White Americans will admit that they are often confused by the way angry black writers can transform seemingly innocent acts into racial hatred. This Sunday The New York TimesErin Aubry Kaplan wrote a funny piece asking, “Is My Little Library Contributing towards the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?”
Kaplan created a small library in her yard, but it wasn’t for whites! Nooooo!
One morning I woke up to see a couple of young, white men at the library. Instantly, I was flooded with emotions — astonishment, and then resentment, and then astonishment at my resentment. All of it converged to a quiet scream in my brain. You must get off my lawn
The moment jolted me into realizing some things I’m not especially proud of. I had set out this library for all who lived here, and even for those who didn’t, in theory. It would be a shame to make it difficult for anyone to access the library or take books, regardless of race. But while I had seen white newcomers to the neighborhood here and there, the truth was, I hadn’t set it out to appeal to white residents.
This space was intended to be black. This was a “Black space.” But whiteness was ruining the experience.
Now that they were in front of my house, curious about this new neighborhood attraction, I didn’t know how to feel. Had I created the neighborhood, or was it a modern cultural asset brought here by white residents? Did I contribute to gentrification by sending the wrong message to the neighborhood?
This couple was the one I disliked. They were white, as was my helplessness in not knowing how I could preserve the Black spaces that I created.It was amazing to see how fragile this space could be. I also saw how easily its meaning could be altered in my own mind by other people, even if they had no intention of changing it. It was my yard, but that library became theirs.
Which many readers would reply: Whiskey Tango foxtrot The Imperialism of two white men looking at old books. The “casual displacements of Black people” was represented by it. We wonder how she would react to white readers. The New York TimesThis article is worth reading
What message should they take from my library, then? That’s the message I want to convey to all my neighbours, to my entire community. Black presence has value — in every sense of the word, and on its own terms.
That should make it impossible to casually replace Black people, or even moral,. It will require more than just a small library to fix this.
It’s also bizarre. The byline might suggest that Erin Aubry married Alan Kaplan, a white male who also died in 2015. Karol Markowicz from the New York PostMany of our readers loved it:
The editor’s job here should have been to find this writer mental health help not publish this. https://t.co/9hWSzJIuyt
— Karol Markowicz (@karol) December 6, 2021
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