The great replacement has come for Brooklyn.
Or so Naomi Jackson, writing for New York Magazine, claims in “I Miss My Black Brooklyn.”
“I once lived in a [b]lack mecca. But by the summer of 2022, my toddler son and I were often the only [b]lack folks on the playground in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a fact that felt both alienating and surreal.”
Certainly. Sweeping demographic change is usually unpleasant for natives. White Americans displaced the Cherokee, who themselves displaced the Muscogee and Yuchi, who themselves probably kicked or killed some other sorry tribe off the land. Few people would begrudge the Cherokee for trying to preserve their territory, their people, their culture. Many begrudge white Americans for doing the same. (RELATED: INGERSOLL: Cato Publishes Yet Another Cooked Study, This Time On Immigration)
Jackson admits her “[b]lack mecca” was, just a few decades ago, not that.
A DJ plays music at a block party in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York on May 23, 2021. (Photo by ED JONES/AFP via Getty Images)
“I was a junior in high school when we moved to Old Mill Basin, an area just off the Belt Parkway marked by rows of two-story attached homes once inhabited by Jewish, Italian, and Irish folks before white flight and retirement spirited them to places like New Jersey, Long Island, and Florida. We were one of the first [b]lack families on our block in the late 1990s … A decade later, there were only a few white families left on our block, replaced slowly but surely by [b]lack, mostly Caribbean and African, families.”
Jackson puts white people in a classic double bind. When whites move in, it’s gentrification, which is evil. When whites leave, it’s white flight, which is evil. When white people stay put, some engage in “racist microaggressions,” according to Jackson, which is evil.
Not to mention, Jackson’s parents immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s. She was born in 1980, “part of a tidal wave of late-20th-century West Indian and African emigration that changed the face of [b]lack New York.” (RELATED: ‘A Good Way To Destroy Your Country’: Joe Rogan Comes Down Hard Against Democrats’ Policy On Illegals)
Jackson and her family arrived relatively late on the scene. She seems oblivious to this fact. I’m fairly unsympathetic to the anti-white lamentations of a second generation immigrant.
Still, Jackson’s nativist instincts are easy to comprehend. Recall Robert Conquest’s first law of politics, as formulated by John Derbyshire: “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.”
Everyone is conservative about what he knows best, but only whites are castigated for this fact of human nature. Anyhow, Jackson should educate herself on the latest in left-wing rhetoric. Migration is a human right, I’m told.
Follow Natalie Sandoval on X: @NatSandovalDC