The Gentrification of the Mind

by Sarah Schulman

  As in the mid-twentieth century, one of the things we need to work out for ourselves is a true definition of happiness. Are we being duped by gentrified happiness, and can we find pleasure in something more complex, more multi-dimensional, and therefore more dynamic? Can we be happy with the uncomfortable awareness that other people are real?

  Gentrification replaces most people's experiences with the perceptions of the privileged and calls that reality. In this way gentrification is dependant on telling us that things are better than they are—and this is supposed to make us feel happy. It's a strange concept of happiness as something that requires the denial of many other people's experiences. For some of us, on the other hand, the pursuit of reality is essential to happiness. Even if the process gets us in trouble. It is very hard to get a glimpse of what is actually happening when one is constantly being lied to, and it is even harder to articulate what we realize is actually happening while intuiting that punishment awaits. One thing I have learned over and over again is that asking people with false power to be accountable makes them very very angry. It makes them vicious. In the case of women intellectuals, mockery and dismissal are the easiest modes of punishment— but the range of strategies of diminishment is very broad. It's frightening to have ideas that are alienating. I've certainly had moments where I suddenly crack the deception and get what is really going on, and then…oh shit, I understand that this information is not going to be peacefully received.

  • • •

  The healthy, conceited female wants the company of equals whom she can respect and groove on. (Valerie Solanas)

  We're repeatedly told that women are thriving in our society. More women than men are in college, we see women in male professions, as powerful figures on television, and as consumers. Yet at the same time that women apparently have broken all barriers, a disobedient female is considered antisocial, a drag, and a bitch. Although feminism succeeded in transforming options and ways of thinking, the subsequent changes have remained encased in the capitalist apparatus. At the same time, our propaganda machine, mass entertainment, has erased the history of feminism and how these changes were actually achieved. So only their consequences remain visible. Because there has never been a major play, or smash hit movie or musical, or widely read best-selling book about women's rights—no Angels in America, no Roots, no And the Band Played On, no Autobiography of Malcolm X, no Milk—most Americans have no idea of how women organized or won anything, while knowing everything about baseball, Lady Gaga, and eating in Provence.

  As Ti-Grace Atkinson articulated at the fortieth anniversary of the Columbia University student rebellion, women can only progress in a progressive era. Women cannot advance unless men are also advancing. And this occurs every thirty to forty years. The interim periods are years of giveback. While some individuals consecrate their lives to trying to protect earlier wins, they pay an enormous personal price for being so against the reactionary current. In our era, these protectors have managed to retain some crucial lasting reforms of feminism including:

  • Increased education for women

  • Mechanisms for state intervention into domestic violence and child abuse

  • Continuing legality of birth control and abortion, although access to abortion is severely compromised

  What has not changed much are:

  • Attitudes about women's inferiority to men

  • Access to power

  • Earning capacity

  • Lack of accurate representation in our media culture

  • Participation in the creation of culture, policy, and point of view

  • Emotional responsibilities in parenting and partnering

  • Lesbians are still treated as irrelevant nonpersons

  Despite the gentrified feeling that women now have what we need, the reality is that American women have not gained access to the wealth of the nation and do not have control over the perspectives by which national cultural decisions are made. Yet we are told that women are now basically equal. The current foreclosure crisis is disproportionately affecting women because of our lack of economic power, but is not described that way in the press. The increasingly common use of wealth to exploit people who do not have wealth through immoral lending practices, like high interest credit cards, subprime mortgages, debt acquisition through lack of medical coverage, et cetera, affects women in significantly larger numbers than men. In short, capitalism, which is currently administering the gains women have made, is increasingly a system of men denying money to or taking money from women. So what is really happening is available just under the surface of the false story.

  Acting in a way that acknowledges that our structures are not neutral or natural is a tough assignment. Mysteriously, and yet humanly, progressive periods are determined by the zeitgeist. When they happen it is undeniable and you can't force it. But in the meantime it is important to keep rigorous thought and small, accountable action alive. Of course is it not always possible to behave in recognition of the true nature of our structures—how they create supremacy ideology and pretend it is real—because the punishment is too severe. But the hope is that a critical mass of us can be more aware and vocal enough to threaten gentrified thinking without actually hurting ourselves. We want to be what Judy Grahn called “the flea in the elephant's nose” without getting trampled. Revolutionary thinking means focusing on the frame, rather than on the goodies within it, but reality means doing this to the extent that you can without being victimized by the folks who don't want to be accountable.

  In preparing this book, I reread Emma Goldman's My Further Disillusionment in Russia—it is incredibly relevant. She very humanely reveals how she arrived in Russia as a political deportee from the United States, committed to the ideals of the very recent revolution. With great self-criticism and a really clear communication of her process, she shows how she learned to identify Soviet supremacy ideology and what happened when she tried to make its perpetrators accountable. There are even great cameos with Gorki, Kropotkin, and Lenin himself ! The consequence, of course, was that she was redeported back to America. Both America and Russia “didn't want to talk about it,” the “it” being accountability. In the documentary film Anarchism In America this is a small piece of sync-sound newsreel footage of Goldman arriving back in the port of New York, with no passport. She has to be very careful if she is to stay in America.

  “Miss Goldman,” a reporter asks. “What is the difference between the United States of America and the Soviet Union?”

  With her thick Jewish accent, and absolute bespectacled deadpan, she carefully replies. “The United States of America and the Soviet Union are the two most interesting countries in the world.”

  Needless to say, she was deported to Canada where she died penniless.

  Her devotion to the pursuit of justice blinded her from fully understanding the brutality of her enemies, and she ended up crushed. Like many before her and since, she grossly underestimated the cruelty of her opponents, because it was unimaginable to someone like her. She couldn't understand a person going that far to not have to question themselves. While she experienced joy in discovery and truth, the punishment she received resulted in a lost opportunity for happiness that her excess suffering created. Which leads us to the not small question of happiness. What it is, how to tell the truth and still have it, and the necessity of experiencing happiness without doing so at other people's expense are questions we have to grapple with.

  Gentrified happiness is often available to us in return for collusion with injustice. We go along with it, usually, because of the privilege of dominance, which is the privilege not to notice how our way of living affects less powerful people. Sometimes we do know that certain happiness exists at the expense of other human beings, but because we're not as smart as we think we are, we decide that this is the only way we can survive. Stupidity or cruelty become the choice, but it doesn't always have to be that way. After all, people and institutions act on and tran
sform each other. So, it's not happiness at the expense of the weaker versus nothing, right? And yet we are led to feel this way.

  Depending on our caste and context, opportunities are regularly presented that enable us to achieve more safety by exploiting unjust systems. Whether we are benefiting from globalization, U.S. markets, or being able to get a job/apartment, a play production, or a relationship because of prejudicial structures that give us unfair advantages as Americans or whites or educated people, or people with homes or people with running water or people with health insurance, or people who can afford to shop at Whole Foods, or whatever. We get to feel better precisely because someone else doesn't have what they need.

  Conveniently there is a billion dollar self-help industry that tells us to treat the very skewed frame as if it were neutral: Accept it. Be grateful for it. Do not resist. This, we're told, will bring us more happiness. “Let go/Move on/Get over it.” If you are the demographic that the frame was designed to inflate, accepting it will help you maximize its privileges. But if you are the demographic that the frame was designed to defeat or marginalize, accepting it makes it more effective for its intended beneficiaries. I think it is safe to say that personal happiness at the expense of other people's deprivation is a normative standard of gentrification culture, which depends on it to thrive.

  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 in 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 in order to be accountable. Be 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 us and 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. Once we can embrace the fact that it won't kill us, and start the process, with repetition it becomes more tolerable. And once the prohibition on being uncomfortable is diluted, dismantling gentrified thinking and supremacy ideology becomes an interesting and natural part of being alive. Ultimately it becomes invigorating and then, exciting—I love the moment of recognition that I am uncomfortable and the process of trying to understand why. This insight makes my interior life richer, and I feel deeper and more human.

  In my own world, I see these structures take place daily. I achieve happiness by having a secure job (tenure) with prestige (professor) and health insurance (GHI). At work I have the opportunity to share my gifts with a wide range of people (public university) and potentially see others benefit. My students treat me with a great deal of respect. I see some of them grow as a consequence of our relationship. I also see myself let down and obstruct students, and allow them to slip between the cracks, but even when I do this I do not get fired and do not lose my ability to go to the doctor. It would be impossible for me to be happy without medical insurance or a safe place to live. For now, this job helps me have those things—without it, I would not have them. Of course, there are other things that I need that this job will never give me: an elevator, a safe old age, long term care insurance. Maybe a car. Even for a city employee with a financially secure job, getting the elevator and the car in this economy usually requires having family money or a partner with a much higher income—it requires being floated in some way. When that is the case, the knowledge of the possibility of retirement contributes to happiness.

  Spiritually, being a teacher is being a do-gooder. I am not a weapons manufacturer, a worker in genetic engineering agribusiness, or a cultural gatekeeper demeaning and depressing women artists on a daily basis. I don't market Fiji Water. Being at a public institution, while rough on many levels, also saves me from the task of being a tutor to the ruling class. Emotionally, I get the self-esteem that comes from being functional in a competitive system. Whenever we have a job opening at my school I see the hundreds of applicants desperate for income. Each one of my colleagues knows that they were able to get a job while many other competitors were not. It would be easy for me to tell myself that I am doing something positive with my life and ignore the contradictions.

  Yet, if you really examine my employment situation, other structures become revealed. I work within a profoundly unjust paradigm, U.S. higher education, in which the quality of a person's education/diploma is determined principally by their class. Most of my students do not know how things work. They have no idea of how prestigious private universities function, what their conditions are, and how people who are produced by them think about themselves. They have delusions and misinformation about how people get rich, get power over their own lives, and make their dreams come true. They often don't understand how those dreams are constructed. They don't understand the actual process by which people become financially secure. Many of my students are the first in their families to go to college, are low income, are immigrants, and/or went to lousy public schools where they were not individuated. I can't tell you how often I get an email from a student that starts out, “Dear Professor Schulman, I am Nicole Santiago from your Tuesday Fiction Class.” I always write back, “Nicole, I know who you are.” The expectation that their teacher does not remember them, even after intimate direct conversations in class about their lives and work, is endemic. Many of my students make huge personal sacrifices to go to school. They take night classes, take out loans they cannot pay back, exhaust themselves with jobs, child care, and other responsibilities. They join the military. Many of our students do not own computers. Our school facilities are so poor that night school students do not have access to the writing center or child care, and we only have one truly functional smart classroom with projection capacity on the entire campus. The tiles are ripped, the classrooms are dirty, there is no centralized advisement office, so many students have no idea of what classes they are supposed to take. Required classes are not offered, are too large, and fill up quickly. I know for a fact that many of my students will not be able to fulfill their goals: home ownership, safe old age, lifelong appropriate insurance. They believe that making the above sacrifices will earn them these results, but in many cases it will not. The economic system of the United States is not designed to offer those levels of reward to most people, regardless of how hard they work.

  As a teacher I am performing the nurturing role of personbuilding that is the stage set for public education. But simultaneously, while trying to impart the fundamentals of the craft of writing along with the fundamentals of critical thinking, I am also pretending to them that this degree will help them reach their goals. “Education is liberation” we discuss in Freshman Comp while reading The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass. “You've made a commitment to education,” I say encouragingly. “So you understand that simple answers to complex questions rarely approach reality.” There is a suggestive, cheerleading quality to my encouragements about reading, thinking, writing, analyzing. “I know that surpassing your family can be painful,” I drop casually, knowing that some of my students have to justify their educatio
n to their families.

  What I do not discuss with them that this degree in this school under these conditions and this level of class segregation is normalizing and pacifying them into the U.S. class system. I don't talk about how tenured professors like myself literally live off the backs of adjuncts in a feudally constructed system of privilege akin to the military in its fetishization of hierarchy. I do discuss the U.S. class system, and encourage students to look for answers in the reality of their own experiences instead of what they are told on television. But their realistic positionality in that system, and how little this degree will help them leave it, is not on my syllabus. It's a thin line between helping them move towards being informed versus depressing or humiliating them at what they are being kept from. Ultimately, I “do my job.” I maintain the illusion of democracy so that a certain comfort level can be maintained in my relationship with my students, my relationship with my job, and their relationship with their college education. Although a handful do get to graduate school through enormous investment by the faculty, and we can and do help another handful get sophisticating experiences, in the end I get the emotional currency of being told by my students that I have “helped” them, when really I have participated in keeping them in their place.

  Anything that humans construct, humans can transform. Other people can change you, why can't you change them? I can easily imagine a postgentrification era, where the critical mass that controls my school (teachers, administration, students) would decide that a fundamental part of our education should be to reveal the class structure truthfully. When we accept that this fact is an essential part of education, then these conversations in my classrooms would have a context, some kind of constructive goal, not just a burden dumped in the laps of hard-working but powerless students. I would love to trade— send our students to take one class each at Columbia and have each of their students come for one class with us. Just the difference of what is available in the cafeteria would be shocking. Just comparing the libraries would be shocking. Just comparing the classroom technology capacities would be illuminating. We could construct our whole university program around revealing to our students the realities of how things work, who designs them, who they are designed to serve, and the ever-important feeling of being privileged.