Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.

Proponents of gentrification will vouch for its benevolence by noting it “cleaned up the neighbourhood”. This is often code for a literal white-washing. The problems that existed in the neighbourhood - poverty, lack of opportunity, struggling populations denied city services - did not go away. They were simply priced out to a new location.

That new location is often an impoverished suburb, which lacks the glamour to make it the object of future renewal efforts. There is no history to attract preservationists because there is nothing in poor suburbs viewed as worth preserving, including the futures of the people forced to live in them. This is blight without beauty, ruin without romance: payday loan stores, dollar stores, unassuming homes and unpaid bills. In the suburbs, poverty looks banal and is overlooked.

In cities, gentrifiers have the political clout - and accompanying racial privilege - to reallocate resources and repair infrastructure. The neighbourhood is “cleaned up” through the removal of its residents. Gentrifiers can then bask in “urban life” - the storied history, the selective nostalgia, the carefully sprinkled grit - while avoiding responsibility to those they displaced.

Why do we allow abusers to remain in our activist spaces? Why is it that we give them awards, funding dollars, and platforms from which to access more victims? Why don’t we seek to hold them accountable like we would anyone else (recognizing that accountability can look like expelling a perpetrator from a community altogether, or engaging with them in transformative work, or something else entirely)? We’re the organizers on the ground fighting violence—in every community but our own. Why is it that the politics we practice in our work don’t seem to make it into our personal lives?

Sometimes it’s a question of protecting survivors, fearful of their powerful abusers, who don’t want to come forward or be outed as such. Other times it’s a matter of protecting ourselves, recognizing that it’s not always safe to come forward, that it can be more dangerous for some of us to speak out than others.

But more often I wonder if there’s something else at work—an exhaustion, perhaps, that keeps us silent and complicit (are there only so many battles we can fight?). Or a nagging fear of acknowledging that our communities—our support spaces, our organizing groups, our people—could be infected with the same misogyny we spend our days fighting everywhere else. A fear that patriarchy exists in the bodies of those we know and love, in the allies, the activists, the Good Guys. A recognition, painful perhaps, that survivors and perpetrators don’t split neatly along a binary, the one all angelic and good, the other evil and bad. That violence is much closer to home, that it has the face of a friend, the name of a fellow fighter.

Alexandra once wrote that, to end violence, we “have to disrupt the whole body, and though all men can help, most won’t want to.” Change won’t be palatable and easy. It’ll take persistent effort to stop fetishizing the concerns of men in feminism, to stop congratulating them for meeting a bar we’ve set so low. It will be painful to acknowledge the proximity of violence, the presence of patriarchy in the bones of our brothers and in the faces of our friends. And it will hurt to recognize our own complicity, our endless excuses for the Good Guys, as such. To end the violence will require nothing short of revolution.

That revolution starts with us.