Perspectives and Positions: Mr. T

Scenario #5: Mr. T’s Video Clip

Elsewhere, I discuss how this research project on the ways young people document to critique (e.g., digitally, in print, orally) gentrification in Harlem extended into video interviews with high school teachers, other students, and local community members. In the above clip, Mr. T, a teacher at a local high school, talked about misunderstandings of the meanings of gentrification, whiteness, ethnic succession, and getting “pushed out” of Harlem. His focus on being pushed out of the community relates, in many ways, to Kim’s attention to the struggle of longtime residents to not be “push[ed] to the back” for the sake of newness (e.g., new residents, economic changes, new condos, a new Harlem). Such a connection situates these literacy narratives and videos on gentrification within a larger discourse on shared meanings of community change from voices that are traditionally ignored in public debates. Kim, her peers, and Mr. T, as participants in the community, are well aware of the consequences of gentrification on cultural, social, political, and economic structures as well as on demographic trends. It is this awareness that comes through in the video clips and that helps participants make sense of the value of being seen and heard on camera. It is also this awareness that contributes to how they take up literacy—through expressed words, in writing, in the physical languages of their bodies in front of and behind the camera—as they openly critique gentrification.

Mr. T’s own involvement within the shifting community is highly mediated by multiple literacy narratives. The ways he reads and re/reads the physical and human signs of newness in Harlem are constructed around how he situates himself in this space, one that, according to him, has “an already established black population.” This community, like many others across the United States, is undergoing “tremendous changes” associated with gentrification, spatial re-appropriation, and also dire economic times (see Forbes.com’s “Real Estate: The End of Gentrification?”). Thus, some communities that have seen expensive housing constructions, land re/developments, and the influx of retail businesses within the last twelve years are now experiencing either a reverse effect or a temporary halt to these changes (for additional information, see "Surviving after the Boom in Harlem" from The New York Times). What do these acts say about, or signify for, the ways people read their lives and interact within local communities before, during, and/or after spatial changes?

Such acts, for Mr. T, points to the value of human involvement in the community, which implies a level of civic and democratic engagement in the decision-making processes happening there. His own feelings about gentrification, expressed in the above video clip, speak well to this point: “What I see here is white-ification. Let’s face it.” This comment is related to other comments he shared with Phillip and me: “What are we doing about these changes?”; “You can’t just move to a community without knowing about it and the people who reside there”; and “A community must have people who are willing to protect it…participate in what’s going on. Point blank.” This latter point about participation is grounded in Mr. T’s belief that residents, both current and longtime, must meaningfully contribute to the livelihood of their community (see Kinloch, 2009). In other video clips and interviews, Mr. T’s conscious involvement, or engagement, with the video camera—how he used it to deliver a powerful message, “Please, please, don’t push me out!”—was purposeful and intentional. Whether he realized it or not, he was relying on media texts, in this case the video camera, to narrate his story of belonging, place, place-making, and place-taking. Doing so allowed him to visually construct a narrative that privileged community involvement over gentrification while questioning meanings of change through readings of specific acts and activities happening throughout Harlem.

The connections across the scenes with Phillip, Khaleeq, Kim, Samantha, and Mr. T are reflected in Mr. T’s insistence for people to figure out “exactly what is going on” in Harlem. Project participants were all relying on media texts to exchange perspectives, consider meanings of gentrification, and contemplate the effects—negative and positive—of spatial change. Although we did not always talk about the value of media texts and the role played by the video camera, participants were aware that it was there, that it was on, and that it afforded them (and me) an opportunity to be heard when they felt otherwise ignored in the larger, more public conversations going on around urban gentrification. Hence, their individual reactions to gentrification, as highlighted in the video clips and in Table 1, should be accounted for in debates on spatial change in ways that privilege acts and strategies in literacy and their connections to multimodality.