Is gentrification racist?

Two interesting conversations about gentrification that show the divide between left and right, even if both Christian. First, Meg Cox at the Christian Century website asks whether gentrification is racist.

Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that Walter is soft-spoken and clean-cut. Of course that shouldn’t matter; I certainly don’t have to dress nicely and speak softly outside of my home to avoid unpleasant encounters with the police. Walter told me that he’s endured four or five such incidents since he moved to the neighborhood two years ago.

Compare that to Crunchy Con-man Rod Dreher's recent diatribe about questions being raised about the intentions of the white people in his neighborhood.

Lorlee makes a point that we all have to come to terms with: you can't have absolute stability. If you're not getting better, you're probably decaying. You can do things to control the rate of change and the direction of the change -- that's what our neighborhood achieving Historic District status recently was about -- but change is coming one way or another. If things keep going this way for Old East Dallas, I can foresee a time when Julie and I will have to sell our house because we can't afford the property taxes, in which case the neighborhood would likely have changed so much that we might not feel comfortable living there anyway. That might be a sad day for us -- or maybe by then we will be ready to move, I dunno. But as a general matter, I find it impossible to think it's a bad thing for the city of Dallas to have neighborhoods that had been abandoned to crime, decay and despair coming back to life, even if the Wrong Sort of Person (from a Schutzian point of view) is moving in.

In a lively discussion in his comments box, Dreher is pressed on the issue of race and he has a typical conservative reaction. He's unwilling to consider the context of race when it comes to genetrification, instead preferring to view himself--a white man--as the victim. It's a fascinating insight into the conservative mind.