As many of you know, there is much discussion about the future of the DC General homeless shelter. This morning, the Post’s Petula Dvorakstated, “Developers are salivating over D.C. General. It’s a huge property with plenty of potential. So there’s no question that it will be shut down and sold. That part of the plan no one is worried about.” Mayor Gray is rightly calling to rehouse those at the DC General shelter before closing it, but his plan is based on an unfounded belief that private apartment owners will now come forward and house the hundreds of families at DC General at rents far below market rates. Thus, in the interests of “salivating” developers, hundreds of homeless people are going to be displaced again? DC General is District property and could be renovated, maybe even employing homeless or near-homeless workers, if the District wanted to do so. However, developers and homeowners in the area are working hard for the “revitalization” of the DC General area, which they see as requiring the removal of their homeless neighbors. The deterioration of DC General is required as proof of the need for “revitalization.”
A few weeks ago, I went to a great panel discussion, “Racism in the New DC,” organized by Empower DC, which spoke to these issues from a very refreshing perspective. The speakers were three public housing residents working to maintain public housing and public schools in DC (Marlece Turner, D. Bell, and Shannon Smith), as well as Dr. Sabiyha Prince (the author of African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, DC), Ron Hampton (a former police officer and activist against police abuse), and Post columnist Courtland Milloy.
The main takeaway from the panel discussion was that institutional racism (not individual racist people but a racist system) works based on the idea that brown and black people do not deserve as good things as white people do. Improvements in the city are made for white people both because they often have more money and also because they are seen as deserving better things, like better schools and better services.
I asked the panel about a recent Post article that had said that, “Almost 10 years after the District vowed to assure low-income residents in four areas that they wouldn’t be displaced if their neighborhoods were revitalized,” the District decided that this was “overly optimistic.” The District was considering a policy change to “no longer guarantee that residents have a right to stay in their neighborhoods, and the promise that existing public housing won’t be demolished until a new building is constructed to replace it would be abandoned.” Empower DC and others have been warning people about these false promises for some time.
So, I asked the panel, is this a new policy? or is this a statement of what the District was already doing? Courtland Milloy immediately said, “They do what they can get away with.” He explained that, when District officials made these promises, they had to to make their redevelopment plans and the destruction of public housing palatable. Earlier, Milloy had stated that we need to acknowledge institutional racism and that these “revitalization” policies are in the interest of property owners and not in the interests of the homeless and other poor DC residents.
How can we change the situation in which “They do what they can get away with”? As a start, we might recognize that the journalist’s statement “So there’s no question that it [DC General] will be shut down and sold. That part of the plan no one is worried about” is not a statement of fact but rather a statement supported by those who are interested in this outcome and “can get away with” it. It is a political statement in the battle over space in the District. The next step would be to support a range of policies, including permanent public housing and permanent affordable housing in the District.
Cross-Posted from WTOP By Michelle Basch
WASHINGTON — The stories of people dissatisfied with the tactics of the D.C. police were at the center of a hearing at Howard University Wednesday night.
“The ACLU and the Washington Lawyers’ Committee have documented vast racial disparities in the arrest rates in D.C.,” said D.C. Councilmember Tommy Wells, who chairs the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, which oversees the Metropolitan Police Department.
“Some of these officers treat the citizens who are black in this community like animals on a daily basis. They jump out on the street and confront us aggressively. They pull us from our vehicles for no good reason at all. They yank at our clothing violently while they search us for contraband,” said Patrice Sulton, with the NAACP’s D.C. branch.
Iman Hadieh, who describes herself as white and Palestinian, says that last Monday she was talking with a bunch of young black friends outside a bar along 14th Street in Northwest when jump-outs — police in unmarked cars — suddenly drove up and searched everyone in the group but her.
“I watched as these Black Americans were stripped of their human and Constitutional rights right in front of God and everybody. This was an all-out assault on the Black male. … I’ve never seen anything like this except in war,” she said.
D.C. police are now testing body cameras that film interactions with the public from an officer’s point of view, but Philip Fornaci, with the Campaign Against Police Abuse, says his group plans to start what they call a “D.C. Cop Watch.”
“We encourage residents to film the police themselves, to turn the videotapes and cameras into tools of self-defense. We’re creating a D.C. Cop Watch website where people can post those videos,” he says.
“What I’d love to see is a [police] chief that’s willing to think outside the box. That’s willing to start thinking about, ‘how do we engage in relationships with the community that are positive, that build trust?,'” D.C. Councilmember David Grosso said at the hearing.
“My staff won’t let me tell you that I think we ought to get rid of guns in the city, and that police shouldn’t have guns, so I’m not going to tell you that,” Grosso added, to some applause from the audience.
The hearing will reconvene at 11:30 a.m. on Monday, Oct. 27 at the Wilson Building, where Police Chief Cathy Lanier and other members of the police department are scheduled to testify.
This “controversial” art work by Mary Englebreit inspired a Facebook campaign.
During dire times, humans seem to have a natural inclination toward the arts as a mechanism to relieve the pressure of feelings otherwise incommutable. Whether we’re referring to the practices of the ancients to perform dance and song for their gods in exchange for blessings, or the sorrow songs passionately sung by enslaved Black people to convey their shackled inner lives and yearnings for freedom, art has been the medium people have turned to time and time again to give substance to that which can’t be said.
However, the so-called ‘cultural elite’, those who live under the impression that legitimate art is only that which is hung in the galleries of lavish neighborhoods, where hundred dollar wines flow like water. The art of this privileged few tries its best to erase the lives of the majority, giving special apathy to those who live on the margins. This is art produced under the delusion of plush fantasy, built upon others’ backs.
Despite the efforts of the upper classes to discourage the production of art that speaks to radically different experiences, where various societal structures are unabashedly named as the forces that cause suffering and notions of taboo are simply done away with. These works of art, where various societal structures are unabashedly identified as forces that cause suffering, have been essential components to movements for social justice; from Harlem Renaissance artists boldly proclaiming that “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.” , to writers living during the Civil Rights/Black Power era, such as Lorraine Hansberry, who actively chose to depict Black people’s lives without relying upon misinformed notions of Black humanity to give their works zest. Arts, in all of its manifestations, have pulled movements for change in directions that would have otherwise been inaccessible, because works of art constructed with an abundance of integrity and technical skill can activate people’s imaginations in ways that speeches and lectures can’t.
To not give those artists committed to liberatory struggle as well as the production of quality works of art credit is detriment to cultivating a world where people are able to creatively live as their entire selves. Artists dedicated to these missions are extremely reliable for capturing experiences that would otherwise decay into vague recollections and dust. To deny the contributions of these artists is to erase skillful encapsulations of human reaction to social phenomena.
Beginning with the writers, a poem entitled not an elegy for Michael Brown, by award winning poet Danez Smith, begins with the line, “I am sick of writing this poem”, and goes on to question the masses commitment to justice for Brown and other slain Black youth. In this same literary vein, various DC-area poets contributed to the development of Dear Ferguson – A DC Community Poem, searingly read by internationally renowned DC based spoken word artist Pages Matam. Both poems add compelling perspectives and fresh language to the discourse surrounding the events continuing to erupt in Ferguson.
Wallace lying face down in front of the ‘LOVE’ sculpture, wearing a ripped, bloody T-shirt. A young person holding a sign reading ‘Call Us By Our Names’ stands next to his body.
In Philadelphia’s iconic LOVE park, two actors, Lee Edward Colston and Keith Wallace recreated Brown’s last moments right in front of the park’s eponymous ‘LOVE’ sculpture. By having Wallace wear a white T-shirt with holes resembling bloodied gunshot wounds torn into the back while lying face down and motionless for an hour, the two artists received mixed messages from spectators; from those in respectful awe of the artists’ creativity to those who degraded the pieces message to pure spectacle by having their portraits taken in front of Wallace’s still body.
Within the musical realm, a deluge of tracks have been released by artists in various genres and all levels of fame. Releasing an intensely emotional track alongside a very vulnerable statement on the nature of living as a Black man in America, rapper J. Cole’s track Be Free is a somber conveyance of a simple desire for a liberty most African-American’s will never experience in today’s world. Getting to the root of the Ferguson community’s, and by extension all Black people engaged in struggle against the state, frustration, Lauryn Hill unveiled the melancholy Black Rage. Tenderly singing lines such as, “Black rage is founded on two-thirds a person”, a reference to the Dred Scott Case of 1857, Hill centers the history of Black people being dehumanized, abused, and exploited, revealing the historical context of the Ferguson community’s rage.
Are We Really Free? Are We Really Equal?, 2014. Via Tumblr, drawsandcries.tumblr.com
In the city of Ferguson itself, a Before I Die wall was constructed by a group of teachers in hopes that the community would use the artpiece to support their efforts in imagining a future without the realities that led to Michael Brown’s death. And, in their calls for acts of solidarity, the people of Ferguson requested those capable of organizing street theatre performances join them on the ground, hinting at an abundance of artwork created, and in production, by Ferguson community members themselves.
On September 21, 2014 over 300,000 people swarmed Manhattan in mass protest against global climate change. With indigenous peoples and people of color leading the charge , the largest protest against climate change in history took place in New York City.
On September 23, Rising Tide DC (RTDC), the local chapter of the international, grassroots climate justice network Rising Tide North America, and the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance (NCNR), an organization dedicated to peace and nonviolent resistance, both staged acts of protests against climate change in solidarity with the march in NYC within the nation’s capitol.
