01-09-2018, 12:04 PM
(01-09-2018, 11:16 AM)Johnny Cupcakes Wrote: In Over The Rhine; a rather gentrified neighborhood close to downtown Cincinnati, sits a place called Findlay Market. Every weekend, there is a pop-up farmer's market that takes up neighboring parking areas in addition to Findlay Market itself.
It is the single most diverse place that I go on any sort of regular basis.
The market was there pre-gentrification, and it isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It's always been diverse, whether it was white people shopping in a poor neighborhood, or minorities shopping in a hipster neighborhood.
This may be different in other places, but this is how it works at one of Cincinnati's most famous landmarks.
Here are some questions I have about it.
1. You mention diversity, which I am assuming is based on race/ethnicity. Do you know the socioeconomic diversity? Has this diversity changed since the gentrification of the area?
2. As the neighborhood has become gentrified, has the market changed? Has there been a switch in the vendors? Have prices risen beyond what is normal for the rise in inflation? Have the products changed (more "organic", more artisanal items, etc.)?
I ask these because when we look at the surface of things we can often miss what may be going on. I don't know the specifics for this market. Hell, you may not have any good answers to my questions. But these things are what we look at in the social sciences when we look at something like the gentrification of an area and a farmers' market in the same place. What is easiest to see isn't going to tell you much very often.
For my general response to this thread, and not to Johnny directly: Really, the biggest issue with the article is that it used race in it, which just throws everyone into a tizzy. Everyone rushes to denounce it because, surely, we live in a post-racial society and race has nothing to do with anything and we just need to ignore race and everything will be better. Ignoring race in such a way, though, is ignoring the mountains of evidence that exist to show that minorities are not provided with equitable treatment in this country. I'm specifically saying equity, here, not equality. Equity is the equal access to opportunity, equal treatment by the law.
We are not at the point where people of color are in an equitable situation in this country, and there are systemic issues that are the reason for it. The fact that everyone thinks if we just ignore race it will all go away does nothing but provide further evidence of this systemic issue.
Could the authors of this article ignored the race component and focused purely on socioeconomics? Sure. But then what do we do about the next layer that shows that minorities face a wealth gap, an income gap, are less socioeconomically mobile, etc? Those are components of the socioeconomic layers and so to talk about these issues without recognizing the racial component means that any approach to addressing them is not going to be in a holistic manner.
I'm an FDR Democrat, but I criticize the New Deal because it ignored the racial component to the socioeconomic issues in this country. There were policies that left minorities behind, and some outright hurt them further. If we are going to address these issues in our society, we have to look at the racial component and not bury our heads in the sand.
