Which is it? “heroic neighbors fight against gentrification,” or “racist neighbors fight for segregation?”

David Cole writes at Taki's Magazine,

...In 2016, I wrote about the Boyle Heights neighborhood in East L.A. Boyle Heights is about 95% Latino, and its residents aim to keep it that way. Last year, the Obama administration handed down a federal civil rights indictment against Boyle Heights’ oldest and largest street gangs. The gangs had been using violence and intimidation to keep black people from moving into the neighborhood. Blacks who braved the threats and tried to make a life for themselves in Boyle Heights’ low-cost housing units soon found themselves firebombed into homelessness. The gangs had strong support from the community, and even after the federal indictment, the area is still almost entirely devoid of blacks.

Boyle Heights activists have been in the news once again, and this time, their targets are white. They’ve been waging a relentless campaign to force the closure of any stores that might attract white people to the neighborhood. First to go were the art galleries, which were targeted because art appreciation is apparently a whites-only endeavor (unless you’re Frida Kahlo or a graffiti tagger). “Fuck white art” was painted on gallery doors. Windows were broken, employees harassed. Most of the targeted gallery owners surrendered to the segregationists and fled. After defeating a bunch of pretentious art sissies, the activists decided that the coffee shops were next. Yes, drinking coffee is now apparently emblematic of white supremacy. Protesters picketed a local coffee shop, holding signs that read “Caffè AmeriKKKano” (because if the Klan was known for anything, it was its love of espresso) and “fuck white coffee” (okay, seriously, that doesn’t even make a lick of sense). Customers trying to enter the store were harassed. Signs were posted around the city depicting a white hipster’s head in the crosshairs of a rifle. And through it all, at no point did the activists make any attempt to hide the racial nature of their cleansing campaign: “No white people. No white stores.” It’s almost funny reading the reactions of some of the gallery and coffee-shop owners. “But we’re progressive whites! We’re the good guys! We resist Trump!”

They don’t get, or refuse to get, that it’s about race, not politics.

Needless to say, the anti-gentrification campaigners were hailed as heroes by the local press (and by national outlets like Newsweek). Curiously, in all of the coverage devoted to the 2017 war against the Boyle Heights “white wave” (as the activists referred to it), not a mention was made of last year’s civil rights indictment. Reporters and editors steadfastly avoided bringing up the antiblack pogroms of years past.

Why do you think the anti-white campaign was presented in isolation from the previous year’s antiblack campaign?

Simple. Because the residents of Boyle Heights are not fighting gentrification; they’re fighting diversity. If they were only concerned with gentrification—i.e., ensuring that home prices and rents don’t rise—they’d welcome black residents, as, generally speaking, an influx of blacks tends to depress property values. But no, gentrification isn’t the foe here. The Latinos of Boyle Heights want a neighborhood that looks like them, talks like them, and reflects their culture and heritage. They want a neighborhood where churches praise Jesucristo, with no mosques or temples in sight. They want horchata carts instead of coffee shops, taquerias instead of soul food restaurants. They want a neighborhood where if someone stubs a toe, they scream ¡ay! instead of ouch! Simply put, they want a brown town, and they’ll fight against any other color that tries to muscle in.

The media won’t present the Boyle Heights story honestly, because to do so would expose the ugly and inevitable result of leftist identity politics. It’s a road that doesn’t lead to diversity; it leads to Boyle Heights. It also leads to Leimert Park, one of the few remaining black neighborhoods in L.A., where the locals resist the “threat” of nonblack neighbors, be they white or Latino. And just as in the case of Boyle Heights, when the press covers anti-diversity protests in Leimert Park, it’s always from the perspective of “heroic neighbors fight against gentrification,” not “racist neighbors fight for segregation.”

...There’s your identity politics, leftists. This is the logical conclusion of the race-centered worldview that the left encourages nonwhites to embrace. These “progressive” geniuses thought they could unleash that beast on whites alone. They thought they could feed it, nurture it, grow it big and fat, and still control it.

How’s that workin’ out?

And now that the beast has turned on its creators, the left is preventing any kind of “honest dialogue” (the thing that leftists always say they want but actually never do) about the “anti-gentrification” protests. It would be nice if the media would report these matters accurately, even if it means portraying people with black or brown skin in a negative light.

Read more here.