When I first started the platform, I wanted to make it clear to folks that this wasn’t a hip-hop blog. 

No shade to any part of hip-hop, but I didn’t want folks disappointed that I wasn’t a black person writing about hip-hop records. Especially since even in an article about a diversity and inclusion initiative, a black radio station can’t be written about without the word urban next to it. Are there really any black suburban or rural radio stations? Of course, there are, but yet some of them still are labeled urban.

However, I will admit that the site does have a hip-hop sensibility. I call out the struggle. I ask ourselves what we are really doing. When I drop site articles and podcast episodes I feel like I’m dropping a record or a mixtape. I see this newsletter as a bit of a remix, as I take content around the web and pull it together, and still put an original spin on it.

And recently I watched the entirety of Hip-Hop Evolution on Netflix and I’ve been watching pieces of Snowfall and WuTang:An American Saga, plus I added Jitney to my list of August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle plays and films that I’ve been able to see. (Shout out to Arena Stage for allowing myself and Les a nice date night and a chance to see almost the entire Broadway cast and their director reunite). 

Watching these shows, along with others that are rooted in the black experience of the urban renewal-becomes-the crack era, you can’t ignore the sense and scrappiness of place and scrappiness of black and brown bodies, which is often soundtracked and portrayed in hip-hop.  You can say hip-hop came from seeing the Bronx burnt down and was what emerged through the ashes.

(Mild spoilers ahead on these and a few other shows, movies, and plays)

In Jitney you see black men creating a community and a service where no service existed in 1977 Pittsburgh. You also see them pressing on and fighting back when they are threatened with urban renewal and the abandonment that had already taken hold on their own block.

In Snowfall, in a flashback sequence in this past season finale, shows how dramatically different life would have been had the characters lives not been affected by crack. There’s still some racism, sexism and classism. But, the destruction that happened to several characters, across class and race lines, wouldn’t have happened in the same way, to several of the characters. In fact, there was a glimmer of hope in several character’s lives and for those of you who have seen it, I was moved by the bathtub scene.

You see in the WuTang story, which group member and master beatmaker RZA is writing and co-producing, that it was the drugs that helped fuel the music, and unfortunately basic survival, as we see at least one character that has what we consider a “legal” job, still privy to sexism, low wages and racist violence at the restaurant and in their rented home. 

Yet, much like the men of Jitney, the men (and the women who supported) WuTang ultimately came together to create something quite legendary. And in a bit of synchronicity across my pop culture universe this week, one character in the WuTang show is shown at Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, which was on its Broadway premiere run in 1990, when the character watched it. Les and I saw Wu-Tang a few months ago at The Anthem in DC and it now makes sense why they had a full stage set mimicking the streets of Staten Island where they came up.

And speaking of the streets where I came up, I really enjoyed seeing the South as not just a bit player in Hip-Hop Evolution, but as a co-conspirator and creator. I do hope my home state gets an episode in the next season, along with Hampton Roads and Minneapolis.

Finally, before I let this subject go for this week, Michael Ford is one of the many, but most prominent architects or planners working specifically on hip-hop as it meets architecture, and is designing a museum to hip-hop, and has been doing youth camps and workshops specifically tying hip-hop to the community of folks who build and plan our environments on a professional level.

I also know there are so many of you reading this and in the greater urbanism/sustainability community doing this kind of work where we marry our popular culture to our day-to-day living as black folks. As usual, shout out (which of course comes from hip hop vernacular) to all of y’all and hit me up!

This is The Black Urbanist Weekly. I’m back for the third time in this volume to share my thoughts on spaces and places throughout the African Diaspora, along with thoughts on places and spaces of all kinds. The main thing I worked on this week was this here newsletter and as you can see it’s not just in some of your emails, but on your favorite social network and (finally) back on the actual website.

Have you considered subscribing to The Black Urbanist Weekly on Patreon? Patrons get the email a day before, plus in the coming months, they’ll be getting an expanded email, original reporting and data sets on the website and VIP access around the podcast. Again, subscribe and don’t miss out!

A Few More Things on My Mind This Week

A call back to last week, again, what are we building and why? Especially when it comes to things like jails and other buildings that go against community wealth and cohesion.

And a call back to Jitney and the struggles of the marginalized (and in Pittsburgh’s case) minority populations, both as Google contractors that don’t have the same rights as full time Googlers and who tend to be blacker and browner and as black women, who were found in a study by the city’s Gender Equity Commission to be doing not only the worst in the city, but the worst compared to other black women in peer cities. 

Les and I also enjoyed watching Hustlers in the movie theater this week, and I’m disappointed to find that the women who were dramatized in the article, didn’t receive adequate payment for their portrayal and participation. It also underscores why these women are in these kinds of careers and those particular women did what they did to survive in the post 9/11 and Great Recession era in New York City.

On the surface, this article is about the first black IBMer and the memoir his son, who also was an IBMer, wrote. Yet it goes into how IBM’s technology has caused great pain, namely in Jamaica, Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa, and post- 9/11 New York.

I think Amtrak could have kept the dining car. Yes, add some of the flexibility and packaged foods, but when you’re already locked into a long-distance train, there’s more than enough time to sit down and eat a meal, especially across generations, classes, races, and other identities. Plus, the cheesecake better still be wrapped up and offered in this new dining scheme.

Finally, Angie Schmitt, a longtime national Streetsblog editor and the reason I’m even syndicated on the site in the first place, has moved on. Really appreciate the shout out in the article and that initial support and inclusion in the Streetsblog summits over the last decade. And yes, for some of you, I may the first person you can think of to replace her. However, I would like to ask that you consider the time, effort and voice this particular work both takes and also puts into the world. Streetsblog is needed, with diverse voices included and heard AND I and the collective I’m building also need to exist in the media space.  Thanks, everyone for thinking of me, though.

Before you go…

—Check out the job board. 

—Check out the stores on The Black Urbanist and Les’s Lighthouse 

— I’ll be co-presenting with Les at this year’s The Untokening, held in my home state, in Durham the first weekend of October and a couple of weeks later, I’ll be back with my Maynard Institute 200 cohort at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, continuing to work through building out this platform to be its very best. Want to add something to my calendar before year-end or get a jump on my spring schedule, book me for a lecture, workshop or both.

Thanks for reading! You can get these messages in your email, support the platform financially on Patreon and get special bonuses; follow the platform on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and Instagram and if you missed some of the previous weeklies, check out the archives.