In a week full of dark news moments and absurdities, the best way I could bring you the next part of my series on personal comfort in physical spaces was through a little bit of magical realism, centered on those lemon juice bottles shaped like lemons. If you’re still interested, come along with me as I talk about how restaurants are my fourth most comfortable space
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.
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.
I haven’t been feeling great this week and I really needed to hang out in nostalgia and imagination.
However, I promised to talk about food rooms and it’s nothing like being in the ones I grew up in, so, let’s hop in my time machine and let’s hop out in Burlington, NC in 1989.
It’s about 5:30 pm on this winter Friday night in 1989. I’m sitting in a high-top chair at the end of a six-top table because I’m four and I’m about a year away from being able to sit at the regular table. My maternal grandparents, my parents, and my mom’s youngest brother and his then-girlfriend, later wife are sitting at the regular table.
They’re visiting for the weekend after having moved to Maryland the year before. They wanted to get seafood in the special NC way. So here we are, joining my grandparents in their Friday night calabash seafood ritual inside of a covered barn-like structure painted blue called Harbor Inn Seafood (they’ve since moved into an old Golden Corral down the street). We’re next door to a former bank shaped like an octagon painted yellow and converted into a Biscuitville. My uncle had sworn off that place though after a bad stomachache. But we’re all excited about what we’re about to eat at the Harbor Inn.
Speaking of yellow objects, I know the plastic lemon isn’t a lemon or a toy, but I want it to be the latter. Yes, the restaurant gave me a coloring menu, but it takes a minute to fry fish and unlike the adults, I don’t have anyone to talk to, I finished coloring, and the adults just keep swatting away the lemon.
But, just as the fish arrives, my dad sneaks the lemon over to me to squish just one time, after putting some of the droplets of the lemon juice into his sweet tea to make it just a little less sweet.
As we touch that lemon together, we flash forward in our time machine to 1995. Only the machine gets a little wobbly with the imagery here.
The lemon is there, but it’s on our table in a room of soft pink booths, white-topped tables, and gold-accented mirrors on the walls. I can hear the clinking of plates and glasses all across this room. I look down and I have a small bowl of emerald green Jello, a small bowl of greasy macaroni and cheese, a small bowl of fried okra, and a plate of chicken pot pie. I have a red and white striped milk carton just like the one at school.
However, not only does the dining room at this place called K&W Cafeteria keep flashing and changing its decorations, I notice that my body keeps changing sizes and the people I’m sitting with are the same, but they too are aging and they aren’t all at the table at the same time.
I blame this failure in coding the machine on the fact that I’ve been to a number of K&W’s with all kinds of configurations across the state of North Carolina over the years, with various combinations of family members, church members, colleagues of my parents, and college friends.
One of those configurations that really used to haunt me as a child was the one at Fourm IV. I mentioned this failed iteration of a mall before when I first mentioned Friendly Shopping Center, Greensboro, NC’s first major suburban shopping center. To keep up with the times in the 1980s, they built an enclosed part of the mall and other than the K&W in the basement, it didn’t do so well.
That K&W required you to walk in and walk through wall-to-wall dark paneled wooden hallways before getting to the actual cafeteria line to help with crowd control. Sundays especially were tough as a kid waiting in those hallways, where you could somewhat see the dining room out of frosted windows, but you could only see over them if you were adult-sized. This is already after parking in the parking deck on the same level as the K&W, and seeing escalators leading up to the main mall levels that seemed to go nowhere.
I still have nightmares of being in that enclosed mall, because something always seemed off over there.
Back to this K&W time machine simulation though. We’re going to stay and eat the entire plate because one, we waited too long for it after seeing it from a distance when we would be in the back of the line at the more well-lit ones for at least 30-45 minutes.
But, I’m going to then shake the lemon because now I’m sad at all the people that are in this simulation, who have passed on, and because thanks to the pandemic, K&W is dying off too.
The final lemon shake takes us to a hot summer night right off U Street in DC, the weekend before I would have surgery last August. Les and I are sitting in front of the lemon bottle and a tray of six crabs that we paid an amount for that we would never admit we did back home. Let’s just say I could go to K&W every day for a month and Harbor Inn every week for a month for what I just spent at this new spot, which I won’t name because I don’t want to shame. I also don’t want folks to figure it out so I can have my little time machine moment right here, in a place with all outdoor seating and delectable seafood.
I can relax and breathe knowing that having a bite to eat with the people I love the most will be lifegiving and not life-threatening as it has been for over three years now.
I hope you took my advice to not come to the newsletter hungry this week, because I know I took you on quite the journey through my imagination that has been cultivated for all of my 37 years and counting, Especially growing up as an only child in a single-family home. Next week, I talk about how even my “home” home has been a site of comfort and discomfort.
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. In this section over the next few weeks of these themed newsletters, I’ll be reminding you why I’m ranking spaces in the first place and how that’s building up into launching phase one of the usable Black Queer Feminist Urbanist dashboard.
I came up with food spaces being third by listing ten places on a vertical scale of 1-10 with 1 being the safest for me and ten being the least.
I’m still working on how I want to collect this kind of information from you, and how it would work in an interactive dashboard, but for now, just email me your top ten. Let me know if you’d want me to share it in a future edition of this space!
And for reference, Here’s the vertical version of my Personal Space Comfort Index from most to least comfortable, with this week’s space in bold and next week’s space in italics:
Nature Trail/River Kayaking
Bookstores and Libraries
Craft circles, stores, and festivals
Places that sell and serve food (restaurants/grocery stores/bars)
Private residences
Public transportation
Schools and workplaces
Healthcare facilities
Hair Salons
Churches* (I’ll explain this asterisk in a few weeks when I break down why I feel least comfortable in a church but not necessarily in spiritual spaces).
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.
Earlier this week I tweeted that I was not doing well mentally. It’s not just the end of the public health emergency for COVID, but that was what prompted that particular tweet. I feel extremely heavy, though I have been doing a lot of self-care and receiving some degree of community care. However, I can’t make all of these structural issues go away and they do feel like an anvil.
What I can do though, is remind you that we should speak up and we should be leading the way in building the kind of community we need to see.
Yes you, who goes to work for a public agency or social benefit organization of some kind. Yes, you who worships or meditates in a community that claims you want to see the “least of these” thrive and that we should treat all as valuable.
Yes, even you who may have thought that they lost the battle when they got infected the first time or that things have gotten better and you can’t do anything else.
If you’re reading this newsletter today, it’s not too late to think about how to go forward with a mind of solidarity and understanding that we as the community builders, the way-makers, the informers, the carers, the nurturers, to build a world that starts with accessibility and inclusion.
I leave this section with this article specifically how the media failed in informing those, but if we truly believe in justice, we have to step in, as much as we can, as often as we can. We most certainly must not shame or diminish those who are ringing the bell to course correct.
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I do appreciate this quiz by the Washington Post that assesses ableism. I’m hoping to have my eventual index do something similar, but for now, start with this quiz.
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Even though nothing was said about the LGBTQIA+ humanitarian crisis on the African continent, and the Vice-President of the United States being Black and South Asian is not a solution for any of the problems befalling Black and Asian women, the imagery was nice (especially with this article coming from a Black feminine-presenting reporter) and I’m glad that I can focus my time on being the solution, in solidarity, with others.
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So I promise that two of my queer urbanist colleagues and I didn’t plan on writing and publishing research about similar things this week, but they did. First, Dan Reed used the closing of Silver Spring’s Tastee Diner to talk about how so much of our comfort level in these private food businesses that end up becoming public squares is how comfortable they are when we bring our whole selves to their table.
And I’m excited to see this research of DW Rowlands come through the Brookings banner, as we’ve chatted about a version of this research putting facts behind what I’ve long seen: a lack of “premium” grocery stores in Black neighborhoods.
While it’s sad to see it, I’m glad I’m not alone in my feelings and anxieties and that the facts are on the table in a way that would require folks to deliberately unsee issues.
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Also grateful for more analysis on the transportation equity that we are attempting despite not having all the resources and funding needs (paywall) with our Metro system here in DC. Also, I’m excited to have had a small hand in bringing another young Black urbanist’s thoughts to the ecosystem.
On the Shelf, On the Playlist
Considering the weight on my heart around the ending of the public health emergency around COVID-19 in the United States, my only book recommendation this week is Dr. Steven Thrasher’s The Viral Underclass. I was gifted a review copy of this book a year ago and while I’ve believed in its importance 100%, I haven’t been able to clear the space to read all of it and really apply it. Plus, I already operate out of a solidarity and holistic model of placemaking and keeping. However, as we go into this next phase of our lives, I’m going to jump in and understand how to maintain a practice of solidarity and uplifting those who are constantly at the mercy of natural disasters and disease, despite their promises of “equal impact”.
Music-wise, I’ve been leaning on my GetUp! Mix on Apple Music. I would share it, but it changes every Monday and works similarly to other apps, AI-generated music picks, only I trained this algorithm and it’s pretty spot on to what I do want to listen to when I wake up and get moving.
And I was quite relaxed after listening to Tracee Ellis Ross and Britany Luse talk on this week’s episode of It’s Been a Minute. The one thing I’m embracing coming out of this whole recent lockdown and malaise (and pressing through future times), is the hope that too can drink the special auntie juice they speak of and press forward as a good elder. Oh and for the record, I’m happy to be your urbanist auntie but don’t push me.
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!
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The Equitable Development Data Insight Training Initiative (EDDIT) is a collaboration between UC Berkeley Centre for Community Innovation and University of Toronto School of Cities, funded by a $2.2 million (USD) grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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I’m still lifting up the fundraising campaigns of LolaBean Yarn Co. and Dye Hard Yarns, of another urbanism editor and their family, and 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.
For those of you who can and I know it’s tough out here for a lot of us, 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. I’m going to encourage you to glance at local GoFundMes/Venmo/CashApp and donate what you can stand to not have come back to you, to lift the spirits of someone that is having a really hard time paying bills, maintaining healthcare, and building up their livelihood in addition to everything else going on.
However, this also leans into how we can practice solidarity and uplift community groups. If not these campaigns, please find some that are closest to you.
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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.
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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.
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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 a Patreon, 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.
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And if you need one more reminder to support my textile and fiber work, head over to www.kristpattern.com.
Until next time,
Kristen