and Michelle come from diametrically opposed class positions, they are having a similar experience rooted in a lack of consciousness. For some reason, neither has any cultural context for being able to imagine a more humane, truthful, and open way of life, in which their expressions and self-perceptions would not have to be diminished for the approval of straight people. To be more assertive about their own experience..."

As queer people, we cannot have our cake (i.e. aspiring to assimilate into cisheteronormativity and have the comfort/privilege that comes with fitting into gender norms) and eat it too (i.e. be free and authentically ourselves). Real safety and freedom can be found where/when we don't seek approval from systems of oppression and their foot soldiers in order to live truthfully and peacefully.

(Trigger warning for mention of death by AIDS)

"[On the twentieth anniversary of AIDS, Schulman is listening to NPR in her car when she hears the following:] 'At first America had trouble with People with AIDS,' the announcer says in that falsely conversational tone, intended to be reassuring about apocalyptic things. 'But then, they came around'... Oh no, I think. Now this. Now after all this death and all this pain and all this unbearable truth about persecution, suffering, and the indifference of the protected, Now, they're going to pretend that naturally, normally things just happened to get better. That's the way we nice Americans naturally are. We come around when it's the right thing to do... Building a community institution with someone is a very bonding experience, and I know that together we can find a way to change this distortion of AIDS history. Jim is on it immediately. We cannot let the committed battle of thousands of people, many to their deaths, be falsely naturalized into America "coming around." No one with power in America "comes around." They always have to be forced into positive change. But in this case, many of the people who forced them are dead. The ones who have survived are in a kind of hell of confusion and chaos that feels personal but is actually political, whether they have "moved on" and "are living their lives" or are confused, displaced, lost..."

This proactivity in the commitment and responsibility to correcting the narrative of those who whitewash and erase history is what we need!!