Race, Resistance and Gentrification: Fighting to Stay in Place

Erin Lilli The Graduate Center, CUNY

Gentrification research often relies on quantitative methods to investigate the production- and consumption-oriented aspects of the process whether that be collecting data on housing market and mortgage trends, labor market shifts, or residential mobility. Conversely, many scholars employ a strictly qualitative framework utilizing interviews, mental mapping, and often other ethnographic techniques to identify narratives of change as well as individual or collective perceptions of gentrification and its destructive consequences. However, when considering a methodology that seeks to capture lived experiences and psychological feelings of loss, in the wake of neighborhood restructuring, qualitative methods are often employed within a framework that confines the data output to a specific historical moment within our contemporary neoliberal timeline. In short, these methods preclude a long view and resist situating gentrification in the context of ongoing forms of forced mobility and threats to ontological security. Furthermore, an area that has received little study in relation to gentrification, and therefore minimal methodical development, is the notion of everyday resistance and tactics employed to obtain and maintain a secure home environment and meaningful connections to place. I suggest a methodological approach that critically examines the gentrification process in relation to race, everyday life, and forms of resistance thus considering gentrification as another tool of oppression. These methods will include: residential oral histories, participant observation, and archival research inclusive of reviewing secondary source material on the lived experiences of black resistance in America since the Atlantic Slave Trade. These methods would produce and identify data to be analyzed and contextualized within a historical materialist thread that views gentrification as just another guise for the continued oppression and forced mobility of black bodies.