Black History Month wasn’t always Black History Month. And for me, a proud Black queer feminist urbanist 365 (366 on leap year) days of the Gregorian calendar year, I don’t need that prompt to remember and embody my history. However, I’m happy and ready to plot my Black future and yours too.
This is The Black Urbanist Weekly with Kristen Jeffers, an email newsletter that highlights the Black Queer Feminist Urbanist thoughts and commentary of me, Kristen E. Jeffers, an internationally-known urban planner, fiber designer, and contributing editor. Think of this as an editorial page column, but directly in your email. This week is the first of our deep dive into the Whys of Black Queer Feminist Urbanism and how you can apply them, no matter your background. Let’s get started with a few words of reflection from me, then my weekly section on my Black queer feminist urbanist principles, “The Principle Corner”, then By the Way where I highlight articles and projects I had a hand in externally.; On the Shelf, On the Playlist where I share book and music recommendations, and finally Before You Go, where I share any ads and announcements if I have them and ways to support this work financially and externally. Ok, now, onward to our reflection this week, which I kinda teased above.
I know I sound like I hate February and Black History Month in the lead. I don’t. What I hate is that feeling I have to do extra things above and beyond what I already do, namely on a weekly basis in this newsletter.
And I already said last week I’m not here to prove anything to you about my identity. However, I enjoy having the opportunity to school you and share with you elements of my life and culture. I love helping people make connections with who they are and the places they inhabit.
I really enjoyed when I was actively teaching the Black Queer Feminist Urbanist School (which if you become a Patreon at any level this month, you’ll have access to all the archives) discovering that folks like Mary Ann Shadd Carey, Ida B Wells-Barnett, and W.E.B. DuBois were some of the first Black urbanists and social scholars. They were asking key questions about where we lived and who we lived for and what could we do with this colonized state we found ourselves under, even if we were emancipated from enslavement.
One of the other things I learned was that this work has value and is necessary for everyone, but for different reasons. Hence why I ran an equity caucus and a white space for the course the first time. I realized that running community groups online wasn’t something you do alone, especially if you want to avoid any kind of mistakes or stressors. However, we need something every day that allows us to reckon with our biases and acknowledge our histories.
It doesn’t need to be in just one month, but I know we love having X Month for causes and conditions, and identities that are often marginalized. However, having these months has often become a painful showcase of people trying to look supportive and say all the right things, while going right back to their old ways the next day.
I’m especially frustrated and disappointed this week that I continue to hear that companies inside of the architecture, planning, real estate, and development industries, along with adjacent advocacy groups, movement spaces, publications, and research centers are not reckoning with what makes it hard for marginalized identities outside of their favored months.
Addressing the disparities of the sector and related activities is a key thing I do both in this newsletter, in my lectures, and in my online and offline workshops. This is nothing new. What is new is that after all of the promises and pledges of Juneteenth and Black History Months 2020, 2021, and 2022, we are already starting off 2023 with skewed expectations.
We’ve become happy just to have a person, maybe two or even a good 25-30% but never a majority, on staff, especially if that person is naturally inclined to be a community builder. We’ve gotten comfortable with doing our salary adjustments. Many more of us have done our implicit bias assessments and training and we know exactly what our biases are.
We insist that it’s unfortunate that not every firm (or movement or advocacy group or government entity) is as equitable or knowledgeable or generous with their time and benefits as we are. However, we are now at the point where we have to address that our systems for creating equity are not failing because we aren’t trying. The system we’ve set up, not just for equity, but for how we conduct business and we share resources is working as it is supposed to because it was not set up for true liberation and abundant resource sharing.
The challenge I want to leave us with this month and every month we celebrate marginalized identities and conditions and places, is to ask ourselves why we chose to create the systems we have, for the things we love to do and promote.
Why do we have to work to earn things that the Earth can generate on its own? Why do we have to work or look or sound or feel a certain way just to be deemed worthy as a human?
If we choose to engage in technological processes, why do we put a premium on access to those processes and learning how to make them?
It’s ok to want to barter for something we created, that’s artistic, that’s unique to us, but why does that trade have to be so degrading and at times unequal based on certain capabilities? Why can’t we just share, knowing that many things that are at the human scale are infinite? And for what is not, we have the tools to make these decisions equitably. Why don’t we use them?
And finally, to create the future, we have to understand why we did these things in the past and we have to reckon with what we are doing in the present that’s doing more harm than good when it comes to our work.
We have to stop demonizing people who have the passion to make places but don’t always have a formal title. We have to stop making it seem like a person has to always work, to be worthy as a human.
No, everyone can’t be planners, architects, or engineers, even run their own venture or write, like I’m doing. However, every single firm, even if it’s just you or a few other people, need to have a plan internally and externally. That plan needs to cover at the minimum, how you will manage when your work in the past has caused cultural harm, beyond an I’m sorry plaque, especially if you have the means to provide repair services for the harm done. In your present, it means to keep doing the work to understand your worldview, and complete transparency around your hiring and firing decisions, as well as choices to work with particular communities.
As a powerful entity with control of your workforce, your company and the parts of the contract you’re contracted for, you’re still being inequitable if you fall into doing the following:
— Sending the email stating you’re sorry we can’t hire you, but not offering to give feedback or acknowledging the feedback may warrant or need further mediation. If you’re trying to escape a lawsuit or EEOC complaint in the United States, unfortunately, you may not be able to, but you could resolve the situation in mediation and more evaluation of where you sit in the nexus of an inequitable industry and your own personal needs and biases.
— Tokenizing. Clearly, the work that’s been done since the original Untokening is still not sinking in or running up against systemic barriers. Continuing to diversify not just your workforce, but your executive teams, boards, partnerships, and joint ventures is what’s needed to resolve this along with that system dismantlement work.
— Punishing your colleagues and employees internally for not meeting standards but demanding that clients and communities put aside their struggles or that we accept how people naturally do their work and art and practice. Yes, have a mediation practice, yes, express concern about performance. But don’t be dictatorial to your employees, when you embrace others fully. No, you don’t tokenize externally, but you need to stop doing it internally.
Whatever you do, don’t run away from hard conversations. Otherwise, when the system finally crashes, you’ll be underneath it, instead of part of the solution.
The future, especially the future I can help you create from my Black queer feminist urbanist framework, will help you be part of the solution. You’ll get new action steps, ways of being, and ways of generating abundance in income and well-being.
Finally, my dear Black siblings. Don’t feel obligated to educate anyone or even do extra digging up of history or culture this month. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t get that formal position in the industry, especially if you already have a community tie and you have a means of income that allows you to give back to said community.
Now, if you feel called to explore more of your ancestors and elders and learn more about a place out of genuine curiosity, please do! If you love sharing your thoughts and your knowledge on social media, please do. And finally, it’s ok to not know everything and be on your own self-affirmation journey. It’s ok to want a better job or home or career and start the process of affirming that I’m here for you and I would love to be helpful.
The Principle Corner
Each week, I’m taking a moment to share how I’ve been building the Black Queer Feminist Urbanist practice and ethic, so we can approach this work from a similar starting point. This week, I wanted to highlight the two working definitions of Black that have been influencing this process.
So, in case you missed it last week, this is my working definition of Black:
Black: A person of African descent, often with visibly melanated skin, who has been subjected directly or through ancestry to enslavement, colonization, discrimination, or mistreatment as a result of their ethnicity, past and present marginalization, and/or skin color. This also refers to the cultures derived from these activities and their adaptation to their environments.
This is a definition that comes from both my lived experience and my academic environment experience. I was thrilled to find this definition that makes it even more succinct:
“We know race is a construct, an invention of racism. Race was created to justify imperialism and the slave trade. Blackness is not intrinsic to anyone. Blackness is definitely not monolithic. Yet, Blackness, entwined with the enslavement of Africans, colonization of the continent and the subjugation of a massive diaspora– has become an indelible concept” — Sebene Selassie, as quoted in the foreword written by Gaylon Ferguson of Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us About Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom
So yes, race is a construct. However, we’ve had actual, sometimes positive, sometimes negative consequences over centuries as a result of this construct and we must not ignore or explain away Blackness.
By the Way
Here’s where I share other articles/videos that were noteworthy for me this week in this section. Apologies in advance for things behind a paywall. Some things I subscribe to and others I grab just before the wall comes down on me. I will start marking these articles and describing them.
Who was Carter G. Woodson, the founder of what has become Black History Month? Reading this I felt a very familiar sentiment to what I said above. I think if he were here, he would absolutely support the movement to observe this month as Black Futures Month.
My fellow Substacker Robert Jones, Jr. (author of The Prophets) has an amazing primer of Black gender-nonconforming and same-gender loving (terms that speak to Black LGBTQIA+ experiences) histories and the means of uncovering these ancestors and elders.
Meanwhile, people tried to tell me North Carolina was improving on this front, but none of our “safe areas” are immune from statewide intervention from the General Assembly and other entities that emit power from Raleigh which the whole state must bow down. I know we are ready to organize against this “Don’t Say Gay” bill, but how much of this do we endure before we ask our neighbors and family what’s going on with them that they don’t want us to exist? And even better, why do we let them get so loud and emboldened in the first place?
That last question in the blurb above was even more enhanced after I listened to this podcast and commented about what I thought my life would be like if I had continued to do this work in North Carolina.
On the Shelf, On the Playlist
This year, I’m challenging myself to read more books, versus reading long form articles and hot takes. I also want to strengthen the Black Queer Feminist Urbanist book canon, by re-reading several of its titles. Realistically, I’ll probably be curating and skimming some of these titles, but I still want to lift them up to you as my readers, in case you’re self-educating, doing teach-ins, or need more materials than your university or school has provided on several of these topics. And sometimes, but not every week, I’ll be sharing some of my musical favorites, as I’ve been resurrecting my musical and DJ roots lately.
So as you saw above in the Principle Corner, I’ve started to allow myself to explore other faith traditions and their intersection with Black ancestry and political status. I happened to be in the faith section of the Columbia Mall Books-A-Million, which despite its size had about ten shelves for all kinds of Christian books and had all the other faith books, including other holy texts that carry similar weight to the Christian Bible, rammed together on a bottom shelf, just inches to the floor. It was a true miracle that I found Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom. I have been attending sanghas off and on both on Zoom and in person since around 2019 and I’m looking forward to learning how my identity meets this faith tradition.
And as I continue to explore new and old music, I have been stuck on Lucy Pearl’s singular, self-titled R&B album from 2000. Reading their Wikipedia, you can see that the supergroup might have been doomed to failure before it even really got started. However, I love the grooves and it’s bringing back my 8th-grade year. That’s one benefit of streaming, for hard-to-find titles. However, I encourage everyone to purchase anything I list that’s actually in print, from online sites like Bandcamp or go to their shows (ok, maybe not Beyonce if you can’t win her lottery!)
Before You Go
***
The Columbia University Graduate School of Planning symposium on Black Urbanism I’m participating in is open to the public and free and will be held in Fayerweather Hall Room 209 on the main campus Tuesday, February 7 from 1-4 pm It will also be recorded!
***
I have created a special landing page, www.theblackurbanist.com/books, that’s not only a home for my upcoming volume, A Black Urbanist Journey to a Queer Feminist Future, but all those books in my canon that I mentioned above.
***
if you want to send me money for quick expenses or like a tip jar, you can Venmo me. I’m still working on introducing a paid tier for Substack and Medium users to also function like a tip jar and if you become a Patreon, you get detailed reporting on my progress as we shift operations into both a for-profit and non-profit model, along with a special thank you note each week! Also, you can still advertise in this newsletter, although no one chose to this week!
***
Until next time,
Kristen