An Empirical Test of Gentrification-Induced Social and Cultural Displacement and Place Identity: Examining Native Black American Residents’ Experiences

Five years later, but centuries in the making

Scholars have increasingly recognized the sociocultural impacts of gentrification on Black residents. However, the gentrification literature lacks a theoretical model on the nuanced ways gentrification socially and culturally displaces longstanding Black residents. Limited attention has been given to factors that moderate social and cultural displacement. This article introduces a Theoretical Model of Gentrification-Induced Social and Cultural Displacement and Place Identity among longstanding Black residents based on extant theories and literature. Black neighborhoods’ changing character was theorized as a precipitating factor leading to residents’ negative experiences. Five types of experiences were theorized as contributing to social and cultural displacement: (1) confronting changing neighborhood norms, (2) “othering,” (3) losing social connections, (4) encroaching, and (5) witnessing the erasure of what was. The theoretical model further advances knowledge by explicating how place identity may moderate longstanding Black residents’ social and cultural displacement experiences. Implications for future research and equitable development for historically Black communities are provided.

Excerpt of the content: Jewish activist communities have historically been allies to communities of color in the fight for racial justice and equality in our country. Jews were among those who worked to establish the NAACP in 1909. In the early 1900s, Jewish newspapers drew parallels between the Black movement out of the South and the Jews' escape from Egypt, pointing out that both Blacks and Jews lived in ghettos, and calling anti-Black riots in the South "pogroms." Historically, Jewish leaders stressed the similarities rather than the differences between the Jewish and Black experience in America, and emphasized the idea that both groups would benefit the more America moved toward a society of merit, free of religious, ethnic, and racial restrictions. In more recent history, Blacks and Jews fought side by side in the Civil Rights Movement. The kinship and relationship between the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel has been regularly and continually celebrated. What has been less often discussed is the relevance of the social circumstances that created and, in some cases, still sustains a rift between Black activists and white Jewish anti-racism activists. In the late 1960s, the birth of the Black Power movement shifted the emphasis in Black activist communities toward self-determination, self-defense tactics, and racial pride. While this shift was crucial to the evolution of Black consciousness and identity in America, the expansion from the singular nonviolence and racial integration approach espoused by King left many white Jewish activists with little input in the Black community and an anti-racism movement that seemed to be moving on without them. Click for larger view "Blacks and Jews fought side by side in the Civil Rights Movement," the author writes. Here, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth march alongside Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965. Since the 1960s, efforts at coalition building and solidarity work for justice between white Jewish and Black communities have suffered and never reached the pinnacle that was reached during the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. The rapid decline of American anti-Semitism since 1945 (alongside the nation's continuing and pervasive anti-Black racism) and the increasing gap in accumulated wealth and education between Black and Jewish communities have widened the rift of perceived shared interests between Black and Jewish activists. Many of the civil rights struggles that joined Blacks and Jews in the middle of the last century--i.e., anti-lynching, desegregation, voter registration, etc.--were typically organized around divisions in society that easily identified injustices between persecutors and their victims (a division in which Jews could also identify as victims). Between the late 1960s and the present, much of the anti-racism work that has galvanized Black activists has shifted and come to be concerned more specifically with disparities in access, privilege, and power between those with and without white skin privilege in our country. Click for larger view Members of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue pray alongside Rev. Dr. J. Alfred Smith Jr. of Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, California, after the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's killer. Disappointingly few synagogues nationwide engaged in similar expressions of Jewish-Black solidarity. A Weakened Coalition In 2013, the lack of deep and abiding connections between Black and Jewish communities of activists became apparent to me in the disparate responses I encountered to the events surrounding the killing of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman. Here's a quick summary for any readers who need a reminder of what happened: in July 2013, after more than sixteen hours of deliberation, a jury of five white women and one Latina woman found George Zimmerman not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter. Previously, on a drizzly February night, Zimmerman had shot Martin, an unarmed seventeen-year-old, in a gated community in Sanford, near Orlando. Citing Florida's stand-your-ground law, Sanford police originally did not charge Zimmerman or take him into custody. Only after social media outrage and civil rights protests alleged racial profiling and discrimination did Governor Rick Scott appoint a special prosecutor, who brought the charges against Zimmerman six weeks after... Language: en

Previous research demonstrated an increase in the reporting of schizophrenia diagnoses among nursing home (NH) residents after the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services National Partnership to Improve Dementia Care. Given known health and healthcare disparities among Black NH residents, we examined how race and Alzheimer's and related dementia (ADRD) status influenced the rate of schizophrenia diagnoses among NH residents following the partnership. We used a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences design to study the quarterly prevalence of schizophrenia among US long-stay NH residents aged 65 years and older, by Black race and ADRD status. Using 2011-2015 Minimum Data Set 3.0 assessments, our analysis controlled for age, sex, measures of function and frailty (activities of daily living [ADL] and Changes in Health, End-stage disease and Symptoms and Signs scores) and behavioral expressions. There were over 1.2million older long-stay NH residents, annually. Schizophrenia diagnoses were highest among residents with ADRD. Among residents without ADRD, Black residents had higher rates of schizophrenia diagnoses compared to their nonblack counterparts prior to the partnership. Following the partnership, Black residents with ADRD had a significant increase of 1.7% in schizophrenia as compared to nonblack residents with ADRD who had a decrease of 1.7% (p=0.007). Following the partnership, Black NH residents with ADRD were more likely to have a schizophrenia diagnosis documented on their MDS assessments, and schizophrenia rates increased for Black NH residents with ADRD only. Further work is needed to examine the impact of "colorblind" policies such as the partnership and to determine if schizophrenia diagnoses are appropriately applied in NH practice, particularly for black Americans with ADRD.

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Reinventing the Blues Gregory P. Downs (bio) B. Brian Foster, I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 206 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $99.00. In 1941, three Fisk University scholars—musician John Wesley Work, sociologist Lewis Jones, and sociology student Samuel Adams—documented the listening habits of Black residents of Coahuma County, Mississippi, and the jukebox offerings in the Black-patronized establishments of Coahuma’s county seat, Clarksdale, while their Library of Congress colleague Alan Lomax recorded local blues and folk musicians. Lomax was in search of Robert Johnson, who had died three years earlier, so instead recorded songs by Muddy Waters, Son House, and other Delta blues musicians that remain lodestars of the genre. Work, Jones, and Adams, however, discovered that many Black Delta people did not listen to much blues. At the King and Anderson Plantation, near Clarksdale, Black farmworkers and sharecroppers liked some blues songs (though primarily of the crooning type that would influence 1940s jazz) but listened mostly to popular songs, swing numbers, hymns, and gospel, admiring Cab Calloway and the sometimes-bluesy Count Basie but also Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Roy Acuff. On the jukebox at Messenger’s Café in Clarksdale, the top six numbers were by bandleaders Count Basie, Louis Jordan, Johnny Hodges, Eddy Duchin, and Sammy Kaye. Even in the cradle of the blues, scant miles from Robert Johnson’s Crossroads, in the town where Bessie Smith died, Black Mississippians were mostly listening to other things. Even in 1941.1 This disparity between apparent and actual Black Southern taste endures: now, Clarksdale is a center for blues tourism, attracting more than 100,000 visitors—almost all white—to the blues clubs downtown, while Black people repeatedly told sociologist B. Brian Foster that they mostly liked other music: soul (Luther Vandross, Marvin Gaye, Patti LaBelle) and gospel, among older people, and hip-hop (Nicki Minaj, Moneybagg Yo, 2 Chainz), among the younger. Even when asked to name blues music they like, they refer to people who might be classed as blues but might also be called southern soul: Johnnie Taylor, Marvin Sease, Jackie Neal, Tyrone Davis. [End Page 422] How important are the blues anyway to Black Mississippians? This is the question Foster poses in his skeptical, sometimes-circular, but often compelling I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place & the Backbeat of Black Life. Over five years, Foster lived in Clarksdale for stretches, observing from diner booths and sidewalks, and conducted more than 200 interviews with Black Clarks-dale residents. What Foster wanted to know changed over the course of his interviews, in ways that help us pin down the elusive, unavoidable question of what the blues mean today. Foster arrived in Clarksdale determined not to write a study of the blues. He wrote in his notebooks, “I am not studying the blues” (p. 2). He wondered if “Black southerners were no longer blues people” but “post-blues people,” “beyond the blues” (p. 3). Foster himself hated the blues, and hated even more Clarksdale’s downtown blues district. And Black resident after Black resident told him that they too hated the blues and never went to those clubs. “Fuck that blues shit,” one tells him (p. 3). At its best blues was “old-timing,” (p. 51) as one of Foster’s subjects says, (a view arguably widespread even among 1930s Clarksdale Black residents); at worst, it was a put-on for white tourists, who got what they demanded and who saw in it what they wanted to see, mostly a façade of authenticity. Instead of the blues, Foster went to Clarksdale to explore an important lacuna in contemporary sociology (and arguably history): the study of 21st-century rural Black Southerners. Foster quickly sketches the emergence of the Black rural South as a problem in early-20th-century sociology, then its eclipse by urban studies, then by studies of what Foster calls the New South (Atlanta) and the Historic South (New Orleans.) What disappeared in these studies were the people who stayed in place, in places where the population was shrinking, the economy...

Background Asthma is a chronic respiratory condition affecting around 300 million people worldwide. In North America, the prevalence of asthma in children and young adults is about 11%. Multiple studies have shown that the burden of asthma was higher in the inner-city when compared to non-inner-city areas. In the United States, African and Hispanic Americans have a higher burden for asthma compared to White Americans. The goal of this study was to differentiate the burden of asthma between US-born and foreign-born Black New York City (NYC) residents. Methods This is a secondary data analysis of the 2014 NYC Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NYC HANES). The covariates of interest are age, sex, education, income, health insurance, and smoking status. We test for differences in asthma among Black residents of NYC by nativity using a multivariable Cox proportional hazard model with robust estimates by using a constant time for cross-sectional studies. We use domain analysis to maintain the complex survey structure of the data. Standard errors were estimated using Taylor’s Series Linearization, accounting for the complex survey nature of the data collection. We conducted all analyses in SAS OnDemand for Academics®. We set the threshold for significance at 5%. Results The final analytic sample represented a weighted proportion of 24.16% (SE = 1.40). The proportion of US-born Black residents was 61.1% and the proportion of foreign-born Black residents was 38.9%. Univariate analysis indicated that 29.2% of US-born Black NYC residents reported an asthma diagnosis compared to 10.7% of foreign-born Black residents of NYC (p-value < 0.001). The result of the covariate-adjusted model indicated that foreign-born Black NYC residents had a significantly lower prevalence of asthma compared to US-born (PR = 0.40, 95% CI = 0.21-0.76). Additionally, those who are 65 years and older had a lower asthma risk compared to those 20-34 years old. Conclusion This study shows that asthma is found in higher rates amongst US-born Black NYC residents as opposed to foreign-born. Further studies should investigate this result in a national sample. Also, studies should investigate association of acculturation to asthma outcome in foreign-born population.

BackgroundWe sought to determine if racial differences in influenza vaccination among nursing home (NH) residents during the 2008–2009 influenza season persisted in 2018–2019.MethodsWe conducted a cross-sectional study of NHs certified by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services during the 2018–2019 influenza season in US states with ≥1% Black NH residents and a White–Black gap in influenza vaccination of NH residents (N = 2 233 392) of at least 1 percentage point (N = 40 states). NH residents during 1 October 2018 through 31 March 2019 aged ≥18 years and self-identified as being of Black or White race were included. Residents’ influenza vaccination status (vaccinated, refused, and not offered) was assessed. Multilevel modeling was used to estimate facility-level vaccination status and inequities by state.ResultsThe White–Black gap in influenza vaccination was 9.9 percentage points. In adjusted analyses, racial inequities in vaccination were more prominent at the facility level than at the state level. Black residents disproportionately lived in NHs that had a majority of Blacks residents, which generally had the lowest vaccination. Inequities were most concentrated in the Midwestern region, also the most segregated. Not being offered the vaccine was negligible in absolute percentage points between White residents (2.6%) and Black residents (4.8%), whereas refusals were higher among Black (28.7%) than White residents (21.0%).ConclusionsThe increase in the White–Black vaccination gap among NH residents is occurring at the facility level in more states, especially those with the most segregation.

Despite documented inequities in suicide trends and police-perpetrated killing for Black US Americans, there is little research investigating how structural factors like government expenditures may drive these outcomes. This study examined associations from police and social services expenditures to later suicides and police-perpetrated killings for Black and White residents. This longitudinal study analyzed 2010-2020 US Census of Governments-tracked state and local government expenditures and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-tracked years of potential life lost (YPLL) to suicide and police-perpetrated killing. Dynamic structural equation models estimated 1- and 5-year lagged associations. Models adjusted for reverse associations (i.e., violent death to later expenditures) and state-level variables including Medicaid expansion, Black-White population, racial residential segregation, political representation, overall expenditures, state firearm policies, and firearm violence rates. For suicide, every $100 increase in per capita police expenditures was associated with 35 more YPLL 1 year later (γ=0.35, 95% credible interval [CI] 0.02-0.90) and 28 more YPLL 5 years later (γ=0.28, 95% CI 0.001-0.55) per 100,000 Black residents. For police-perpetrated killings, every $100 increase in per capita police expenditures was associated with 7 more YPLL 1 year later (γ=0.07, 95% CI 0.02-0.12) per 100,000 Black residents. As such, a $100 per capita increase in annual police expendiutres translated to 14,385 more YPLL to suicide, and 2,877 more YPLL to police-pepetrated killing, 1 year later for the United States' 41.1 million Black residents. There were no associations between police expenditures and outcomes for White residents. Conversely, every $100 increase in per capita housing and community development expenditures was associated with 29 fewer YPLL to suicide 5 years later per 100,000 Black residents (γ=-0.29, 95% CI -0.53 to -0.05). Every $100 increase in per capita kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) education expenditures was associated with 4 fewer YPLL to suicide 1 year later per 100,000 White residents (γ=-0.04, 95% CI -0.07 to -0.01). Consistent with CDC recommendations to promote housing stability as suicide prevention, reducing police expenditures and increasing housing expenditures may decrease Black-White inequities in YPLL to suicide and police-perpetrated killing.

Black cargo

A variety of nursing home quality improvement programs have been implemented during the last decade but their implications for racial disparities on quality are unknown. To determine the longitudinal trend of racial disparities in pressure ulcer prevalence among high-risk, long-term nursing home residents and to assess whether persistent disparities are related to where residents received care. Observational cohort study of pressure ulcer rates in 2.1 million white and 346,808 black residents of 12,473 certified nursing homes in the United States that used the nursing home resident assessment; Online Survey, Certification, and Reporting files; and Area Resource Files for 2003 through 2008. Nursing homes were categorized according to their proportions of black residents. Risk-adjusted racial disparities between and within sites of care and risk-adjusted odds of pressure ulcers in stages 2 through 4 for black and white residents receiving care in different nursing home facilities. Pressure ulcer rates decreased overall from 2003 through 2008 but black residents of nursing homes showed persistently higher pressure ulcer rates than white residents. In 2003, the pressure ulcer rate was 16.8% (95% confidence interval [CI], 16.6%-17.0%) for black nursing home residents compared with 11.4% (95% CI, 11.3%-11.5%) for white residents; in 2008, the rate was 14.6% (95% CI, 14.4%-14.8%) compared with 9.6% (95% CI, 9.5%-9.7%), respectively (P >.05 for trend of disparities). In nursing homes with the highest percentages of black residents (≥35%), both black residents (unadjusted rate of 15.5% [95% CI, 15.2%-15.8%] in 2008; adjusted odds ratio [AOR], 1.59 [95% CI, 1.52-1.67]) and white residents (unadjusted rate of 12.1% [95% CI, 11.8%-12.4%]; AOR, 1.33 [95% CI, 1.26-1.40]) had higher rates of pressure ulcers than nursing homes serving primarily white residents (concentration of black residents <5%), in which white residents had an unadjusted rate of 8.8% (95% CI, 8.7%-8.9%). From 2003 through 2008, the prevalence of pressure ulcers among high-risk nursing home residents was higher among black residents than among white residents. This disparity was in part related to the site of nursing home care.

While numerous studies demonstrate that Black individuals have more negative perceptions of the police than their White counterparts, few have simultaneously examined racial differences in perceptions of procedural justice, police effectiveness, and legitimacy. Additionally, limited research has rigorously examined the relationship between race and perceptions of the police while carefully accounting for potentially relevant factors that could influence this relationship. Using unique survey data largely drawn from crime hot spots in Baltimore, Maryland, we examined the differences between White (n = 500) and Black (n = 2,452) individuals’ perceptions of procedural justice, police effectiveness, and police legitimacy. Furthermore, by conducting propensity-score matching on White and Black residents in our data, we compared perceptions of the police between 394 pairs of similarly situated Black and White residents who were matched based on demographics, victimization, offending, self-control, recent experiences with the police, perceived police presence, and street environments. Results indicated that while Black people have more negative perceptions of procedural justice than White people, they do not hold different perceptions regarding police effectiveness and obligation to obey. These findings hold even when comparing the matched White and Black people. Our findings suggest a nuanced relationship between race and perceptions of the police.

Reviewed by: Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945 by Brandon T. Jett Theresa Jach Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945. By Brandon T. Jett. Making the Modern South. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 235. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7507-1.) In Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945, Brandon T. Jett looks at how African Americans responded to crime and policing in three southern cities from 1920 to the end of World War II. While James Forman Jr.'s Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York, 2017) explores this theme from the 1960s on, Jett provides an important look at a critical period in the development of policing in the Jim Crow South. As police forces expanded and professionalized, African Americans found ways to use the police to clean up their own neighborhoods. Focusing on agency, Jett shows that Black southerners were not just victims of police indifference or brutality. Using extensive police records, newspaper accounts of crime, court records, and witness statements, Jett gives voice to both victims and perpetrators of crime in Memphis, New Orleans, and Birmingham. Jett chooses these three southern cities for his study because they all were legally segregated, and they all greatly expanded their police forces, but had no Black police officers, during the period covered in the book. African American communities in these cities wanted police involvement in their neighborhoods to cut down on crime. Jett thoroughly delineates the ways African Americans manipulated the police to serve their own needs. While Black residents did not want the police to target them, they did want the police to treat them fairly and to prevent and punish crimes committed against them. The African American community was not only overpoliced but also underpoliced. The police saw African Americans as likely criminals and yet rarely went after those who committed crimes against them. Police often ignored or half-heartedly investigated crimes committed against African Americans. Jett argues that focusing on intraracial crime allows him to center the reactions of Black southerners rather than white fears of Black crime. He convincingly shows that both working-class and middle-class African Americans wanted the police to stop crime in their communities. They found ways to manipulate and use the police to their own ends. They sought fair administration and application of the law, due process, more police in their communities, and the hiring of Black officers. However, because Black communities had little formal political power, city governments were not responsive to their demands. Jett uses a multitude of sources to show that African Americans often used self-policing to combat crime. And significantly, he proves that the police needed the help of the Black community to arrest Black criminals. African Americans often went to the police station or called the police for help if they witnessed a crime. Witnesses turned over weapons and, in some cases, captured and held suspects. African Americans routinely did their own investigation before contacting the police and provided names, addresses, and other help in solving the crime. In fact, in many instances, they did the policemen's jobs for them. [End Page 799] Working within a Jim Crow system that demanded deference to white supremacy, African Americans found ways to combat crime in their neighborhoods. They would, at least on the surface, acquiesce to the system, in order to get the police to combat crime, trust Black witnesses, protect Black victims, and help return stolen property. Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South provides a much-needed and nuanced look at African American interactions with the police in the urban South. It adds an important perspective on how the Black community used its power and agency to compel the police to combat crime and protect their neighborhoods. Theresa Jach Houston Community College–Northwest Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association