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When looking through the settler colonial framework, this chapter demonstrates how the building and establishment of exclusive White communities is maintained and reinforced. One way to understand how White communities are maintained is to focus on the narratives that White people use to make sense of their residential histories, tied to ideas about private property. Respondents shared histories about why they decided to move, live, and stay in Jamaica Plain. Their histories mainly highlighted their childhood neighbourhoods projected onto Jamaica Plain, which is vital to their sense of self, identity, and relationship to Jamaica Plain. This chapter shows that Whiteness is perpetually reproduced by those who fit into the narrow idea of community. Respondents often looked inward to what they meant by “community,” who they included, and what community means.
This concluding chapter extends the utility of the term gensociocide to speak about the devastating consequences of emplacing a White-middle-class ethos into place and space by highlighting the importance of private property. By showing key examples, the case is made that gensociocide provides language to be able to speak about the devastating consequences of gentrification, that is, the emplacement of Whiteness and White supremacy. Miguel Montalva Barba uses his own immigration experience to address the violence that gensocioside produces.
This chapter focuses on forms of racism not covered in other parts of the book. The chapter outlines how White interview respondents talk about race, racism, and racial politics. The interview respondents use four main devices to speak about race and racism, but what was central was their utility of the racial Other to (re)create their Whiteness. White Jamaica Plain interviewees often used ethnic restaurants and food options to speak and think about diversity. Ultimately, this chapter shows the work of racecraft, in which participants disconnect race from racism.
This chapter summarizes gentrification, settler colonialism, and Whiteness literature by focusing on race, place, and space. What becomes apparent in the discussion is the importance of private property as it is tied to White children and families to achieve exclusive White futures. By focusing on private property through the lens of a wide variety of disciplines, the chapter highlights the utilization of discourses about the White child and family as tools for the extraction and hoarding of resources and the advancement of exclusionary White futures. The term gensociocide is proposed to address what housing advocates state about gentrification, that it is a form of genocide.
This chapter provides a short history of Jamaica Plain, MA and elaborates on key historical moments that gave this borough the progressive label, while at the same time embedding White supremacy and settler colonialism in place. The chapter shows how the modern characterization of Jamaica Plain can be traced to an active settler colonial emplacement visible throughout the borough. In particular, the chapter shows how the racial Other is constructed and used to constantly help solidify a White settler character and city.
This chapter focuses on the (re)making of Whiteness and the White race as a place-bound identity. By focusing on residential housing histories, White interview participants outline how they settled into a heteronormative Whiteness with the arrival of their White children. Many of the participants had been involved in ways that were counter to traditional US values, and after their children arrived, they decided to follow traditional paths set for White upper- and middle-class people. The White parents end up using the figuration of the White child to hoard resources and to change the borough to enrich their children at the expense of everyone else.
The reproduction of Whiteness in this progressive community is done by its disavowal, which at the same time reconstitutes Whiteness. Research participants and protest graffiti outline the disavowal of Whiteness using the figurations of the White family, child, women, and community to make sense of their lives, emplacement, and the processes taking place in this gentrifying borough. These figurations allow White residents to avoid any potential guilt and accountability for the processes they are aware they are advancing.
This book examines the connections between race, place, and space, and sheds light on how they contribute and maintain racial hierarchies.
The author focuses on the White residents of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, which, according to the Cooks Political Report Partisan Voting Index, is the most liberal district in the state and 15th in the United States of America. The book uses settler colonialism and critical race theory to explore how self-identified progressive White residents perceive their gentrifying neighborhood and how they make sense of their positionality.
Using the extended case method, as well as in-depth interviews, participant observation, content analysis and visual/media analysis, the author reveals how systemic racialized inequality persists even in a politically progressive borough.
This chapter summarises the material of the book. It revisits some of its core theoretical themes, suggesting that there are openings within the fissures presented by rentier capitalism’s corrosion of community, and its densification of everyday life within dwindling space. The author argues that these openings incorporate alternative strategies of social reproduction that signal a ‘will to become’: a desire for generational reconfiguration borne from the erosion of ‘secure’ pathways to traditional kinship structures.
This chapter looks at the ways that affective politics circulate within precarious rental accommodation, amidst constricted desires and difficulties in holding boundaries. Moving from a discussion of sexual constriction to feelings of ‘displaced sovereignty’ among respondents who are mistreated by, yet defend, controlling landlord behaviour, the chapter makes connections between capital’s constriction of embodied agency and the suppression of political subjectivity. In the second part of the chapter, the author explores the efforts of queer collective households to realign their homes with desire for social and political transformation, and the tensions and challenges experienced along the way.
