Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/17/fruit-belt-vs-medical-park.html
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But its the North! Racism doesn’t exist in the north. Nope. Someone is just being an extra sensitive snowflake is all.
/s
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Unfortunately, not a unique story in the north.
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I read the entirety of Cory’s post via my RSS reader, so I didn’t even see the map that was on the BB website. After reading the post, I went over to G Maps, searched for Buffalo NY, then went searching for either the Fruit Belt or the Medical Park neighborhood. I was surprised to find Fruit Belt. I then went over to the post on the BB website, and that’s where I encountered the map image that was posted alongside the post, which confirmed I’m looking at the right place.
https://goo.gl/maps/Kx7uEY5cqTC2
I may have missed it, but how come G Maps still lists Fruit Belt if that neighborhood name is being erased? Maybe G Maps has a different data source?
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Yes, you may have missed it in Cory’s post, the name got changed back—as Cory quotes from the linked article at OneZeroMedium:
This victory is partial for the Fruit Belt, too. Residents are glad, of course, to get their name back.
And a couple of paragraphs above that in the linked article:
Google Maps did correct the name of the Fruit Belt in February, after being contacted for this article. So too did Redfin, TripAdvisor, Zillow, and Grubhub.
ETA I think it’s a really good article.
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This shit should be illegal but of course it never will be. Because capitalism.
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And racism.
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Note that the famed Anchor Bar, (arguably) the home of Buffalo chicken wings falls in this zone.
I grew up in Buffalo in the 50’s and 60’s. I remember visiting the Fruit Belt neighborhood. It was a different world from my suburban Buffalo neighborhood. I felt like I had fallen into some play by August Wilson, e.g. Jitney.
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What do you mean, the 60s? This is what redevelopment agencies have been doing all along in the decades since, and remember this when Good Liberals try to bring back redevelopment agencies in CA. Don’t buy the rhetoric, in practice these end up mainly used by developers and politicians who think working class=blighted, for whom the sight of pawn shops and dingy auto mechanics and pupuserias with nary a Trader Joe’s in sight gives a case of the vapors.
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This doesn’t seem to me to be a ‘perfect parable’ of systemic bias, rather an issue of data integrity. Someone made a mistake a long time ago, no one noticed for a really long time, then someone recently did notice, and the error was corrected.
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Institutional racism was defined by Sir William Macpherson in the 1999 Lawrence report (UK) as: “The collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”
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It’s the not noticing that is inherent in systemic bias. It’s built in.
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Chicago also lost a neighborhood for 50 years, which fortunately has come back in the last 10-15 years.
Bronzeville was our Harlem, filled with all economic classes. Then, the area was taken over for housing projects, and everything about the once-vibrant neighborhood disappeared, including its name. As soon as those housing projects were finally torn down, Bronzeville rose up again out of the ashes. It’s not all the way back to its heyday, but a real neighborhood again, with all types of housing stock and a major influx of retail again.
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“But you repeat yourself.”
Personally I think that’s a bit of a stretch. It’s on the very edge of the Fruit Belt at best.
As for the name having ever been changed, I can guarantee no one native to the city has been calling it anything but the Fruit Belt, but it totally doesn’t surprise me that when the Medical Campus project started up that efforts were being made to undermine it.
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This is so true. Here are a couple of interesting articles about neighborhoods in Philly:
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Based on the headline, I assumed this was (yet another) case of a black neighborhood wiped off the map because white people set it on fire, leveling the neighborhood and killing a bunch of people. I read the article with a sense of relief, ironically.
I’m constantly surprised by this kind of capitalist bullshit neighborhood renaming, which I’ve seen in other parts of the country as well. Growing up, I saw neighborhood boundaries and names being battlegrounds because people didn’t want to be associated with a particular “bad” neighborhood that they were part of (and thus wanted to change the boundaries of, to not include them), not because it was some change that an outsider was trying impose on them.
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Just goes to show that if you don’t eat the rich, they’ll eat you.
In my hometown, downtown didn’t grow the way the city council/mayor/whomever wanted it to, so “downtown” was expanded to the other side of the river which was doing quite nicely. I’m not aware that anyone was harmed by this, but it still rather bugs me.
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