Welcome back to Eight Years a Washingtonian, a series where I talk about what I’ve learned since I moved here in 2016. That year was consequential for not just me but the region and the so-called country I live in, so I am, in a way, treating this like I’ve hit a whole decade here and I’m looking back. because it’s felt like a whole decade.

I had plans for this series to be finished before now, so I’ve decided to combine some of those reflections. Today I’m talking about how hungry I feel, but now I’m not thirsty because what we lack in food that feels like home, we have access to water for baptisms literal and spiritual.

Also, I’ve been trying to make companion YouTube videos, but I think I just want to get the words out, so today on this US Election eve, I got one thing for you, and tomorrow, early in the morning on Election Day, I’m going to hit you up with some reading distractions while we await our next steps. My musical selection for this post is Ms. Lauryn Hill classic, Just Like Water. After the jump, with the music, we’ll get started with the writing.

That’s exactly what I mean.

Well, so I thought.

Let me talk about what it means for me to have soul food in the first place.

If you’re new to this newsletter, I’m Kristen. I’m my last month of being 38. I moved to DC after a moment of time in Kansas City wishing I’d moved to DC instead. I’m a Black queer (nonbinary pansexual, presenting traditionally Black southern femme) North Carolinian. I can trace said heritage all the way back to the slavers’ boat on the Black side and working on where exactly that European ancestor inserted himself into my lineage.

I love making things out of yarn and fabric, curating music playlists, talking for hours about whatever is on my mind, and fixing the one Earth we got.

When I came out as queer, I started to feel a little estranged from my natal family, even though only a few expressed Christian concern. When I feel ungrounded or unable to get to any of my hobbies or people chosen or natal that I care about, I go to food for comfort.

This is why I’m so picky about food and so utterly disappointed at my options for said sustenance and joy in the greater DC area.

Even though I write a newsletter on gentrification, I missed the memo on how that affected Black southern foodways in the region. The crew I was rocking with mostly whooped and hollered about the lack of affordable housing and raggedy transit.

Yet, I also need to see Black restaurants and hairdressers thriving in the center of the city for me to affirm a place as a true urbanist Mecca.

I believed that DC was my Chocolate Rainbow Mecca, full of Bojangles, Mellow Mushroom, and calabash seafood brought by a previous generation of Carolina transplants, cooked proudly to perfection as we asserted our political power.

What I found was crabs. And only the steamed ones were edible and fulfilling. I also found out that my gentrification and Mecca seafood restaurant narrative was also complicated. First by the family who owned Horace and Dickey’s, and secondly by gentrification researcher Brandi Thompson Summers.

The complications? Well, the restaurant family is from New Jersey. And yes, I’m going to drag them for even thinking they can do seafood with soul. The researcher has a hook on what’s going on with H Street, but H Street is still under flux, a phenomenon I called failed gentrification, which I’ll bring out fully in a future newsletter.

Both of these miss that Southern Black edge of analysis and seasoning. That’s what I’m looking for.

But, those crabs, those dear delectable crabs.

And all that water!

On my walks to clear my head around our various water-hugging trailways, I noticed a slight scent of salt in the air.

Salt has purifying powers.

And what I was really searching for was sustenance and purification.

Assurance that my life’s moves had been the right ones.

And atonement for those that were true sins, not just what makes people bent on serving an evil empire or unknowingly caught up in its service think they are.

As the tidal river waves flowed, and I matched my steps to their flow, I learned and felt, that everything was going to be ok.

I love those crabs so much now. And the Thai, Filipino, and homemade soul food of my partner.

Because it’s ok to feed yourself on the smell of water.

Let me close today with this song, from NC’s own The Foreign Exchange that I feel the most captures where my mood is now on a regular day.

Until next time. Get ready to vote for who you want to govern with and govern yourselves accordingly if you already have!

Kristen

Part 3 of My Series Eight Years a Washingtonian, On My Relationship with this Town’s Largest Industry.

Everything I’ve done that’s paid more than the (quite high for the United States) minimum wage in this region has been in service to or in the influence of a form of a sanctioned state. This concept of “the state” is something I learned while living here and I aspired to, going back to what we are told at home in North Carolina. I have a Master of Public Affairs, specifically from UNC Greensboro which was a hybrid of hands-on and theory work, that allowed me to shape what this platform has become.

Let me keep it real. Even when I was growing up in Greensboro, both of my parents worked for Guilford County Schools. Unlike in some places where each school system has to figure out its own collective benefits package, all of our school systems are considered sub-entities of the State of North Carolina, which administers a large benefits plan, and some of those folks created a credit union for its workers. That leverage has allowed my parents to maintain solid health insurance and secure homes. My mom financed my first car through the credit union and my payments were under $200.

In addition to graduating from two state universities in North Carolina, I worked for a HeadStart provider and a National Endowment for the Humanities grantee.

So, I get why people here in DC, especially Black folks, really live and die by the movements of the federal government, our state-level jurisdictional governments, and the local county and city governments, as well as things like Advisory Neighborhood Commissions in DC.

And as you saw in the images above, I was that person, so, so excited about the ideas of the National Capital. I mean, I was squarely in that Obama generation after all. And of course under the spell of the TV series The West Wing too. Both the real-life presidential administration and the one portrayed on TV made me think that our hope and salvation were in good governance.

However, a few things happened. September 11, 2001, was my sophomore year in high school, so that was already going on, but I still held on to the myth that DC was the be all end all for a while, while also unpacking a lot of other personal learnings that I’ll share more about in future emails. But as soon as I got here to DC to live in 2016, that myth shattered.

Friends who were concerned that I would choose this town over say my hometown or Baltimore or even New York on my quest to design my life after illness curtailed my time in Kansas City and I realized I still needed to be away from North Carolina for a time.

Jobs running scarce as we were in an uncertain election year and said friends not being close enough for me to be warned against that and trully understand what that meant.

Over time of being here, I began to miss that energy of using your own skill sets to make objects and your own way, along with coming together and making decisions in consensus without being told to by a government or in service of one.

I was finding that outside of my makers groups, and yes, even among some multi-generational Black households and folks of DC, many people do not know or even desire to understand how things are made and they think ideas, rhetoric, and defense are the only worthy ways of living and sharing information.

Yes, living here can be like the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Leadership Conference (CBC ALC), but all day every day. And not to say that ideas and rhetoric aren’t fun.

But the dawn of the 45th presidential administration, especially 2018–2019 when many government agencies were shut down due to conservative fiscal policies winning out and in 2020 with the onset of COVID, shattered any remaining myth of this magical Chocolate City of governance and culture.

However, while I can never forget that our government has serious issues, other people have chosen to forget these events ever happened. Plus, this last year especially has broken the glass for real of how much the federal government is spending so much time and money on war and defense that we are not just hurting fellow humans, but hurting ourselves because we barely have time to do anything else.

And far too many Black folk think it’s a literal sin (and some are being told such by their congregations all over the region) to not put your head down and be in service to the government of the United States no matter what. That leads me to part three’s lesson… The African Diaspora is vast, that vastness is reflected here, but it doesn’t mean you can just look any Black person in the eye and expect at least a hello. Put a pin in that and we’ll get back to that in my next newsletter.

Far too many Black folks also don’t want to comprehend or remember that we are doing all of this in un or coercively ceded lands of folks who were already here, as victims of a human trafficking and apartheid scheme, that barely was doing the function it was given to be a seat of a federal government in its early years, a seat that wouldn’t be able to have a voice besides three white men from 1879–1974.

Once again, folks here really love to forget that part.

But before I go today, let me make it clear that I don’t think working for the government is bad necessarily, depending on your role and your part in everything.

However, let’s sit for a moment on what each function of the government is, at least in these so-called United States. The executive branch of our government is here to enforce laws. The legislative branch makes them and the judicial branch upholds them.

If we chose to end our relationship with electoral politics and the systems we have, our anarchy would still need some principles and ways of being we all agree on.

While most of us may have had a civics class, that was long ago in grade school. Others have not or maybe didn’t have enough of a base to help them understand what they were learning. Many have had their ability to be a human being without persecution filtered through having to learn our flawed civics and pass a test on them, to get the same rights many of us were born with (paid for by that ancestorial debt of enslavement and apartheid I mentioned above).

So say we all got to sit in a class without coercion and pick our laws and our principles of being with each other. Instead of our current form where laws that demean people have the most funding given to executing them, we could use all that money and time in our new system to make sure we help and heal each other.

After all, what would we be without our arts and crafts? My makers’ group in Hyattsville on Wednesday nights is a delightful crowd of folks, many of whom are government-adjacent, who spend their time learning crafts and sharing stories about them. When I found them and managed to figure out how to do so while still taking COVID precautions, my world opened up again.

And, thanks to the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival, especially this year, I was reminded of the power of words and the literary. This week’s companion video features me taking advantage of a few other government-sanctioned things, like my local branch library and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (aka the Blacksonian) that are actually fun and helpful.

And my partner Les, I have to thank you for introducing me to the government-adjacent folks in Buddhist sanghas that are for non-white folks and for queer folks and a dope metaphysical store The Crystal Fox. And of course, look at us giving Loyalty Bookshop and Mahogany Books their love. Our economy does pay-it-foward into helping us release these raggedy ways and ideas of colonialism and militarism.

My big lesson is that I’ve learned over time to find ways to govern myself, do my part to finanically break empire and capitalism, determine what role I want to have in the world going forward, and be the master of my happiness, while still working and pushing for global liberation. And ignore those who don’t share my values, but be willing to help them if there is a need or a disaster, like another government shutdown or a massive hurricane or other weather event, maybe even the one they said might be years away, but with climate change, it’s right here.

Keep that in mind when you think about what you want your ultimate role and legacy to be here on the earth and next time, we’ll talk more about my expanded view of the African diaspora!

PS. There are two books, both of them named after the Parliament Funkadelic concept of a chocolate city in my Bookshop store, one that expands on the Black American diaspora and one that focuses on DC’s specific history around race and culture. These are affiliate links, but I think you’ll like both books.

Oh and check out my companion video to this post on three things I think the government does do well:

Until next time,

Kristen

Welcome back to what I call my UnGentrified Front Porch, the home each week for my essay of the week and some of my vlogs and project photos from my other social media accounts. Soon, I’ll resume hosting a weekly livestream Q&A and releasing new episodes of my podcast Defying Gentrification. However, you can head to YouTube to listen to any streams and episodes you may have missed! And read below to my thoughts this week, on the inevitability of our first (Black, South Asian) woman president in the so-called United States and how it really feels when we need a stronger image and push of liberation.

It’s no secret that I am depressed. Well, it started as anxiety, and it’s clinically complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD), but it’s a regular feeling of malaise.

If you found my words because of Substack sending you here, you might just think this is a well-written grief project about the effects of gentrification on my body, mind, and career in urban planning and nonprofit communication across the lower 48 of the so-called United States.

If LinkedIn is how you found me, you might consider me “bold” or “courageous” for being so real about how my career has been affected not just by the places I live, but the messiness of being in the empire’s service. Depending on your occupation and political leanings, you may either be joyfully in agreement or cautiously curious or concerned with care about me even calling it “the messiness of being in the empire’s service.”

If you’ve listened to my podcast or ever heard one of my speeches, interviews, or panels, you’ll hear everything I just said in my slightly flattened Southern (US) accent. This accent indicates that I am the daughter who migrated far from home. It also shows me as an entity and vessel of the shame that comes from moving about the country and feeling the pressure to conform and contort, but I make sure I still carry my roots in my voice.

This brings me to my analysis of our President-Elect. Yes, I’m speaking it into existence, because unlike in 2016, a few things have happened that tell me this is going on to be the time and place. And such as it is, my Black queer radical working-class feminist personage has the fruitful intersectionality to tell you what’s about to happen and has happened.

In this so-called country, with its tepid values of freedom, if we are putting a Black (yes, even a light-skinned and also South Asian) woman in charge of ourselves, then we absolutely require her to say all the “right things”.

Even if they are terrible things.

And yes, there’s good mixed in and there is honest care and concern. Yes, she probably has moments and family and friends you can relate to.

And yes, you might see yourself as beyond all of this. You’re even working on all levels, first in your body, then your immediate community, and chosen family towards resistance and renewal. You’re blocking as much of this fascism and conformity as you can, pulling those roots and building from it a better, more inclusive space.

But we share a citizenry and land space with those who have a very different view and when you average it all out, you get what you saw at the Democratic National Convention (DNC).

You get a president-elect, who will be a president-elect, that fits the moment. And that moment is a muddy stew of everything of which we are complicit.

However, I want this to be a moment where you think hard about how you really feel about Black women and those who present partially or fully as what we consider feminine in this society.

For those of us who are Black embodied in such a way, what do you see when you look in the mirror. What has respectability told you, you “need to do”?

This is where I ask you why you might be bothered at me telling the truth of how it is, instead of more bothered that yet we have another sista/sibling who has had to for lack of a better illustration “ high-tech shuck and jive” so that we can save our lives. Lives that in some cases would turn right on back around and snuff ours out, because they are on their way to getting theirs.

And to my non-Black melanated siblings, especially at this moment to those who are so bent on being that model minority instead of weeping and wailing with me at the loss of your autonomy of the stewardship on your lands, what say you in the mirror?

Also, some of y’all are radical and want to think you know us, and believe that we only come in the flavor of respectability outside of your bookshelf or social media feed, but where are your in-person, on the group chat comrades who look, feel, and sound like me? When we do rebuild the system, are we really there? Or will you be just as carceral to us as you were to the old system because you think that anti-Blackness is always okay and that our skin and ways still preclude our globe from ever being clean?

And then we get to those under white skin. Even some of you who have shaken off gender, race, and ability limitations and prejudices. Your elders and peers got us here. You can’t ignore them. And maybe blame their lust for bombs and guns and control for getting us here. For seducing us with propagandas that make us feel good, but are full of worms.

This is where we are on this globe. But we can do better. And it starts with the mirror. Rest with it, be with it. And then let’s talk about what we can or can’t do.

****

I want to end this letter on a different note, that I’m glad I was able to get to Podcast Movement and the National Book Festival this week. It reminded me of the roots of my creative practice and I was overjoyed that so many of my fellow creatives were able to connect and that I likewise got to meet some of you. Oh and we snuck in a Washington Mystics Game that included a Hall of Fame Ceremony for Alana Beard

Here are my short films of:

My experience on Day 2 of the Podcast Movement

The Washington Mystics Game

And, the National Book Festival

Now, I’m hunkered down and still testing negative, but I am glad I got to experience these things. And yes, crochet carried me through, both on my body and in my hands!

There are limits to power and fame in an imperialistic society. Let this be the week and the century that we create a better society, from joy and grounded peace.

Until next time,

Kristen

For the first time, I spent the night this past weekend in the Richmond metro region.

Richmond’s skyline has always been that beacon of hope after a long journey through the pine-lined parts of I-85 in Northeastern North Carolina and Southeastern Virginia, en route to Washington, DC.

I needed not just to see that beacon of hope, but to be around that beacon of hope and to root myself with the idea that I can do more than just write these newsletters and crochet my dresses, post them on the internet, and hope that I’m actually making friends.

In my last email, I mentioned that I was going shopping for a community.

Why again?

Because even if we lift a Black woman with Jamaican and Tamil roots to the highest office in this so-called country, we still need to address that our land is unceeded, contested, and full of racist, Zionist, imperialist, ableist skeletons and living spirits connected to our downfall.

Around me, in the DC Metro, many of you love to tell us you’re so excited about what we are doing and then you assume our greater urbanist project is impossible in the way I’ve been speaking about it. 

It’s impossible without building more and setting aside less for those who will never be able to participate in a housing market or who may be going to federal prison just because they laid their heads down on a piece of Earth that is still Earth, despite our insistence that that we put borders real and imagined on it.

It’s impossible to have open public transit, paid for by Congressional and state appropriations, without fare gates. Maybe if we addressed that first paragraph, that whole fear of the trains and buses becoming bedrooms and bathrooms wouldn’t happen at all.

It’s impossible to do community-building work, unless you have the right words and look and politic. Or you are willing to run yourself in the ground doing three jobs and five projects and only one, maybe two pay.

Once again, if we addressed our root cause, this wouldn’t be the issue.

So, before 1:45 pm on Sunday, July 21, 2024, I had already decided that Richmond would go on my list of cities that could be a new community and a new home.

It’s not perfect, I’m not thrilled that they are so pressed about people not paying rent in the housing that was created for the people who can afford housing as a market.

And I’m very hurt that my hometown of Greensboro’s city council is considering pulling needed funding from a now 24/7 community center just for those folks who are without house, but who are ready to make home somewhere, just because the plans aren’t perfect and neither are the people. But that’s the point, they’re in need! They aren’t going to be perfect!

But, I know that in this world, even if my president is Black, again, and we share identity markers, the pressure to adhere to what this so-called country and even the globe in its insistence on having nation-states instead of mass mutual aid and local governance networks, requires of its leaders, will make me have to stand up and call for her and her administration to do more.

But not only is she speaking, I’ve been told by many in our Black dignity movement that she is listening. So keep telling her that a lot of her old policies were wrong. Keep telling her we will continue have her back if she seeks to become a liberator rather than remain a cop and warmonger. 

Remember this so-called country runs on our vibes and dreams. That voting isn’t just on one day at a ballot box, but we have tools like the ones in our hands to tell everyone how we really feel, then we can vote with our resources and our bodies in all kinds of ways toward a liberated future.

No more Electoral College. No more gerrymandering. And of course, actually building up young leadership and caucusing. 

And if our Black lady president stops listening, so many of us Black ladies and those who exist beyond those colonial boundaries of gender, will make a way out of no way and we will still rise!

I too am courageous enough to practice my political act of self-care. 

I put on my masks, because they work and we don’t have time for extra on our bodies, because we need to set up the world for the imperfect bodies we do have.

I dare to do what the name of this newsletter states and defy gentrification and craft liberation.

My dream is to have a central community space to make things in whatever place I land in, and it will not die down. It’s becoming a calling.

I need to get rid of these bills, to build cash flow and to root and grow my relationships with the right people.

I hope that’s you. If not, in this moment where Black gender marginalized people are rising up, reclaiming their time, taking back their power, and doing what they can to put one of their own at the top of this raggedy empire, many with the hope that it will stop being an empire and be an Earth again…

I hope you’ll stand up with us and grab your tool. Even if it’s just your fervent belief that we can dream and have a better world.

Meanwhile, I sprained my foot in the gym this morning. And yes, it’s the same ER, same bay, but I’m grateful that I can take the steps I need.

And yes, it’s quite the Parable times and yes, my journal is up and running too. Get those journals going and I’ll have more details on what our self-study will look like soon.

Until next time,

Kristen