A white Rutgers University professor went off on the entitled “little shithead” gentrifiers who have taken over his Harlem neighborhood (yes, you read that right).
James Livingston wrote a Facebook rant on Thursday that was flagged and taken down by the social media platform after he went to Harlem Shake, a high-end burger joint half a block away from the new Whole Foods in Central Harlem.
“OK, officially, I now hate white people. I am a white people, for God’s sake, but can we keep them—us—out of my neighborhood?” Livingston wrote in the since-deleted post.
According to the New York Post, Livingston also said that the restaurant was “overrun with little Caucasian assholes who know their parents will approve of anything they do.”
He continued, “Slide around the floor, you little shithead, sing loudly, you unlikely moron. Do what you want, nobody here is gonna restrict your right to be white.”
He then added, “I hereby resign from my race. Fuck these people. Yeah, I know, it’s about access to my dinner. Fuck you, too.”
Livingston reportedly teaches history at Rutgers and is from Lombard, Ill. On his Facebook page, he later said that his post had been flagged as hate speech.
“I’ve just been told by FB that my rant v, white people makes me dangerous, socially media speaking, even though I’m a white people, or person, or whatever,” he wrote.
He also said that he doesn’t want “little Caucasians overrunning my life, as they did last night.”
He added that his new neighbors should go back to where they came from, and are colonizers to boot: “Please God, remand them to the suburbs, where they and their parents can colonize every restaurant, all the while pretending that the idiotic indulgence of their privilege signifies cosmopolitan—you know, as in sophisticated ‘European’—commitments.”
There has long been a debate on what makes a gentrifier a gentrifier (e.g., can they be black? Is it not about race but money? It is about attitude), but I must admit I’m speechless on this one.