Reverse white flight, reverse racism, and even a Kony 2012 critique all in a three-minute smackdown.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9Avq8QPUO8
These two young poets' scathing spoken word indictment of hipster racism and gentrification is fully worth a few minutes of your time. The performance underscored for me a rancorous intellectual exchange (see "swagger jacking", and "politics of the urban comeback") on the topic of gentrification that took place recently in the media of my hometown of Washington D.C. Many neighborhoods of D.C. are nearly unrecognizable now compared to when I left in the early nineties and judging by this snapshot of Philadelphia, similar dynamics are at play in the City of Brotherly Love.
Got more time than a few minutes this weekend? Re-read Norman Mailer's classic 1957 essay The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.
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