This is the May 12, 2023 edition of 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.
I want to note that this week is the beginning of a few changes in the newsletter format. I’d been doing this personal comfort series, but to be honest, it’s been weighing me down. So in this newsletter, I manage to tie my three scariest/least comfortable places together. I’m still including my By the Way, On the Shelf, and Before You Go sections, but the first two sections will be reconfigured just a bit starting next week and in this week’s Principle Corner, I’ll talk more about what this exercise has brought up in me and what I want to experiment with next.
Also, I will be consolidating platforms. More info on that is to come, but you will still be getting newsletters on Fridays. Now, my combined story of the week.
Story of the Week: Cages of Healing, Cathedrals of Chains, Adorned with Terror
They told me that it was the best course for his healing. That we were halfway home when it came to him coming back to life.
But regardless, it was still my dad, in a diaper, in a playpen, behind a net, in a hospital room, while I, at age 25, in 2010, am growing up faster than I expected, despite being a young adult.
It was a soft cage, a cage for his healing, but a cage.
But of course, I was thankful it wasn’t the cage he could have been in considering the shape that he was in.
Many of those times the police were called because a neighbor had seen my dad doing something endangering to himself and others, resulting only in a ticket and a ride to the mental health department of the county. The few times he was at the county jail, it was clear that he needed to be taken to a mental health wing, not full-on prison.
But, this time, not the time I talk about this most, was the penultimate time. The damage done was irreversible and it harmed more than him, but it harmed him the most.
The fact that he even regained some kind of mobility, that he escaped that hospital play-pen style cage, then moved to the same rehab center his own dad had managed to squeeze out of almost 15 years earlier, then back to his own house.
He told me not to worry about him, to keep living my life, to continue to thrive. That’s the spirit I took with me for the three remaining “bonus” years we had left. But I watched as he began to cage himself into his home, and I begin to build a heart cage to prepare myself for the day I would get a call that my dad has left this Earth.
I was in a heart-colored, blood-colored room, living a dream at a conference of environmental influencers, the day nearly ten years ago I got that call.
About a week later, I’m standing in a church for one of the handful of times I would do so over the following ten years. I didn’t anticipate that being at the church of my baptism for my dad’s “homegoing” would be the funeral of my regular churchgoing, but in practice, it’s functioned like a wake.
I stand on the pulpit to give a small eulogy on behalf of the family before the main pastoral eulogy, but on the side, because women mostly stand to the side in this particular spiritual environment. I reach up and touch my hair, wishing there was more of it, despite the fact that I was taking the journey of making my hair the way I want it back into my hands.
And that journey had opened up the rainbow road I was almost ready to start walking down.
However, the heart cage sent me back into a panic the day of the call and I put my rainbow flag down. I would not be that kind of proud this particular June of 2013, but at least I had a family right?
But, there’s still the issue of my hair. It’s telling some kind of story and I’m in a Black Baptist church in the south where people have mastered hiding in this way in plain sight.
Salon visits of my tweens and teens were secondary spiritual spaces I witnessed so much Black American womanhood culture of all kinds, and learned what the essence of Black womanhood was, through both the magazine and through the air.
Yet that air and chatter were peppered with warnings that not enough hair or the wrong shape could make me lose membership in this particular sorority. That the worse thing you could ever do was not just look like a man, but stop loving them exclusively.
Reaching up to my hair that day shot me back in time to that one time my hair had broken off, and seemingly overnight when from super long to super short in my twelfth and thirteenth year of life. Then, I felt alright with this thing called queerness, both as an emerging sexuality and as a way of loving the things I loved and doing the things I did, despite their popularity.
But, that cage, that horrible cage.
One day, about three more years after my dad ascended to the ancestral plane, I managed to be in isolation, in a land far from my home. I was making a house cage similar to his, and sleeping in the living room the way he was sleeping in the living room.
I found my way out of the living room, off the unsteady blow-up bed, back to a land of familiarity though, without being forced out of not just it, but this section of the earth.
I thought it was just finding joy in making Pinterest boards of my own image, with my own favorite expressions of hair, clothing, craft, and gender and playing music, and figuring out my place in The West Wing TV show’s universe.
But, I was finding God in myself and they were pleased.
The Principle Corner
In this section, we step away from the literary expression that opens this newsletter and into the “practical”.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been ranking the spaces I feel most comfortable in, partly because it’s a good context to understand me, and two, it’s been helpful for me to have a prompt to write this newsletter regularly.
However, the further down I go on this scale, the scarier and sadder it gets. Plus, at the moment, the mission of creating a ranking scale for personal comfort isn’t really registering with what I feel I need to offer the world.
So, I decided to combine healthcare, hair salons, and churches in my story above in a way that you can feel how these things are scary, but I didn’t have to retraumatize myself.
The throughline of it all is my Dad, who we lost to violence during a home invasion in May of 2013. We buried him and held his funeral at our home church, a place that’s to my knowledge still not open and affirming of LGBTQIA+ identities. And one of the first ways I knew I was queer is that I got different euphoric feelings based on the length and shape of my hair. But, I tamped down the euphoria I was starting to feel and pushed myself back into the cage of the closet because I needed my family more than I needed to be free back then.
This has been the foundation of the feelings part of my personal comfort index, but I am ready to re-root and re-set the foundation.
Next week, I’ll tell you another story about my dad, and in this section, I’ll help you understand why the example of my Dad informs this particular newsletter work and how I want to show up in the world.
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.
No, I’ll admit that I’m super biased about this Department of Data story and research on who is more likely to wear glasses. And I wish that the bias against those that do, would end. I also wish that Velma would get the love and respect she deserves no matter the adaptation of her story.
***
For those of us building businesses and disgusted with social media and its changes, despite also liking some of it, the difference between building an audience and building a customer base and the encouragement that we can build one or the other without having to build both. Especially with so many media outlets and other entities that depended solely on the main social media platforms and the favorability of their algorithms dying and other companies that abandon their small business ethos and try to make us feel good about it.
***
Honestly, I might go to this fake beach if we get one in DC, but I might as soon go to the real beach again, especially since I really did enjoy virtual Something in the Water and I’ve really enjoyed these jaunts away to Virginia Beach through this pandemic.
***
And finally, we may not be in a COVID-19 “emergency” as a collective global people, but we are still in a crisis. Our organizing and our public outreach need to go beyond what it was in 2019 and evolve.
On the Shelf, On the Playlist
My weekly recommendations of books, music, podcasts, and other pop culture
We’re still reading Viral Justice this week, and we will be for the remainder of the month. Reading into the introduction and the first chapter last night really helped me see that writing this newsletter is one good thing. And one good thing can be enough. Even if it’s for me to center myself, for a moment, in a body that was never supposed to exist, in a world that was never supposed to exist for me. And despite all of that, I don’t have to be weathered.
Music-wise I don’t have anything super new to offer this week, as I’ve been trying to listen to quiet music at night, on my Insight Timer app.
Before You Go
This is our last section, where I have classified advertisements for others along with nudges to donate to crowdfunding and social justice campaigns but I also advertise things that I’m doing that are for sale or for hire. Rates start at $75 a week for a four-week commitment and $150 for just one week. Learn more and get started with your ad! First, another position open with UC San Diego Labor Center, which has updated its salary requirements and due dates for advertising this position.
POSITION OVERVIEW
Position title: Program Director – UC San Diego Labor Center
Salary range: A reasonable salary range estimate for this position is $86,000 – $106,000. Off-scale salaries, i.e., a salary that is higher than the published system-wide salary at the designated rank and step, are offered when necessary to meet competitive conditions. The posted UC academic salary scales
(https://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel-programs/compensation/2022-23-academic-salary-scales.html
set the minimum pay determined by rank and/or step at appointment. See the salary scale titled, Academic Administrator Series – Fiscal Year for the salary range https://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel- programs/_files/2022-23/july-2022-salary-scales/t34.pdf.
APPLICATION WINDOW
Open date: May 11, 2023
Next review date: Friday, May 26, 2023 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)
Apply by this date to ensure full consideration by the committee.
Final date: Thursday, Aug 31, 2023 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)
Applications will continue to be accepted until this date, but those received after the review date will only be
considered if the position has not yet been filled.
Apply now: https://apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF03619/apply
POSITION DESCRIPTION
The UC San Diego Labor Center (https://laborcenter.ucsd.edu/) invites applications for a Program Director. The center is administratively housed within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (https://usp.ucsd.edu/).
The UC San Diego Labor Center strengthens and expands the labor movement through advanced research, education, and strategic partnerships with workers, labor organizations, policymakers, tribal organizations, and the broader San Diego region. We place the well-being of workers, their families, and their communities at the forefront of our curricula, community engagement, public programs, and publications. We focus attention on the unique socio-economic circumstances of the border region, including large binational and refugee communities and Indigenous nations in the region. Our research offers innovative policy perspectives on work and workers while our worker-centered approach advances the goals of fair working conditions, living wages, and climate, gender, and racial justice.
We seek a program director to lead the founding and growth of the center. With funding through the University of California Worker Rights Policy Initiative (WRPI), the center aims, in the next three years, to: build our capacity for research, policy analysis, education, and public-facing programming; support unions and community organizations to conduct their work more strategically by developing curricula and providing technical assistance; and develop the next generation of labor and community organizers, researchers, and leaders among undergraduate and graduate students by connecting them with labor and community organizations, and training and involving them in community-engaged action research. We work closely with the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council.
The program director is the senior, full-time person building and leading the center in collaboration with a faculty director and managing its dynamic and growing portfolio of research, training, programming, and community collaboration. The program director is responsible for the independent development and coordination of all aspects of center operations, which includes the following core areas:
Strategic Leadership
Working with the center’s Faculty Leadership Council and the Labor and Community Advisory Board, the program director provides strategic leadership in planning and implementing all research and programming at the center. Represent the center at annual conferences, community-sponsored events, and working groups.
Research and Education Programming
Working with the Faculty Director, as well as the Labor and Community Advisory Board, the program director will help develop and guide the center’s research, policy analysis, graduate and undergraduate instruction, and public-facing programming. This includes overseeing and initiating, if qualified, research projects in collaboration with community partners, as well as teaching courses and workshops related to labor studies and community-based methods.
Fundraising
Planning, developing, and initiating strategies for generating resources and/or revenues, including through fundraising, donor relations, and grant and contract proposals.
Public Relations
Interfacing with the broader community (including the California Labor Federation, San Diego-Imperial
Counties Labor Council, unions, worker centers, and community organizations), local and state government officials, foundations, and other community partners. Overseeing all aspects of the center’s communications, including web presence, report review, and external relations.
Event Development and Coordination
Overseeing all center-organized and affiliated events.
Research Administration and Financial Management
Overseeing and further developing the organizational structure for the center’s financial and business operations, including the generation, management, and reporting of center budgets and oversight of contracts and grants.
Center Management
Responsible for personnel and program management at the center, including planning and implementing strategic initiatives, supervising and mentoring staff, and ensuring HR needs are met.
Unit:
QUALIFICATIONS
Basic qualifications (Required at Time of Application)
1) Bachelor’s degree or higher (or an equivalent foreign degree) in social science, humanities, public
administration, or related fields; AND 2) minimum of ten years' experience, with increasing levels of
responsibility, in research, program development, organizing, and/or administration.
CAMPUS INFORMATION
The University of California, San Diego is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer advancing
inclusive excellence. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, covered veteran status, or other protected categories covered by the UC nondiscrimination policy.
***
Mutual aid will continue to be a big part of this newsletter.
First continue to lift up our colleague who could still use our support with her partner’s chronic health challenges and of course, Les as she recovers at home from her endometriosis surgery, but an extra $20-$50 in these accounts is takeout money, gas/transit money, a doctor’s appointment, whatever they want, which is more than they had before.
Then Project N95 to help folks who still want to use personal protective equipment, but are running into financial hardship now that things like tests and high-quality masks are full price and major institutions have decided to move on. I’m also adding a link for the Entertainment Community Fund and for those in WGA to have relief while they take necessary action to get the funding they deserve for being one of the few industries that can’t be erased (at least for now).
And yes, my yarn-related fundraisers are still going strong, as they too see the value in community uplift and mutual aid. We are directly supporting LolaBean Yarn Co. and Dye Hard Yarns in addition to the spring fundraiser of Knit the Rainbow, a group that works to ensure that knitwear is donated to LGBTQIA+ youth, and raises awareness of queer/trans folks in the yarn and fiber space, is still ongoing.
This is how we as planners and makers can practice solidarity and uplift community groups. If not these campaigns, please find some that are closest to you. I also assume that you do have the financial means to do so as planners, but I know things can be tough for us. But solidarity is free and that starts with speaking up and sharing when you can.
***
If you want me to show up on your panel, keynote, or podcast, book a complimentary consultation call. I still have open availability for 2023 and 2024.
If you want to send me money for quick expenses or like a tip jar, you can Venmo me or buy me a Ko-fi. If you become aPatreon, you can do that on a set monthly basis, along with a special thank you note each week! The GoFundMe is still alive if you want to make large donations quickly and you can subscribe on Substack but know that nothing in this newsletter is going behind a paywall, this is considered a love offering. I will be making some Patreon changes and adding a true incentive to Substack.
***
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 the Black Queer Feminist Urbanist canon. Use this link to purchase from my Bookshop, especially if it’s coming up as an error for you. I’m still trying to figure out why that is and how I can fix it in the future.
***
And if you need one more reminder to support my textile and fiber work, head over to www.kristpattern.com.
Until next time,
Kristen