GENTRIFIED THINKING 

"There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It's a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It's a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing, and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism—a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogeneous patterns with no cognizance of its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is grounded in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.

"Making people accountable is always in the interest of justice. Those who are dominant, however, hate accountability. Vagueness, lack of delineation of how things work, the idea that people do not have to keep their promises—these tactics always serve the lying, the obstructive, the hypocritical. 

I've noticed through my long life that people with vested interest in things staying the way they are regularly insist that both change and accountability are impossible. 

'It's never going to change,' a wealthy, white, male, MFA-trained playwright told me about the exclusion of women playwrights from the theater in the United States. 'And if you try, people will say you are difficult.' 

On the other hand, Audre Lord—black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet—told me, 'That you can't fight city hall is a rumor being spread by city hall.'

As we become conscious about the gentrified mind, the value of accountability must return to our vocabulary and become our greatest tactic for change." 

—Sarah Schulman, "The Gentrification of AIDS,"
 Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief