Oh, So This Is What They Mean By Gentrification? Wednesday, August 13, 2008

I don't get out much for social endeavors as I think I should, but I find myself traveling all over the city in the course of a day for work-related purposes. Usually I'm bouncing from my West Side office to downtown, and back again; but most of the places in between become CTA induced blurs (i.e. I sit on the bus and look straight ahead, to avoid contact with everyone who's avoiding eye contact with me; a little game all Chicagoans play amongst ourselves on the buses and trains).

So earlier this week, I had a meeting over on 35th Street and I got off the Redline to see all the baseball fans headed to the Sox game; my meeting was a bit east of The Cell and I chose to walk instead of taking the bus. As I'm walking, the police are out in full effect; which makes sense because one drunk white person can create as much havoc as five unemployed black dudes (though with the weakening of the American dollar and rising oil prices, that conversion rate is sure to fluctuate). But what strikes me as odd (and by odd, I mean so glaringly racist you don't believe your eyes) is that the police are handcuffing niggaz left and right. And I'm sure some of them did something (after all it is a Sox game, and white people make good targets for the stick-up kids).

But could there have been like seven different criminal offenses within a four block span? All along 35th Street? But it was like whatever for the moment; I'm sure these jigs would have done something before the night was over (even my conditioning, has been conditioned).

A day later, I returned to that area for a follow up meeting and this time there was no game going on. However, five-O is at it again. That's when it struck me... I had fallen victim to the Bush-like word games (a-la 'enhanced interrogation techniques'). See we've been calling it 'gentrification' for so long, that even a well-read, government-distrusting, vote-neither-democrat-nor-republican, black man such as myself had forgotten what really goes down. They don't just tear down buildings and resurrect new ones that our people can't afford to live in; the key component of gentrification is to arrest niggaz (though if they could tear down your building with your black ass in it, they would do so).

So from now on, the proper term for 'gentrification' is 'arresting niggaz'. And here's how you would use it in a sentence:

'Have you been on the West Side lately?'

'Yea, it's starting to look a lot better over in North Lawndale, where they putting up the condos...'

'That's cause they over there arresting niggaz.'

Arresting niggaz.