19 1 / 2013
Series of Brooklyn Billboards Put Racial Inequity on Display
Billboards are everywhere in New York City. They’re on subway trains and in stations, and on top of and inside taxis. But few, if any, have been anything like a series of anonymous billboards that have popped up on bus shelters in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. They’re not selling anything but a delcaration: that racism still exists.
That’s also the name of the appropriately titled campaign. At least half a dozen billboard sites have sprung up around the neighborhood since August, with each month dedicated to highlighting racial disparities that impact black people in America. So far, the billboards have touched on topics ranging from the entertainment industry, education, fast food, smoking, policing, and black wealth. Each month’s billboard is also accompanied by an detailed post on Tumblr that provides background information, news articles, studies, charts, and statistics to back up each claim.
A brief statement on the Tumblr page says, in part, that “RISE is a proejct designed to illuminate some of the ways in which racism operates in this country.” But who’s behind the project remains a mystery.
For the time being, the project seems dedicated to its anonymity. Both the Tumblr page and the billboards themselves are devoid of any contact information. Similarly, the private advertising company that’s contracted by New York City’s transit agency to host advertisments and billboards said that it does not give out information about who paid for the advertisements.
Even local activists who spend their time dedicated to working on racial justice issues can’t figure out who’s behind the billboards. Nonetheless, they’re intrigued by the campaign. This month’s billboard is dedicated to Stop-and-Frisk, the controversial NYPD tactic that’s drawn national criticism for its disproportionate impact on black and Latino men. The billboard’s provactive text reads, “Don’t want to get stopped by the NYPD? Stop being black.” On the heels of New York City’s 2013 mayoral race and the prominent role that critics of Stop-and-Frisk have taken in city politics, the billboards have become a meaningful part of local discussion.
It’s no accident that of all of New York City’s neighborhoods, the billboards have targeted this one. A historically black neighborhood, Bed-Stuy has become one of the most contested spaces in New York City. A 2012 study from the Fordham Institute found that Brooklyn is home to 25 of the country’s most rapidly gentrifying zip codes. That’s created a stark contrast between those in the neighborhood who have more upward social and economic mobility than others. Several high profile media accounts have recently noted Bed Stuy’s so-called “hip” transformation and “resurgence”, but the borough’s medium per capita income in 2009 was just $23,000, which was $10,000 below the national average.
The content of the billboard’s messaging may not exactly be news for most residents, but the presentation has nonetheless been powerful.
(via newwavefeminism)
12 1 / 2013
When eating organic was totally uncool
Before hipsters got rooftop gards, my poor, refugee family ate that way because we had to. And we were ashamed
by Pha Lo
To me, the organic food movement has become dizzyingly, surreally chic. Farmers have become rock stars; the most exclusive restaurants name-check them so much you can almost see dirt on the menu. But before organic produce exploded into a $25 billion industry, before city gardening became cool, I grew up in a Hmong refugee community, living the urban organic lifestyle not because it was fashionable, but because we were poor. I couldn’t wait to leave it behind.
I grew up in Del Paso Heights, a mixed-race inner city of Sacramento, Calif. — the kind of neighborhood that had just two grocery stores between endless fast-food and liquor shops, and where we all paid for our groceries with food stamps. It was where we grew organic food and raised chickens in our backyards to survive. And where we did it in secrecy.
Like most Hmong in the United States, our community was from Laos, transplanted here after an alliance with the CIA turned our isolated tribe of farmers into mercenaries — a failed secret war against the Communist Vietnamese that left Hmong as the targets of ethnic cleansing. Lifelong farmers-turned-international refugees, the older generation was ill-prepared to thrive in modern America. They settled into inner cities where many turned to social services as safety nets.
I remember watching grown-ups lose their identities and self-worth, slip into depression and cycles of poverty, illness and suicide. These were clan leaders who once commanded the respect of entire villages, tough guerrilla soldiers trained by the CIA — like my father — and proud providers who had, without writing, committed to memory centuries of the best farming practices. And they were humbled, receiving welfare and food stamps because there was no opportunity then in urban America for their main skill. Still, they farmed in the city for two necessities: food and a wistful connection to the old way of life.
We grew crops in every plot of soil that hinted of fertility — parking lots, front lawns, even inside discarded paint buckets, which made terrific homes for lemongrass and chili peppers. When I was in elementary school, the families in our apartment building worked a farm just outside of Sacramento. Every person, every age, had a job. Meals were planned around what we gathered: We scraped fresh cucumbers, serving them with sugar over ice on hot summer days; we pounded the signature Hmong mix of hand-picked peppers, cilantro, green onions and lime in a mortar and served it as a dip for meat and sticky rice. I remember loving our imperfectly shaped cucumbers because I got to watch each one grow into its own unique shape and thought they all had more character than the “beautiful” ones wrapped in plastic at the grocery store. And I loved mustard greens, which grew in abundance once a year but could be pickled for year-round consumption.
We bartered with each other. We raised chickens in the backyard, letting them out to roam and feeding them by hand. We didn’t have a label for this back then, though now I suppose people call it “free-range,” and it costs more. We slaughtered our own hens, sometimes with rituals honoring the sacrifice of the animal’s life.
With the costs of vegetables offset by our gardens, all the families pitched in to buy a pig or cow from the closest farmer, dividing the meat. This way, we could also afford to buy rice.
But we had to keep our locavore tendencies secret. America’s food rules, which seemed to us to go against nature, left us fearful of punishment. At the time, exactly one person from our clan had attended an American college and became our cultural broker, translating to shamans the world of Western medicine, and to lifelong hunters and fishermen the rules of hunting and fishing. What license was needed for what, how many of what thing could be caught during which season, if you could take fruit from a tree depending on which side of a fence it hung. All of it was too complicated to keep straight, and so it felt safer to keep our food producing regimens to ourselves. I can’t remember how many times my father built, tore down and rebuilt the chicken coop, afraid that neighbors who heard crowing would report us.
“Don’t tell the Americans,” my mother would always say, and, eventually, as I grew into adolescence, I couldn’t agree more. I was afraid of being judged.
My mother sprinkled only fresh-cut grass in her garden, swearing by its ability to grow bigger and tastier vegetables. She often crossed dangerous lanes of traffic to get to a pile of lawn clippings. My sisters and I would jump out of the car to bag the grass, and we did it with the speed of a NASCAR pit crew, terrified of being seen by friends.
The parking lot of our neighborhood Kmart was a regular pickup spot for lawn clippings. In my teens, when merely being accused of shopping at Kmart was an epic embarrassment, you can imagine the horror I felt about being spotted stealing grass from its parking lot. “If anyone sees me, MY LIFE IS OVER!” I’d say. Unfortunately, dramatic teenage declarations of “life being over” didn’t fly in Hmong households, not when there would always be someone around to remind you of the time he narrowly escaped the death camps.
As the adolescent me tried to find her groove, navigating deeper into the treacherous social maze of an American high school, I tried to talk my mother out of picking cilantro and scallions from her garden, cleaning and separating and selling them for 50 cents a bunch at a local Hmong store. It never made her more than $20 a week, but she didn’t care. She was obsessed with the idea of doing something she knew how to do, something that could earn money.
My family searched for new places to grow food while I became increasingly afraid that outsiders would find out we lived in a replica Hmong village, built to resemble what the older generation knew as “home.” Then one day, I was outed by a classmate as a food stamp user as I stood in the collection line to count money for my mother. That was the day that I decided I hated everything about the way we got food — from the paint-bucket chili peppers to the communal pig, cut up in pieces, ready to be bagged and shared. I wanted to run away from this mess. I wanted to be one of the cool kids. I would feed myself like they do.
Now, as an adult, I don’t have a garden. Years after I finished college and was well into the working world, long after credit cards made checks obsolete at the grocery store, I still insisted on writing checks to pay for my brand-name groceries. The defiant child food stamp user in me still needs the validation that comes from putting pen to paper and declaring, in writing, that I earned the right to take this food home.
But who’d know that, just as I finally shed a former life of organic necessity, my mother would be the hip one? Now I go to the market and hear people boasting about the eggs in their backyards, or how much their garden looks like the one on the White House lawn. My best friend, also a former Hmong child gardener, laughs with me about collecting lawn clippings. If only we had had cool recyclable cloth bags with eco-friendly slogans, we joke. If only we could be heroic, claiming to be launching a food revolution. But for us, there was no room to think about glamour. That life just felt backward.
I imagine now how many “I told you so’s” my mother would impart on me if she could grasp the enormousness of today’s food movement: Pesticide-free produce, hand-fed chickens, cuisines boasting minimal ingredients all represent billions of dollars to be made. And, irony of ironies, now people’s food stamps can’t even cover the costs of organic and local produce at our markets.
But I stood recently at a popular farmers’ market in San Francisco, where I now live and where my relatives have a vegetable stall. Surrounded by a flurry of patrons enthusiastic about locally grown food, I felt … proud. Proud that Hmong farmers owned their own stalls, their tradition of necessity now trendy and profitable. That day, my uncle gave me a bag of cucumbers and tomatoes from his stall. He said he had heard all about my schooling and my travels, and that he was proud I had made it. But as I looked at my bag and at all the customers flocking to his stall, I couldn’t help thinking he was making it in his own right.
Pha Lo is a freelance writer/nutrition educator and teaches food budgeting skills to low-income parents.
(via beautyinthebr0ken)
02 12 / 2012
new wave feminism: Shhh. Your privilege is showing
There are people without cars.
There are people without cars who only have bodegas and Korean min marts in their neighborhood with limited options.
There are people who don’t make very much money and have to go hard with budgeting their food money.
So shut the fuck up with…
07 8 / 2012
Example: All the “street art,” commissioned by Open Walls Baltimore (sponsored by PNC Bank), being strategically placed in areas undergoing gentrification so the white yuppies/punx/MICA students from suburbia can exist in a hipster bubble and pretend they’re living somewhere dangerous while they displace everyone and drive up rent.
Destroy all artists/hipsters/future yuppies.
Fuck street art.
If I get around to it sometime this week I think I’ll try to write something longer addressing how problematic, counter-revolutionary, and frankly, liberal, statements such as “Destroy all artists” and “Fuck street art” are. For now, however, I just want to say I’m really fucking tired of people equating artists with yuppies. Yes, some artists are yuppies but you cannot just negate the fact that art objects are still just commodities within the dictatorship of Capital. Also, equating all artists with yuppies only works as an erasure of the entire history of art which is inseparable from the entire history of human existence. Fuck PNC and all banks for that matter. But with the commodification of street art, shit like this is going to happen. The question that arises though, with art projects like this would you rather have a message of subversion against capitalism (and the gentrification created by the capitalist system) planted by the artist with this commodity of gentrification, or just another fucking boring mural?
Destroy all yuppies.
Destroy all banks.
Destroy capitalism.
Art, however, is and always will be inseparable from human existence.
Capitalism contains within it the seeds of it’s own destruction. The same theory applies to the art market as it does with all industries.
ok this is a little better but lol @ Tru Art being *~subversion~* of capital
i mean good point w/ all art (object or not) being “just commodities within the dictatorship of capital”
OP is dumb as heck but graffiti (“street art” being only a cultural position migration of the form) regardless of the whatever the artists program is, is always a reactionary aesthetic form, if only because of the medium
basically lefties need to quit with the fetishism of the idea and finally recognize that both program and aesthetic are important for ~~~revolutionary art~~~
spacebaw knows more about politicized aesthetics than like 99% of the people on Tumblr/that I’ve ever met
(Source: ourtropes, via le-kif-kif)
23 7 / 2012
Los Angeles remains homelessness capital of the US
July 24, 2012Los Angeles is known for Hollywood and glamorous celebrities, but it is also a city where many live in poverty and suffer from hunger.
Even if Southern California is home to several billionaires, the poverty rate in LA County is among the highest in the nation and the unemployment rate remains in the double digits, making Los Angeles the capital of glitz and homelessness.
From exotic cars to extravagant fashion, the rich and famous give Los Angeles a reputation of opulent prosperity, but just around the corner from this glamour is the Los Angeles of utter despair.
On Skid Row the homeless live in third world conditions and things they say are only getting worse.
“They feel like there is no hope for them. They’re afraid of the police,” said Mary Czrepuszko, a homeless Los Angeles resident.
Los Angeles remains the homeless capital of the US with more than 51-thousand people living in shelters, cars or in homeless encampments.
“Staying in a shelter, getting bit every day. Having scars and scratching, it’s really bad. I would rather just be on the street,” said Czrepuszko, who became homeless after losing her job as a nursing assistant.
While Mary Czrepuszko and her neighbors sleep on tattered blankets, just a short drive away are some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in America.
In this city of extremes, the celebrities and the super-rich enjoy pampered living on palatial, hillside mansions. Huge houses in exclusive neighborhoods give Los Angeles an image of glitz and glamour. Behind high security fences lay multi-million dollar homes with luxuries like Olympic size pools and a staff of maids.
The wealthiest rest safely behind their elegant walls, while some of the city’s poorest face another long night next to a warehouse wall.
A lavish mansion costing more than $50 million in Beverly Hills is unthinkable for most people in a city where 1 in 5 children live in poverty.
“It was 2 in the morning and me and my kids were sleeping on the bus stop. That was the first time we ever had to sleep on the bus stop,” said Antoine Hudspedth, a Los Angeles homeless resident.
After the real estate crash, Hudspeth lost his job as a mortgage loan officer and became disabled. Now he struggles to feed his wife and their three sets of twins.
“I don’t want to see them sleeping on the streets. I can’t have that,” said Hudspeth.
While Hudspeth and his family line-up for a sandwich, Los Angeles’ wealthy dine in pricey gourmet restaurants and inside the massive dining rooms of their sprawling estates
The startling gap between the haves and have-nots is seen in the growing number of families who cannot afford food and housing.
“We’ve had families who have stayed with us for over two years. Yes, that’s sad, but we’re still trying our best to give them the best we can give them and connect them with resources,” said Kitty Davis Walker from Union Rescue Mission Los Angeles.
As financial austerity looms, those resources are shrinking.
It will be those in lines for the soup kitchens, not the grass fed beef and organic arugula, who will feel the pinch of California’s belt tightening.
In this economic crisis, the rich in Los Angeles flaunt their high end lifestyle, while more families fall into poverty, making it likely the city will remain a place of fame and fortune but also of great financial anguish.
17 7 / 2012
"This feeling of being “pushed out” of the city usually manifests itself in the controversial term, “gentrification.” But it’s hard for me to worry about gentrification when you can literally buy a home for $10,000. We have a long, long, long, long, long way to go before the poor are pushed out of the city limits by rising prices. Now will they be displaced from one neighborhood and into another? Yes. I realize that this sucks. And yes, I realize that I have no idea how much it sucks to be pushed to move out of your home by economic forces. But remember, you can buy a home for $5,000-$10,000. You might have to move out of one neighborhood, but you’ll get to move to another one not far away. And still well within the city limits. And, in fact, Detroit is 140 square miles. 90 percent of it will not be affected by gentrification for 10-20 years, even if we’re being optimistic."
Jerry Mangona: Gentrification: Views From Both Sides of the Street
Reading this article was really really difficult. The entire premise of it is based on the idea that “gentrification” is about *feelings* and “misunderstandings” rather than very real resource hoarding and withdrawals.
These paragraphs are probably the most problematic point in a really problematic article—the idea that gentrification isn’t *that* bad because folks who are ‘shoved out’ can just buy another house!
I’m going to leave the most obvious point alone—that to many many people, even a house that is “only” $5000-10,000 is often prohibitively expensive (which is why so many people are renting even when houses are “only” that much), and I’m going to instead focus on the point this article begins with—the story about how exciting it is to see people making over $100,000 a year organizing community potlucks and get togethers.
It takes a stable strong community for community building projects of any sort to happen. Parents don’t generally leave their children with some total stranger down the street who just moved in two weeks ago—and conversely, what are parents supposed to do when the person they’ve trusted enough to leave their child with leaves after three months because they can’t afford their house payment any longer?
Why is it ok to ask the people who need community the most and who use community building as a way to address actual problems in their communities (vandalism, youth violence, schools shutting down, etc) to uproot (that is: destroy) their community integrity to make Detroit “nicer” for people who, through tax breaks, investments, incentives, city policies, and oh, those nice hundred thousand dollar paychecks, can make Detroit “nicer” all by themselves?
The casual treatment by the OP of poor people’s need for stable dedicated community is astonishing, but sadly, not uncommon. As a good friend and local activist pointed out, it’s just taken for granted in ALL areas of heavy gentrification that poor people have nothing of value to offer a city—that they don’t have community driven agendas that actively make those cities “nicer.”
Gentrification is not about “feelings” or “not liking change”—it’s about an actual competition for resources. Lifetime Detroiters are not suspicious of “the suits” (to draw on OP’s example) because “the suits” were too arrogant or blew smoke from over priced cigars in their faces.
It is because the resources different neighborhoods need to survive as those thriving communities that the OP loves so much have been literally taken from them and given to people making a hundred thousand a year. This *causes* bad blood—but the bad blood is not the problem. The taking the resources is. The casual indifference of the integrity and value of poor communities is. Safe, well resourced, stable communities is a human right *even for poor people* .
Not something to be sold to the highest bidder.
(via theaboveground)
This point:
Demonstrate a willingness to participate in the city’s improvement rather than fight it at every turn. You know what’s been great? Seeing community involvement at Detroit Works. It shows that you genuinely care and are more concerned with finding solutions that soothing egos. Let’s put problem-solving over pride… something Detroit (and Detroiters) are not always known for doing.
Is just absolutely stunning to me. This person is talking about the same people who are actively organizing against school closures, heavy industry pollution, and home foreclosures among other massive problems, and who are organizing to create new media economies, youth led movements, food structures that are grounded in justice, health systems that are affordable for poor people…and so so so many other things.
It’s absolutely a sign of the OP’s ignorance that he doesn’t know these things. That he doesn’t know how much of these actions are grounded in the communities that he’s so casual about uprooting.
(via mmmightymightypeople)
Clearly OP and similar folks have never:
1. Tried to live without a car as the only means of transport and how much of life depends on being in the magic triangle of commuting that gives you groceries, work, and access to your kids’ schools/daycare.
2. Tried to get an apartment when you don’t have good credit
3. Had to have family, friends, or neighbors live close by in order to help take care of children, sick, or elderly family
Beyond all that, the housing discrimination. Loan discrimination. This is true both in the downward spiral of Black owned businesses and the ways in which they do not recover from these uprooting.
But let’s also talk about policing. How gentrification doesn’t involve making the neighborhood safer - it involves “increased police presence” which always translates to harassing the people who have lived there for decades in favor of the people who are suddenly moving.
Let’s talk about how cities only redevelop WHEN the plan is to move out the original folks - all the taxes these people paid didn’t go into their communities- it was shunted elsewhere to redevelop some OTHER part of the city - now that the land is cheap enough push these folks out so they can do the same thing again.
(via bankuei)
As someone who had to leave the city I loved and called a home (Brooklyn, NY) due to price gouging and gentrification, I have to say that OP has absolutely no fucking clue what it is like to be put in that kind of situation. I hope they never do, frankly.
I had to give up everything I knew - my friends, my father, and my home - because we just couldn’t keep up with increasing rents and how rapidly the neighborhoods (Park Slope, especially) were/are changing to accommodate all of the out-of-towners coming in.
And no, in certain cities (Brooklyn, for example), sorry - you can’t buy a home for that amount of money. What do you do when you’re a local and you can’t even afford the $1,200 rent for a basic studio/ one bedroom apartment?
I know you can make the argument that one can just choose to live the city, that NYC is expensive anyway, etc etc. Doesn’t matter. It was still affordable to live where I lived - Park Slope and Sunset Park - because it was a locals only/ ‘my family has lived here for generations’ kind of deal. It’s my fucking home. I shouldn’t have had to have left because of this bullshit. But I had to.
‘We have a long way to go’, my ass. It’s been happening for decades.
(via smelltheashes)
I’m not going to put words in the mouth of smelltheashes—but i just wanted to point back to the OP and how he says “it sucks” and makes the injustice of gentrification about “feelings”—and i just want to say that I know several people who have been or are getting priced out of midtown and/or got foreclosed on due to predatory lending—and what they talk about is not “feelings”—but *trauma*. “being nicer” to people you are actively traumatizing—a kinder and gentler trauma experience—is just so unbelievably offensive. i can not express how angry the OP makes me.
(via mmmightymightypeople)
(via ethiopienne)
03 6 / 2012
upwardly mobile folks and los angeles inequality
So I’m at a small restaurant spot in the Arts District in downtown Los Angeles just several blocks from the detention center on Alameda, just a couple blocks from Skid Row, and very close to Boyle Heights where poverty remains the norm.
Urth Cafe is full of upwardly mobile and professional folks who (coincidentally) are Asian and White American. The place is just 2 blocks away from Alameda where homeless folks walk along and find their next refuge. Urth Cafe is up against some lofts where the rent is indeed expensive. Now, my problem isn’t with people being successful and enjoying a $15 panini.
My questions arise from as to why the clientelé and demographics of the customers are the OPPOSITE of who the workers are. The workers are mostly brown skinned Latin@s and Black Americans. There seems to be an Asian manager and one white worker. The arrive in their new hatchbacks and mini-coopers. The police regularly visit for their discounted food.
Now the rant - this is what I get mad at people who earn money and run away into an urban spot and think they’re somehow “trendsetting” or “breaking new barriers”. Most of these folks are probably liberals - but why do they love to see LAPD arrive and stay for coffee. Because they want to be protected, because they know deep down inside unless a Latina/o or Black person is not wearing an apron and serving them their lattè - they look at that person of color as threatening or “other” person who’s here.
Yeah there are some Black folks and Latina/os here, but they prob got money and if they don’t then their probably not coming here on a weekly basis. I just hate how these so called “liberal” say they are apart of the 99%, say they want equality, but if you don’t look like you got money or act like the 1% with a 99% front, THEN YOU’RE TREATED LIKE AN OUTSIDER.
This is why I really believe that mainstream Democrats and “liberals” are just like Malcolm X talked about. People who are progressives on paper, but when it comes down to sharing the land/wealth/lending out a hand - “oh i don’t believe in that” - fuck liberals.
18 3 / 2012
Wheatpaste by Tatiana Von Der Schulenburg from 2007 on 940 E. 2nd St. building (Arts District - Downtown Los Angeles)
P.S. Here’s a link to a feature article in the Downtown News that published on May 8, 2006 about her previous art installation incorporating ties, which preceded and inspired her subsequent “Gentrification” wheatpaste project.
(Source: downtownmuse)
