Gentrifying Blackness With Dr Brandi Summers

Welcome to 1919Radio’s Black Geographies podcast series! This 4-part Black Geographies podcast series brings together four authors in the emerging field of Black geographies to explore the conditions of Blackness across multiple spatial dimensions. The goal of this series is to bring radical ideas of race, space, and the politics of place out of academia and into our community and streets through an engaging and open access medium.

In the second episode of our Black Geographies podcast series, Mohamed Nuur sits down with guest Dr. Brandi Summers to discuss her 2019 book Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post Chocolate City. In this wide-ranging conversation she defines concepts such as gentrification and neoliberalism and analyzes how they relate to Blackness and Black people living across urban contexts from Washington DC to Toronto and beyond. We begin by exploring the history of the H-Street corridor in the post-civil rights era and the resulting impacts of gentrification. Near the end of the episode Dr. Summers discusses diversity and multiculturalism as tools used for the commodification and erasure of Blackness.

Title sequence credits:

Introduction clip: Angela Davis on Democracy Now!
Second clip: Sister Souljah response to Bill Clinton
Third clip: Kwame Ture on Organizaiton and mobilization Song: The Pharcyde - Runnin'

Transcript

1919Radio Intro audio clip 0:00

I never experienced anything like the conditions we are currently experiencing.

I am mentally spiritually physically, emotionally, intellectually, and academically developed and acutely aware of the condition of African people throughout the entire world.

We don't want fortune, we don’t want popularity we want power, power. And power comes only from the organized masses.

MN 0:48

Welcome to another episode of 1919 radio, and the second episode in our block geographies podcast series. My name is Mohammed and I'm your host. In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Brandi Summers, Assistant Professor of geography and global Metropolitan studies at UC Berkeley, and author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post Chocolate City. Her book examines how aesthetics and race converge to map Blackness in Washington DC, with a focus on the H Street Corridor. In this conversation, we define and explore gentrification, and neoliberalism, critiques of diversity, and the commodification of Blackness. I hope you enjoy the show.

MN 1:28

Let's begin by setting the scene for our listeners. What is H Street? And what is its significance to Washington DC at large? How has gentrification changed the H Street?

BS 1:38

So, H Street was or is a popular commercial district in Washington, DC. And so in 1968, April 4, after the April 4 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, there were uprisings that took place in DC. And H Street was one of the locations where there was some damage, and just really like frustrations had come to a point at which people were really angry, saddened, of course, about his assassination. But in particular, there was this focus on the conditions and ways that Black people in Washington DC, were encountering, you know, various forms of systemic racism in relationship to not only, you know, commercial elements, or at least commercial districts, but also, you know, interactions with police, and, you know, substandard housing and substandard education. So, there are these ways that places like H Street became really foundational to understanding Black life in DC.

BS 2:49

And so I came to the area, it was accidental. I didn't intend on doing research on H Street, it was just that I moved to DC planning to do work on a political organization. And I put my clothes at a dry cleaner on H Street, and I'm walking around and I'm like, "What is this place?". It was, it just you had to feel it. Like, you just had to kind of sense it. There was just, you could tell it was in transition. Right, so I am, like I said, I put my clothes in the dry cleaning. And I'm looking around. And H Street was one of those places where you started to see certain types of businesses that were catering to a wealthier population, I saw more than one dog spa, I saw lots of you know, cupcake bakeries, or expensive coffee shops, next to an Ethiopian restaurant that had been there for years, next to a ramen shop, right. And so you saw this eclectic mix. And so I started to read up on it, because I was like, I don't understand this place. And that's when I found out about its history after Dr. King's assassination. But then also, that's when I found out that it was a primary location for Black people to shop, especially when segregation was being enforced. It was the most populous commercial district outside of downtown and Black people couldn't shop downtown. So it was really simple to getting a lot of service needs met, whether it's, you know, getting your, your vacuum cleaner repaired or getting basic items from a drugstore. But it was a really important corridor for Black life. And so I wanted to kind of see what had happened for it to have a beer garden and a coffee shop, but then also a rundown grocery store that wasn't getting a lot of love and attention. So it's gentrification. And I know we're going to get into that a bit. But for me, I wanted to understand why it felt so strange. I'm seeing the changes happen. I'm seeing changes

BS 5:00

To the built environment, but there was a feeling there was an affective, kind of, there was a feeling I was getting about transition and wondering where this particular story of this, of this corridor was placed in DC's larger history.

MN 5:15

What is the chocolate city? And how does it become post chocolate?

BS 5:18

Ooh.

BS 5:20

So, you know, in the 70s, and especially this was after a long decade of the 1960s, where there are various uprisings all over the country, Parliament Funkadelic, produced a song called Chocolate Cities, and the first chocolate city was Washington, DC. And so in thinking about what a chocolate city is, it is this place that basically Black folks run. So, whether that's through politics, culture, music, art, sound, everything, right. And so there, it's the celebratory space. But it's also very much place driven, in terms of where Black people can be free. And, and again, imagine, so in the song, several cities remained. And a lot of those cities were those that had had experienced uprisings. But, But Washington was especially important because it had the largest Black population of a metropolitan area in the country, or at least the first, right. And there were these ways that the political establishment having them Black, again, this large Black population, generally, but also large, mid Black middle-class population existed, it seemed as though there was, opportunities for prosperity in Washington, DC, but at the same time, there were extreme forms of poverty.

BS 6:42

We saw various instances of segregation rearing its ugly head, still years later, in the ways, that there was Black poverty that was, you know, exponentially greater than that of white poverty. And so, you know, we start to see a shift in the US Census in 2010, when the Black population dipped below 50% of the overall population. And that's when, you know, people, scholars, started writing about Washington, DC's declining Black population. But identifying as like, latte, or cappuccino or swirl or something like, there was some food metaphor that was always used to talk about the infusion of white into this chocolate mix, right? And so, you know, I thought about it, and I was like, Yeah, I could, you get another food, a cookie or something to include, but to be honest with you, I chose post chocolate because it's still, chocolate is still associated. So I don't think that the Black has been fully extracted from DC. In fact, I think it's been attached in these really effective ways. So whether it's positive or negative, of course, is up for interpretation. But there are ways in which the Black population is leaving DC or being forced out, displaced from DC. But Blackness still remains and is very much central to its identity. And so it's that combination that there's, there's friction, but then there's also this contestation over space, that I think more so it's best explained as post chocolate where we don't know what's going to come next, I'm not going to presume that DC becomes white, just because Black folks are leaving. And so I wanted to have a different temporal relationship with the concept rather than going for, for a food, a desert or something.

MN 8:43

One interesting element from your book is when you state that a new dog spa, or a craft brewery doesn't necessarily generate more capital than a beauty salon or a local drugstore. Yet, the replacements of the former for the latter is still representative of gentrification in the age of neoliberalism. Can you define the neoliberalism for us? And what it is? What is its relationship to gentrification?

BS 9:06

Yeah, so you know, for me, I'm really more focused on neoliberalism working with gentrification and commodification and how those together shape urban landscapes, right. And so, you know, my focus in particular is how Blackness plays a part in these processes and the practices that are associated with them. So neoliberalism is this theory of political and economic practices that promote the deregulation of markets. Also the reduction of international trade barriers, the privatization of state companies and also thinking about the growth of private investment, but also, the with, the overall withdrawal of the state. And so that involves laws and policies that expand private markets and spaces that, that end up also shrinking public services. And so thinking about the, the neoliberal imaginary, it organizes not just like political, economic questions, but also the social, cultural and spatial practices that end up being mapped on to the laws of the market and the logic of capital. Right. And so if we think about gentrification, which, you know, it's a term that's thrown around constantly. And it's one that I, you know, people talk about the gentrification of something, right. But, but really, you know, as it relates, specifically in the, in the urban context and thinking about cities, it's best understood as the series of processes in which there's a variety of actors, institutions, and again, practices and top down policies of financial decisions that end up controlling the amount, the price and the quality of, let's say, housing and real estate. But also, it's this set of processes that's propelled by the state policies of like housing financialization, infrastructural investment, deregulation, and also privatization. So that's when you start to see, you know, this emphasis on, on mortgage securities and various media portrayals, but also where I focus real estate development, right, and these kind of commercial corridors.

BS 11:21

So it's not just about residential, real estate. And so that's when you also involve financial actors, like banks and landlords, venture capitalists, hedge funds, you know, renters, etc. So, so scholars really are at least as I was doing research, for first my dissertation, and then my book, they were talking about urban gentrification as this inevitable economic phenomenon, right. That, that gentrification is about exclusion, it's about the invisible hand of the market coming in and taking things that were previously you know, accessible, and making them too expensive for folks who were working class, not only residents but also consumers. So they really focus a lot on the unregulated market, as I mentioned earlier, and also displacement, right, and how there's this push pushing out of current residents, and renters, and landowners. So I, though, instead of emphasizing the devaluation and the revaluation of physical assets and communities within the context of gentrification through various public policies. And so, you know, if we think about urban renewal, for example, historically, or what James Baldwin called Negro removal, if we think about redlining, in the United States, and also various forms of uneven development, it congealed this, this seemingly natural link between Blackness, under development place and poverty, because in the United States, specifically, urban almost always signifies Black. So in that way, neoliberalism and gentrification really go hand in hand. But I'm saying that it's really important for us to also consider race, but specifically Blackness and how it plays a part in the, you know, leveraging of certainly capital, but also how various markets are able to operate seamlessly by commodifying Blackness.

MN 13:19

How does neoliberalism make Blackness, but not necessarily Black people cool?

BS 13:25

I mean, it's that commodification question, right. So one other point that's important from the book is that I'm not just talking about Black people and what Black people are doing but I'm actually talking about Blackness and the fluidity of Blackness and ways that Blackness can be extracted from Black people's bodies, in order to be used to raise capital and really to develop land. And so in that way, if there's this emphasis on this unregulated market, then that means you can take the Blackness of, again, some someone's actual body. You can take the Blackness of sound, different sounds, you can take the Blackness as it relates to art, you know, public art, etc and you can just smash it on something, and then you can make it hot and popular and cool. But you don't actually want lack people to consume that thing. Right. And so as it related to H Street, that was kind of the weirdness I was seeing. I was seeing Black people on the street walking down the street and stuff, but I wasn't necessarily seeing them engage actual businesses. I didn't see them really inside the restaurants. I didn't see them inside the businesses. Instead, it was as if there was this kind of mixture that looked right. It looked multicultural. It looked at diverse, but it wasn't fully saturated as it related to the actual corridor itself.

MN 14:43

What do you mean by neoliberal urbanism, and how does neoliberalism shape urban spatial processes in general?

BS 14:50

Yeah, so neoliberal urbanism is this form of urbanism, that subordinated to the dictates of capital. So, I've pulled from geographers, or actually, you know, it's funny urbanists, I'll say because they all kind of fit in different categories. But Neil Brenner and Nick, Theodore, and others who talk about this actually existing neoliberalism, which ends up involving interventions by the state, first to destroy institutional arrangement, but then also to create these new infrastructures for capital accumulation. And so what's happened with neoliberal urbanism is that cities have become kind of like these, these labs, for neoliberal policy experiments in urban entrepreneurship or, or marketization and also various forms of competition. And so there's this way that, you know, neoliberal urban restructuring produces these new spatial, social and power relations. And you see this through history and, and this kind of push for a global city and ways that cities all over the world are trying to be that, you know, global city, right. And so what it ends up doing is it redefines, and also rescales, what we understand as urban or what we understand as global, but then also targets the unwanted bodies, right? That includes Black people or other people of color, it involves, you know, getting rid of the homeless, right homelessness and the look of it. And so it's in that way, the targeting means you have to actually get rid of them in this kind of environment. So you see, ultimately, what happens with neoliberal economic and social processes in the city, is that you see this concentration of wealth, you know, in a few hands, that ends up reshaping these cities, globally.

MN 16:50

Your point about the experimentation on cities is, hits home with Toronto. We had Google propose a whole sidewalk labs, where they were going to take over an entire, like quadrants of the city and basically take data from everything, the sidewalks, from who's going where, and what's doing what, which, thankfully, was, ended up being canceled in Toronto after like a lot of pushback.

BS 17:13

Oh Great!

MN 17:13

Thank God.

MN 17:15

It is great. Yeah. My next question is, how do discourses of diversity and multiculturalism, which are very big in Canada, work to erase structural and systemic inequalities in urban settings, as well as displace and erase Black people, working people, immigrants in urban settings across North America?

BS 17:34

Okay, so you're asking how do the discourses actually work to erase them? In terms of them being successful? Or? Because I don't think they are.

MN 17:45

How do they, how do they try to erase Black people, working-class people, and immigrants?

BS 17:51

Oh, yes. Okay. So they do right. So there are ways that discourses on multiculturalism and diversity claim to make everything equal and make everyone equal and make it so that everyone has opportunities, right. And so the presumption is, there are benefits to having diversity. So what it does is it allows, especially in the context of cities, it allows the city essentially to forget historical, you know, forms of inequities that have existed, and so say instead, okay, let's start now, let's, again, let's just throw in a whole bunch of different colors. And then everyone, we can turn out these results that again, enable people to have equal access. But if you don't actually address historical wrongs, then you're not going to achieve those kinds of results. And that I imagine is certainly the case with that several indigenous populations in Canada, especially where this is a question over land and rights and acknowledging settler colonial kind of ties that still exist in the present. So as it relates specifically to Black people, there's a way that Blackness is embraced, but still, Black people can be pushed aside. And you'll see that and that's why these aesthetics end up being really important to my formulation, as I'm thinking about it because it's with this emphasis on neoliberal capital. It's just more important to find something that's profitable. And if Blackness is profitable, then that's all you need. Why do you need a Black person if you can just use their Blackness instead? And so it's that kind of work, and at least claims of multiculturalism and diversity that end up being usurped and kind of taken from Black people where it might have been based on some kind of political you know, organizing and ways to find pride and especially in a particular, leaving an era where Blackness was always already negative, you know, debased, devalued to find value in Blackness now, but again, not being managed by Black people is more so a slap in the face. Even if there's this, you know, desire to be given equitable, not more equal and diverse.

MN 20:18

Can you define your term Black aesthetic and placements for our listeners? How is Blackness aestheticized in urban spaces? And how does this dynamic play out in cities across North America?

BS 20:29

Yeah, um, so I define Black aesthetic and placement as really this mode of representing the realities of Blackness with representations of Blackness, right. So it's the, it's the shortest means to get a Black face, or get a Black body, a Black limb incorporated to indemnify someone from criticism. So it's kind of like, hey, I'm showing a Black face so I'm not racist, right. And so I introduced this as a way to think about how Blackness is aestheticized, but then also deployed to increase the desirability of a particular urban location. And so I'm really saying that it's the strategic incorporation of Blackness as this aesthetic that ends up being essential to gentrification as an urbanizing process. And you can see this clearly in, in various institutions that provide daily services. So I talked about this in the book related to like an experience that I had at Whole Foods. But there are also other ways that, you know, you think of food establishments, generally lots of restaurants, but ways that certain types of Black businesses or at least those that are attributed to Black people, in some cases, you just kind of have the city decide how Black at wants to be.

BS 21:51

So you can have only a certain number, but then if you get too many, it becomes excessive. And so just earlier to your, your question, where you mentioned, how I discussed, like, you know, barbershops and beauty shops, which have been traditionally owned by Black people, especially in Washington, DC versus these beer gardens and cupcake, places that they don't necessarily generate, generate more revenue. So, the logic doesn't meet out where I thought the whole point was profit. If that's the case, then you should keep barbershops and beauty shops. But the reality is that that's not the only logic that determines the direction, that's when you start to see this emphasis on creative, creative placemaking, or innovative businesses that aren't necessarily attributed to Black business. So you see it in multiple ways. And really, it's, it's the market determining what to do with the excesses of Blackness. Interesting.

MN 22:44

My next question is, in your book, you quote George Lipsitz, who says, to quote, "the lived experience of race has a spatial dimension, and the lived experience of space has a racial dimension". Can you elaborate on what that means for our listeners?

BS 22:59

Yeah, so what Lipsitz is talking, or at least how he discusses it is, is the spatialization of race and the racialization of space. Right. And so, in terms of the, the specialization of race, you know, it's, it's really this process by which racial inequalities have essentially been, been spatialized or, or implanted and maintained through geography. So just thinking again of the example of, of segregation, right, especially that which was federally mandated, where you have the actual people having to be located in particular areas, or at least a process by which the land has these implications by whom is there or forced to be there. So again, segregation is the best example of thinking about the spatialization of race, but also practices of redlining, etc. In terms of the racialization of space, it ends up being this process, in which racialized groups are identified, and then also given, you know, stereotypical characterizations. And they're coerced into the, into specific living conditions, where you see the social and spatial segregation, right. And so that's when you see the ghettoization of certain areas or even see this as it relates to ethnic themes, neighborhoods, that not the trendy ones now, but the ones previously were, let's say, a Chinatown was a location where Chinese and Chinese Americans were expected to remain right. And so again, it's before this commodified form of, of placemaking, occurred. But instead of this way, that, that geographies inherently have racial connotations, or at least meanings in terms of how people are able to, be able to or not able to come in and come out, but then also the ways that there's always geography mapped upon the bodies of actual individuals around the world honestly, not just in the United States.

MN 25:01

My next question touches back on what you are mentioned about the urban riots of the 1960s. And I wanted to draw a parallel to today. How do you see, how do you foresee the last summer's uprisings impacting and shaping gentrification and urban development's at large?

BS 25:19

Yeah.

BS 25:21

You know, I've been thinking about that a lot lately, and, and hopeful that there is some change. However, I've also written about ways that cities in particular, and city leaders, as well, as you know, national figures and state leaders are still leveraging these Black aesthetics to show they're I guess, that they're allies, or that they're, or if it's the case of African American leaders to show that they are down for the cause. The problem, of course, is that the rhetoric doesn't match the practice. And so they're saying a lot just in terms of Black Lives mattering, which ends up really being, you know, pretty low bar. Like to say that, I mean, I think it's important, absolutely that especially because Black Lives Matter has been really central and calling attention to various forms of state violence. However, it's really basic to say Black Lives Matter, it's like, or that Black Lives should matter. So beyond that, the expectation is that those who are in power really should be taking extra steps to demonstrate how Black lives matter and not just say that Black lives matter. And so I have used the example of Washington DC, and I've written about DC's mayor, mayor Bowser and ways that, you know, certainly she was the first to put a Black lives matter street mural..

MN 27:00

I was just about to mention, about that's like that. Basically, what you were saying about Blackness being aestheticized and Black people, Black movements being erased,

BS 27:09

That's right.

MN 27:10

At the same time.

BS 27:12

And, both literally and figuratively. So in this case, where she incurred, like there's, you know, she essentially got people to paint Black Lives Matter on the street. And this was in contestation with the former president, but then activists added defund the police after it, and lo and behold, that was erased, right. And so in this way, so, so not only was that portion of the updated mural, erased, but also there, she put in a request to increase the city's police budget by $45 million.

MN 27:46

Wow.

BS 27:47

And so, if you actually pay attention to what people want and need, or you consider the conditions under which Black people are leaving DC at ridiculous rates, then you address those problems, rather than, you know, hanging on to particular slogans. And so I think there is real potential in terms of the visibility of the protests and recognition in some ways, but I just don't think that's necessarily enough. So they, I do think that there's been important movement as it relates to the defund movement and in thinking about abolition seriously, where it's not just kind of like this radical rhetoric that people cast aside. But instead, people are now starting to figure out ways to do it. So I'm seeing this here, my hometown, Oakland, where the Oakland Unified School District was able to get rid of the police department that was essentially, you know, operating in their schools. And so that's a huge step um..

MN 28:45

It is.

BS 28:46

To, right. If even if it's incremental in one location, it's certainly with, with Oakland having such a fractured and horrible history and relationship to specifically the Oakland Police Department. And it's a really wonderful thing to experience. But it also shows the potential that it can be small steps, but they really have a lasting impact. So I'm hopeful about these, these uprisings. But I'm concerned, that once I saw like all these corporations start blacking out their things on social media and again, saying Black Lives Matter, or going to wealthy neighborhoods and seeing the Black Lives Matter signs when they know they don't have any Black neighbors. Like I, that doesn't do anything for me. And the ones that really get me are the ones they have their kids paint and stuff. And so it's just wild. And I'd love to see some traction instead of kind of these aesthetic, these gestures. basically.

MN 29:41

Facts, we need to take BLM from Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation Movements.

BS 29:45

Yes!

MN 29:51

My next question has to do with, I guess, resistance. So how can Black people, poor people, working class, and immigrant people resist the forces of gentrification in their own, like local contexts? Do you have any pointers or suggestions?

BS 30:09

Well, you know, I think part of it, you know, I've been talking to my students a lot about this and, and some of my colleagues, that oftentimes we rush to solutions before we have a good grasp of the problem or at least the conditions that we're living in. And so lately, I think there's been a ton of people who want to push through legislation or, you know, support certain policies that we think are going to make a difference. But I don't actually think we've really reckoned with how class matters significantly, as it relates specifically to Black people. But then also ways that certain folks are shielded from against state violence and other forms of violence that occur on a daily basis, and that are also structural. And so I think we need to account for that. And not to say, I'm not one who says, oh, race is more I mean, on class is more important than race, or I'm not actually making that claim. But I do want us to reckon with the ways that class has this fundamental impact on how we not only see ourselves, but we'll be able to come up with solutions.

BS: 31:16

As I've been reading, actually lately, newsletters from the 1960s in Oakland, and one in particular, is focused on West Oakland, which was the Blackest region of Oakland, and especially during the war, the First and Second World War. It became a Black space and essentially, was segregated as such. And so in reading about West Oakland, and understanding activists who are in West Oakland, they were really fed up with the Black middle class, because they were saying you all aren't living this life. We don't have running water, we don't have, you know, adequate, we have terrible relationships with the cops. We don't have, you know, adequate spaces for our children to play, we live in overcrowded and, neighborhoods and blocks. And so, to not, and at the same time, it was the Black middle class who were instrumental in bringing the model cities programs and other urban redevelop, urban redevelopment renewal programs that essentially negatively impacted the Black poor. So if we're going to move forward, I think it's really important, again, that we reckon with that, and decide that we're going to essentially elevate and put poverty, and think about homelessness and the crises that occur because of those, and how that feeds into the criminal justice system, how that feeds into incarceration, how that feeds into prisonized landscapes before we start doing this, you know, wide scale, you know, we need policies that can help. Just basically get Juneteenth as a holiday or policies that, you know, instituted affirmative action alone or policies that, you know, try to reform police departments when we know they can't be reformed, and that they're still going to target the Black poor.

BS: 33:06

So I think it's important for us to really kind of understand the conditions first, before we can actually leverage important policies or answers to the, to the questions.

MN 33:17

What is the practice of placemaking? And how can Black people as well as poor immigrant and working class people use placemaking to reclaim urban settings?

BS 33:27

Yeah, so I'm, in the book, I'm critical of placemaking but a certain kind. I'm critical of like, the urban planning, creative placemaking strategies, which are supposed to be used to make people feel, feel more connected to their neighborhoods, or feel like they have more power in determining how they live and where they live, right. So what ends up happening is, you know, if the neighborhood that, if the land value has gone up, and the price of homes has gone up, and you know, people are being evicted, because they can't pay the rent that's just been, you know, elevated. Then all you're getting are upper middle class folks determining how the place should look. So the placemaking is made for people that look like them or have the same amount of money as them. And so it doesn't end up dismantling anything, it doesn't end up helping anyone who, who was there previously, or who might have issues as it relates to mobility in that space. And so I do think, though, there are forms of placemaking that disrupt that. That it's not just about landscape, in terms of like, like landscape architecture, it's not about making sure there's pretty flowers everywhere, or making sure there's space for farmers market. But instead, it's creating an opportunity, honestly, as I see it for Black people to just be and be in place.

BS 34:54

And so I'm really supportive of just that basic notion of Black folks just being able to hang out like, and not have it be called loitering. Where Black folks can or just hang in or just be out, right?

MN 35:08

Reclaim the corner...

BS 35:09

Right? Seriously! And so in this way where you're not presumed, where you're not criminalized or you're not presumed to be this violent figure or that your drug dealers or something like that. I, I've written about and also kind of teach my students about kind of sightlines right, and ways that in parks, they will plant trees in certain neighborhoods so that there are sightlines, so you can see if there's any criminal activity taking place, right. And so to think that you are shaping the environment, you're planting trees to make sure there aren't bad apples out there selling drugs and doing all kinds of nefarious things. It's kind of ridiculous. But they're able to use it as a way to say, well, we're beautifying this space. Oh, but yes, we do want to make sure it's safe. So, I, the placemaking component, I think it needs to be more basic than that. It is just, yes, reclaim the corner, just being able to hang out and really establish place by just being there. That is literally the basic thing that I want. I don't need it to be, you know, stone this and like a waterfall and all the other ways that I think creative placemaking kind of calls on or, you know, happy colors and stuff like that.

MN 36:22

Yeah. No, that's so crucial. We want to reclaim the corner and hang out on the block.

BS 36:28

Right, reclaim the block,

MN 36:29

How have the work of Black geographers such as Catherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods influenced your analysis? And how have you used the Black geographic lens in your book?

BS 36:39

Well, greatly. So, you know, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, part of this project started off as my dissertation. And you know, I, my PhD is in sociology. And so I was really trying to understand neoliberalism and Blackness. And I was looking at it, as it related to spaces and bodies. And so the body component was looking at high fashion imagery. But in terms of spaces, I was looking at gentrification, specifically in Washington, DC. So that was kind of the nexus of the project, the book project. So once I started writing the book and adding on to, to make a full book, that was when I dipped into geography, and really discovered the work of both Clyde Woods and, and Catherine McKittrick, and to be honest with you, it blew my mind. I didn't know I could think like that. I didn't know how much I was dancing around these spatial questions but couldn't find a way in through sociology.

BS: 37:48

So certainly, there's been a spatial turn in a variety of disciplines history, you know, even in English and other areas. But as it relates to geography, there was a different relationship that geographers and specifically Black geographers have to understanding various landscapes. And so why that mattered to me was, I could explicate what I saw, right. And so, when I know but I see Black people, but I feel differently in a particular space. It was, it was Catherine McKittrick talking about Black geographies that really helped me, specifically in demonic ground, that helped me articulate kind of what I was seeing and how to describe it. And so, their volume, their edited volume, especially the their introduction that they wrote together, was really again, what blew my mind, is they're talking about on Hurricane Katrina, and they were talking about elements of the unknown. So, Black geographies generally, I mean, I think people are still talking about it as if it's new. But I think what's been wonderful about Black geographic imaginaries is that we can look to the past and see where this work was already being done. It just may not have been named as such. And so, as I think about Black geographies with, with my students a lot, especially my grad students, I asked them to not necessarily see Black geographies as disciplinary, like as a discipline, but this, as a metric, or as a method through which we understand various, not only circumstances but disciplines. So what if you took Black geographies to I mean, we're seeing this in Black Studies. But what if you took it to anthropology? What if you took it to, you know, the classics, philosophy? What could Black geographies do to an analysis within those disciplinary boundaries? And I think it really could illuminate how important the spatial context is, and understanding spatial reproduction and understanding various practices that have so much to do with racialization but specifically, our concern of Blackness. So I still, you know, it's hard to pinpoint all the time. What is Black geographies? I think a lot of people struggle with, with coming up with a definition.

MN: 40:09

So do I.

BS: 40:10

Right? Yeah. I mean, I mean, I still kind of go back and forth in terms of how I'm not only thinking about it, but I'm certainly care about how I'm thinking with it, right, where it's always with me in terms of how I'm looking at different cities, or even, you know, rural contexts or understanding still urban sprawl. You know, even looking historically, if I still, you know, look at, use a Black geographic lens to think about, you know, suburbanization or economic restructuring in various ways. It's important to me, I'm still in my teaching, and it's still in my writing that's going on currently.

MN 40:46

My last question is do you have any books, or readings that you would suggest for our listeners?

BS 40: 53

So, you've already, I mean as I'm looking at my bookshelf. So, I already mentioned Catherine McKittrick in Demonic Grounds, but then also Clyde Woods Developed Arrested. If people, you know, I think, I’m also a fan of Saidiya Hartman in Lose Your Mother. But my favorite is Scenes of Subjection. I would also say Savannah Shange’s Progressive Dystopia. I will also, I mean, there’s so many. You already probably, Simone Brown’s book I’m sure you’ve mentioned before. Ruth Gilmore’s Golden Gulag, like there’s, you know there’s so many, I’m like, you see I’m looking. I’m a big Bell Hooks fan too so Black Looks. I think that I mean Bell Hooks is not a geographer, but I think she really is a geographer. Yeah, that’s a good start, right?