Daily Inspiration Quote by Jim McKay

There’s a quiet self-indictment baked into McKay’s phrasing: not “I learned about gentrification,” but “I had to confront my opinions.” The verb choice matters. Confront suggests resistance, discomfort, a sense that his prior stance was settled enough to be challenged only by proximity - by being embedded in a process rather than observing it from the safe altitude of commentary.

McKay also smuggles in a crucial distinction between “change” and “gentrification.” Change is the neutral, civic euphemism politicians and developers love; gentrification is the loaded term that admits winners and losers. Pairing them exposes the rhetorical laundering that often happens in public discourse: we celebrate “revitalization” while sidestepping who gets priced out, displaced, or culturally erased. His line hints that he’d been participating in that euphemism - or at least tempted by it - until the film’s on-the-ground realities forced a reckoning.

The context of “working on the film” is key because it implies extended contact: locations, neighborhoods, crews, permits, maybe residents who don’t get final cut. Film production can function as a miniature gentrification engine - bringing money and attention, then leaving behind higher rents and a neighborhood newly “discovered.” McKay’s journalistic identity makes the admission sharper. Reporters are trained to translate messy life into legible narratives; this suggests the story resisted simplification, turning the lens back on the storyteller. The intent isn’t confession for its own sake, but credibility-building: signaling that any account of urban transformation worth reading begins with distrust of your own easy certainties.