Welcome back to The Black Urbanist Weekly. I’m Kristen Jeffers and I’m currently producing this weekly digital newsletter on my site, via email and various other places, to share my thoughts, my Black, Spiritual, Southern, Working-Class, Educated, Queer, Femme thoughts on how places and communities work. Think of this as my weekly column, sitting on your proverbial print paper’s editorial page or as so many other of your favorite newsletters do, in your inbox.
This week’s edition is #17 and this is the next email in my series “And That’s What Time It Is”. This week, I believe it’s time to create the spaces we need to be in and walk away from spaces that don’t serve us.
Last week I started out by putting out big goals in the spirit of setting intentions. I’ve already had some major shifts on that front. First, I tackled the job board. Going forward, I’ll do a recap list of the still open jobs in this more legible format. Let me know how that goes. This will also be what I link to in the job board link in the “Before You Go” section.
In addition to this week’s reflection on creation of spaces, over the next three weeks in this newsletter (because I totally forgot last week that there are five Fridays in January) I will be predicting what will happen in North Carolina, Kansas City and the DC/Baltimore region over the next 20 years, in the spirit of this article series from the Indy.
This week though centers on that last goal and I quote myself:
“… for those of us who have one or more of those identities I list every week at the top of the page— I want to be able to encourage you and uplift your work, not to always have to explain it, but to be a place where you can be it and then collect that collective community knowledge.”
Come with me now on that journey to do just that.
And That’s What Time It Is, Part 2: To Create Inclusive Spaces and to Walk Away From Those That Aren’t
“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
We’ve heard bits and pieces of this Audre Lorde quote a lot over the past few years, especially in the advent of Twitter allowing a lot of concepts of feminism, womanism, queer studies and the like to come out of the classrooms and into the palms of our hands. The phrases “self-care is a form of self-preservation” and “silence will not protect you from being marginalized and oppressed” are also hers.
And when I thought about how I wanted to write this newsletter, this was top of mind.
I also had on my mind Tamika Butler’s reflection on Medium around her journey and issues interacting in our greater urbanist universe. My own partner Les Henderson and I met doing work with what’s now known as the Rail Passengers Association. Her work with them and in other transportation advocacy circles brings her great joy, but also at times rage and sadness. In the past five years, she’s built up a successful career in the health and wellness space. Yet, she’s still very much an urbanist. Both of these women have an extra layer of being gender non-conforming, and getting black male stereotypes on top of having all other stereotypes of black woman implanted on them.
In my case, this is my first full year being completely out as a queer woman professionally and personally. I’m still more feminine and I could easily pass in certain spaces. Yet,I still get and have flashbacks of times of being told I was too loud, my concerns weren’t enough and worse, the time I was fired from an industry job.
The stereotypes Melissa Harris-Perry pointed out in her book Sister Citizen still play out across gender identities and presentations, especially the more politically aligned places. Meghan Markle is bumping up against all of this as well, in her own way.
Some would say that we as feminine and lighter-skinned or biracial women don’t seem like we have the same pain. But, much like my colleague Sherell Dorsey points out in that recent CityLab article and study on the livability of cities for black women in cities with at least 100,000 people in them, the numbers and even some anecdotes don’t always tell the whole story.
We love numbers and data because they seem to merit replication. However, people live. We plan for people to live. We build for people to live in. We transport people to life. We preserve our spaces for life. Life is both linear and circular. Life is both numbers and letters. Life is lived both once and in memory. So, if people aren’t able to live and we continue to marginalize life, we can’t expect people to not bear witness and air grievances. Some of us love to believe that we don’t have triggers, traumas and problems, but that’s not true.
That’s why Greensboro can lead on so many of those factors in the CityLab story, but because of its lack of leadership in black queer life and lack of economic access, especially for funding businesses, I’ve done as Brentin Mock said in the CityLab article and attempted over my adult life to find places that will “fleece me the least”. It’s also why so many other women do so, despite having leaders that look like them in so many cities.
Yes, I believe that the access to black and queer women doing dope things and our relative higher salaries balances out the rent (and hair) expenses relative to what I paid in Greensboro. And with multiple modes of transportation at my disposal, plus having more of the places I do things daily closer together than I did in my detour to Kansas City , I feel even more connected here. Plus, North Carolina is a half-day’s drive and not a whole day’s drive away. Baltimore is also 45 minutes on a good day and I can tap into the benefits they have, without needing to live under the very real and very crushing pressures the city has created. I can connect to all of our various metro area points here in the DC metro proper. I put my car to work for that flexibility, despite the fact that it does contribute to emissions.
Still, me being guilty about my emissions speaks to a statement made by Pittsburgh City Paper columnist Tereneh Idia in her reflection of the original livability study that was centered on Pittsburgh’s black woman population:
Then there was the “Should I stay or should I go?” battle among Black Pittsburghers. The shame of leaving, the pitying of those who want to stay. The “self-righteous” stay-camp, the “selfish” go-camp. The “self-preserving” go-camp and optimistic “we-built-this-city” stayers. Which also meant Black folks were arguing among ourselves (again) instead of looking at the systems, policies, and people responsible (again).
I’ll admit that this statement (swap in Greensboro or any city name for Pittsburgh) is true for not just things pertaining to black women in Greensboro that hit the national press, but for anything that we as a citizenry thinks makes us look bad. Those of us no matter race or class in small cities tend to have these battles. Sometimes we get to have them on an intellectual level. Other times, it’s either we move or we’re homeless, jobless, sick or all three.
And so what time is it this week? The time has come for me to own that I can be every intersection of identity, while also overlaying the intersection of all the identities that encompass urbanism. I’ve got those raw materials. And in that temporary window, I’m going to make my changes and build my house.
Over the next few weeks, it will be time for me to speculate where everywhere I lived will go in 2020 and beyond.
Other Things on My Mind
This article on Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles, a black Baby Boomer and her daughter, a Black millennial really spoke to me. Here’s the thread I made on Twitter about it, with comments from the author, another black Millennial, with a cautious Black Boomer mom. I saw this before I saw the CityLab article that leads with Mayor Lyles picture and this is a nice post script about what we talked about above, that highlights how our moms, especially those of us who had moms who were one of the first to enter the middle and upper classes, gave us daughters the privileges and space to take us beyond just surviving and doing what we needed to do.
I’m super excited to see N.C. State University, my first alma mater, truly embodying what it means to live in a pack, by supporting their students in need of housing and food.
I do hope that one day we won’t be able to count our black woman transportation directors and agency leaders in our hands. In the meantime, a salute to IndyGo’s new leader Inez Evans.
And no, you won’t see me at Transportation Camp D.C. or TRB this year. I literally finished the meat of this newsletter in the wee hours of the morning, took another nap, woke up and set everything up to send out and now I’m being a couch potato. However, feel free to DM or text me if you want to set up some time to chat this year. I am still full time temping so my hours are a bit limited, but especially if we share some identity intersections, please reach out as I’d love to hear from you even if we don’t connect.
Before You Go
—Check out this week’s job board. You can submit jobs here. Additionally, there are two job and opportunity seeking and posting centered Patreon support levels.
—Check out Kristpattern on Instagram and DM me if you’re interested in anything for sale over there. It’s not too late to get one of the cards from the Les’s Lighthouse collection and they’re great for helping you or a friend turn your wishes into reality in 2020.
— Book me for a lecture, workshop or both.
—Les, my wonderful life partner and sales director, is great at hyping you up, making you laugh and helping you or your organization make radical changes in your life and health. In fact, you can join her in her Facebook group and her email list where she’s doing a 30 Day Manifestation and Wisdom Challenge to help us get ready to do well in 2020.
—Don’t forget to check out my mentee’s Rashida Green’s podcast which also discusses environmental issues from a black woman’s perspective. You can listen to me talk about some of North Carolina’s more notorious environmental issues and the political culture on this episode.
— Advertise your conference, event, project or something else right here in this Before You Go section. Send us a DM with your budget and we will be in touch with rates. Or, become an individual monthly supporter via Patreon or send me a one-time Venmo.
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