What makes gentrification ‘white’? Theorizing the mutual construction of whiteness and gentrification in the urban U.S.

Urban gentrification is often assumed to be a racialized process. Scholarly work on gentrification, however, has generally left race underexplored, and has specifically not fully engaged with critical theories of whiteness, despite the frequent use of this categorization in a descriptive manner. In this review piece, I clarify this relationship by theorizing the mutual construction of whiteness and gentrification in contemporary U.S. cities. Whiteness, as a powerful structural and ideological force, shapes how gentrification processes play out via both appropriative practices of racialized cultural consumption and economic processes related to racial capitalism and racialized organizations. In turn, gentrification shapes whiteness by spurring salient discourse of racial difference and further necessitating the justification of racial economic inequality. When we imply that gentrification is “white,” what we mean is that it solidifies white structural dominance and reifies whiteness itself as a privileged racial categorization.