Phase 2 Cover Letter 

This meme was a simple one about how landlords treat renters in gentrified neighborhoods. Gentrification is an issue that the black community has been struggling with more and more over the years. We used to occupy places like Seneca Village and SoHo, places that are inhabited by the super wealthy today. Red Lining is something that has caused many ghettos to be created including the neighborhood I grew up in, in fact my exact location was within the red line as well as the rest of Harlem New York. Taxi drivers wouldn’t even drive past 110th street because they considered it too dangerous, so black people from Harlem would actually sometimes have to ride in limousines, just to get to work. But as time progressed the neighborhood would begin to change, and as more white people arrived, Harlem became more commercialized, all of a sudden stores like Whole Foods and Shake Shack which had no locations uptown would move into Harlem. This is the significance of the meme, I think I did a good job of basically illustrating the mindset certain landlords have when they see renters who have  a more stable income and are more likely to pay on time. I think I could have spoken about in part three more on how gentrification has not only affected me but how it has affected the people around me by giving examples and or potential scenarios. I think the classification of the meme as a simile was correct, and I think that it fit the task at hand quite well, in terms of the dynamic between an unfaithful boyfriend and his love interests, being comparable to a landlord and his potential renters. I feel like I could have taken Maggie’s suggestion to specify what each person in the meme represented, but I feel that it was more digestible to just say black, white and landlord anyone would understand that point pretty easily. 

I think the issue of gentrification will continue to push black people into worse conditions as time goes on. However the bright side is that there are already black people taking advantage of this by buying land in lower income neighborhoods before they become gentrified and bringing in huge profits, when a big company decides to purchase the land and build properties on it. I feel one of the best ways to combat gentrification would be for the people who were in that neighborhood before gentrification to buy up the cheapest property around and keep it and pass it down to their children, until there is a point the community owns the neighborhood it lives in.