Saving Black Neighborhoods

The Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates uses humor to address the backlash against the gentrification of African-American neighborhoods.

… It occurs to me that we really need a world with more murders, more failing schools, more grocery stores with rotting vegetables, more bodegas with old milk, more teen-pregnancy, more homeless, more crack, more heroin, more fathers on the lam, more disease, more joblessness, and generally, more death. And we need to concentrate every one of those those ills in black neighborhoods.

We have seen the enemy, and it is change. Clearly the only way to preserve black neighborhoods from the scourge of white people is to render them as post-Apocalyptic as possible. It's not even enough to roll them back to the days of Jim Crow — that would mean an actual black middle class in Bed-Stuy and Columbia Heights, and great jazz clubs in Harlem. 

No. We need complete cultural and social depredation, a total breakdown of black humanity until our neighborhoods resemble something out of 28 Days Later. I am calling for the Superpredators of Bill Bennett's negrophobic dreams to make themselves known. I am calling for the thugs of Katrina who raped and murdered babies in the Superdome into being. I am calling for Saturday Night Specials, Starter Jackets and Lottos — the 80s on steroids, but without the great hip-hop. 

Read Ta-Nehisi Coates' complete column at the Atlantic.