Gentrification
We live in an America that is somehow simultaneously ‘post-racial’ and currently under fire of citizens who feel that the rights of African-Americans are being infringed on almost daily by those sworn to serve and protect the population. With debatably the leading presidential candidate talking about building a wall to prevent certain minority groups from being allowed into the country we have a people that are torn about the issue of racism in America and it shows in treatment of African-Americans with many people isolating and avoiding them. In Sherman Alexie’s “Gentrification” the author uses humor and isolation as a means to share with his reader the fact that racial balances, or lack thereof, in inner-city neighborhoods are fickle.
Alexie’s article is more of a tale, one in which we see a hero, our narrator and author, save his neighborhood from potential disease while also managing to tiptoe around the feelings of his neighbors. This is done by removing a mattress left out for a month in the middle…show more content… When talking about him and his neighbors Alexie mentions “We live as people live, aware of racial dynamics but uninterested in their applications as it applies to our neighborhood. They are people, not black people; and I am a person, not a white person. And that is how we relate to one another, as people”(616). This quote can be interpreted by someone as him and his neighbors being, as it says, uninterested in the applications of racial dynamics in their neighborhood, however it can also be interpreted that Alexie, the only white person in the entire neighborhood, is not as much a part of the neighborhood as everyone else is and he can only vaguely relate to them. This interpretation leads us to already understand that he is not quite as integrated as it appears from the
