Gentrification and the White Savior Industrial Complex

This post is written in response to the post Gentrify Me on the blog Life and Law on 23rd Street.  Gentrify Me was written in response to my piece in Weld for Birmingham called My View: Gentrification.  In a nutshell, the author of Gentrify Me agreed with all of my conclusions, but insisted that gentrification was, in fact, good.

In response, I want to delve deeper into the underlying causes of such a view of gentrification - namely: the white savior industrial complex. Teju Cole coined this term in response to Kony 2012, a widely maligned video that thought to represent white people as saviors of Africans.  I believe that this impulse is vividly shown in Birmingham, in which white gentrifiers characterize themselves as the saviors of Birmingham, and by extension the black people in it.

Using Cole's seven points about the white savior industrial complex and excerpts from Birmingham blogs and journalists, I will show that the white savior industrial complex is alive and well in the Birmingham area.

1. "From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex."  Clearly, gentrification is the fastest growth industry in the Birmingham region.  The city just constructed a 58 million dollar baseball stadium and a 20 million dollar park.  Home values are rising dramatically downtown to the tune of 90% over the past 10 years.

2.  "The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening."  Clearly, white saviors are promoting policies of gentrification.   REV Birmingham, a new joint venture combining Operation New Birmingham (a tireless promoter of gentrification) and Main Street Birmingham (also a promoter of gentrification; see work in Avondale) is a charity dedicated to revitalizing Birmingham.  Main Street Birmingham won the Birmingham Business Alliance's nonprofit of the year award in 2012.

3.  "The banality of evil transmutes to the banality of sentimentality.  The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm."  For evidence of this I turn to a recent blog post on Magic City Made by Avondale resident L.K. Whitney.  In it, she shows how her concerns for Birmingham are rooted in sentimentality for a "community" experience of difference.  She states that she is emotionally shaken when someone undermines the liberal utopia of different people all thinking alike.  Rooted in this is the inability to understand how or why someone could have a difference of opinion, and how those differences are rooted in culture, race, and history.  She believes, instead, that all the deep seated and profound issues of the region can be solved through enthusiasm for this liberal utopia.  This sentiment also rings heavily in Gentrify Me, though less overtly.

4.  "The world exist simply to satisfy the needs - including, importantly, the sentimental needs - of white people and Oprah."  Same evidence as above.  Furthermore, Dan Carsen's article on "reverse integration," whatever that is, and a recent article by Mandy Shunnarah in the Magic City Post, speak to the complicity of and promotion by the media of white saviors.  Shunnarah's article seems to take the position that the conversation about Ensley needs to be shifted, and shifted by white people.  Shifted to what?  A nice place to experience sentimental diversity?

5.  "The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice.  It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege."  REV Birmingham, Magic City Made, and almost every charity in Birmingham never mention, much less fight for justice.  These charities exist to appease the needs of mostly white donors, funders and gentrifiers, to make them feel like they are participating in something good, no matter the effects.  To claim to fight for justice would undermine the monetary basis of most charities in Birmingham.  It is structurally prohibited.

6. "Feverish worry over that awful African warlord.  But, close to 1.5 million Iraqis died in an American war of choice."  Naturally, part of this is irrelevant to Birmingham, but the feverish worry over that awful African warlord, ignoring other factors is quite prevalent.  For instance, there was much journalistic concern over the corruption of Larry Langford - and no doubt, he deserved it.  But at the same time, white journalists privileged this narrative over the much more important one, that banks screwed Jefferson County.  It took Rolling Stone journalist, Matt Taibbi, to finally put the pieces together.

7.  "I deeply respect American sentimentality the way one respects a wounded hippo.  You must keep an eye on it because you know it is deadly."  While I don't think that the white savior industrial complex in Birmingham is at a deadly level yet, if the pattern of white saviorism and gentrification continue, it could lead to widespread displacement of poor, mostly black populations.

Let me be clear - my critique of the blogs and work of others in this article is absolutely not a personal attack.  The aim is to point out blind spots and unchallenged assumptions about the nature of Birmingham and the world at large.  Whites are not automatically owed the privilege of determining the direction of the city.  Whites should seek out neighborhood residents and leaders and try to understand how they can help and what those leaders want, not plow forward with critically-unassessed ideas founded chimeric utopias.  Justice - real, practical justice - should be the goal, not sentimental, feel-good experiences.