December 18, 2018
Meek Mill shared a video with his 7 million Twitter followers and 14.8 million Instagram followers on Tuesday in which he says a man can be seen spray painting “racial remarks” on his grandmother’s house in South Philly.
You can watch the video in his Instagram post below:
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Meek Mill (@meekmill) on
And here’s what Mill had to say in a post accompanying the video:
“A white man sprayed a racial remarks on my Grandmom’s house last night in south philly referencing white Privileged.... the crazy part is this was a all black neighborhood 20 years ago It was gentrified and now this!! The funny part is we just bought this house ... after its remodeled more blacks coming soon !”
What exactly the spray paint says is unclear in the video, which was captured on a Nest camera, though it appears to be one word.
Mill’s claim of gentrification of majority-black neighborhoods sparked some inevitable “well actually”-ers about South Philly's cultural makeup in the replies, but Mill is correct.
While South Philly is often thought of as an Italian-American monolith, some neighborhoods west of Broad Street — Grays Ferry, Point Breeze, and Graduate Hospital, to name a few — have historically been majority-black.
They’re also gentrifying at rates close to the kinds of changes going on in Fishtown and Northern Liberties. A 2016 Pew study noted that, from 2000 to 2014…
“The three predominantly working-class African-American tracts that gentrified, all of which are located in the neighborhood known as Graduate Hospital, experienced the most dramatic changes in racial composition. Their total black population fell from 7,793 in 2000 to 3,450 in 2014. During the same period, the number of white residents more than tripled in the neighborhood.”
Mill is a North Philadelphia native.
Philadelphia police have contacted about the incident, but no report has been filed, according to CBS3.
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