Is it colonizing to want to improve a neighborhood?
That one time I disagreed with author Michael Harriot
About a decade ago, I worked the night desk in a newsroom from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. I would sleep during the day and be on DuSable Drive (then Lake Shore Drive) at night, blasting music and enjoying the lakefront view. But there was one thing I always did before I drove away from my apartment and when I arrived home — turned the music down. Just because I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 6 a.m. on my way in the door didn’t mean the rest of the world was. Luckily, I was on the first floor so I didn’t have to worry about tiptoeing around or have screaming matches with my neighbors for stomping around.
One of the main things I loved about that apartment that I lived in for eight years was people weren’t loitering outside, blocking the entrance to my building and everybody seemed to be going somewhere. That wasn’t always the case at prior apartments and condos. At two of those places, when I started seeing restaurants and business spaces closing, the neighborhood started to change too.
If the person or group is ruining the neighborhood after a neighborhood used to be peaceful and non-violent, who is the colonizer then?
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People were blasting music at insanely late hours in the dead of night, one guy was up way too early and standing on the corner waiting for cars to stop by, and I started seeing a shift in who was moving in and who was moving out. Then news briefs about shootings started happening. I wanted the neighborhood to go back to the way it was.
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I thought about those two prior rentals recently while listening to Michael Harriot’s “theGriot Daily” episode “You Might Be a Colonizer If.”
He’s spoken about gentrification sporadically throughout the show. I think his book “Black AF History” is incredible. But this is the one topic on his former podcast series that I just can’t get on board with. In his opinion, if you moved to a neighborhood and it was a certain type of way, you shouldn’t complain and ask for change. In my opinion, sometimes that change is a welcome relief and there may have already been people living in that neighborhood who wanted that change to happen.