Black Safety: Threats of Gentrification to Practices of Freedom in DC's Go-Go Music and North Philadelphia's Fletcher Street Riding Club.

• Author: Amin, Enkeshi Thom El-

IN FEBRUARY 3014, SPIKE LEE ATTENDED PRATT INSTITUTE TO CELebrate and participate in a Black History Month event. During the event, Lee received a question from a member of the audience. The audience member asked, "You mentioned gentrification with some slightly negative connotations, and I wondered if you'd ever looked at it from the other side? Which is that, if your family was still in that $40,000 home that's now worth $3.5M to $4M..." (Michael & Bramley 2014). Before the audience member could finish their question, Lee cut them off, saying "let me just kill you right now" and engaging in a roughly twelve-minute response on the multiple practices of harm gentrification imposes on Black and Latinx communities in New York. In addition to critiquing the city's failure to provide decent public schools, consistent garbage collection, and better facilities for residents until the "influx of white New Yorkers," Lee also critiqued the way gentrification erases not only the presence of Black and Latinx people but also their cultures and cultural institutions in their communities.

Comparing the influx of white New Yorkers into Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Harlem, and the South Bronx to the so-called discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus in 1492 and the subsequent genocide and erasure of people and culture, Lee passionately explained:

Then comes the motherfuckin' Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can't discover this! We been here. You just can't come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherfuckin' African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can't do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father's a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherfuckin'-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin' people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He's not--he doesn't even play electric bass! It's acoustic! We bought the motherfuckin' house in nineteen-sixty-motherfuckin'-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the fuck outta here! (Michael & Bramley 2014)

Lee's response to the audience member's questions demonstrates the multiple ways that gentrification is harmful to working-class Black and Latinx communities and performs the exhaustive work of having to explain how these racialized practices are grounded in history and the contemporary moment. It shows, in particular, how gentrification poses a threat to Black culture. For example, the influx of white people and the power of real estate developers in Crown Heights, South Bronx, Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant has resulted in the renaming of Black and Latinx spaces such as SpaHa for Harlem and East Williamsburg for Bushwick. Further, the invasion of white people has also aided in the increased criminalization of Black and Latinx bodies. When Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, residents wanted to celebrate his life in Fort Greene Park but were unable to due to opposition from white residents. According to Lee, "all of a sudden the white people in Fort Greene said, 'Wait a minute! We can't have Black people having a party for Michael Jackson to celebrate his life. Who's coming to the neighborhood? They're gonna leave lots of garbage'" (Michael & Bramley 2014). Inherent to the question "who is coming?" and the statement "they're going to leave trash" are the many ways that Black bodies are criminalized, policed, and essentially viewed as threats in white spaces and by white people and how distinctively this relates to place, culture, and gentrification.

The erasure and erosion of Black and Latinx people and culture in the inner city is not specific to New York. In Atlanta, the Old Fourth Ward, Dr. Martin Luther King's childhood neighborhood and one of the most historic Black neighborhoods in Atlanta, is increasingly unaffordable for Black residents who have long inhabited the area (Sims 2019, Suggs 2019). Houston's historically Black Third Ward is quickly being encroached upon with development and expansion--some of which is caused by the University of Houston's growth--slowly threatening the rich Black culture and identity of this space (Bach 2020, Jones 2019). And Oakland, home to the Black Panther Party, has experienced some of the highest rates of gentrification in the country in the last few years, with poor communities who can no longer afford to live in Oakland pushed out (Hansen 2020, Levin 2019). These are just a few examples. And while there is a dominant--and rightly so--narrative of gentrification functioning as a removal of working-class people of color and poor communities by well-to-do whites who are drawn back to the inner city, one of the deeper practices of gentrification is the rupture, erosion, and erasure of community cultural practices that provide safety, relationality, and joy through the presence of long-term residents who are being pushed out.

In this essay, we highlight practices of Black safety by way of two case studies that illustrate the historical and ongoing vitality of these localized practices and their intentional endangerment by gentrification and the white carceral conceptualizations of safety embedded in them. In that process, we demonstrate how Black safety is foundationally finked to the experience and preservation of Black place, culture, and community fife.

Black Safety Across Time and Place

It is no coincidence that in the months after the high-profile killings of three Black Americans, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, at the hands of police and white vigilantes, Black people were buying land collectively to establish a new Black town. Furthermore, it is no coincidence that the 20 families who purchased the 100 acres of land just east of Macon in rural Wilkinson County, Georgia, decided to name their town Freedom. According to theirwebsite, "The Freedom Georgia Initiative was established out of an extreme sense of urgency to create a thriving safe haven for black families in the midst of racial trauma." This suggests that Freedom, Georgia, was conceptualized specifically to address Black people's need for safety in a United States where white supremacy and the carceral state pose an ever present, ever penetrating threat to Black people.

It seems contrary that in search of safety, these families would establish a Black town given that commonplace notions of safety often associate Black places with an absence of safety. For example, time and time again we are bombarded with media depictions of Black neighborhoods as crime infested, drug ridden danger zones. Black schools are presumed to be overflowing with gangbanging teenagers that cannot be trusted and must be disciplined. But what is often missing in these representations of safety and Black space is an analysis that recognizes that safety, being neither neutral nor objective, is socially constructed and highly racialized. Commonplace public safety concerns are monopolized by the needs and perceptions of white Americans, while Black bodies, criminalized and weaponized, become subjects of terror and danger. When Black people and places are stigmatized as unsafe, their safety concerns are ignored and destabilized. But what the purchase of Freedom Georgia underscores is the extent to which Black people consider their own safety, the measures they take, and the intense labor required to envision, build, and protect their safety. It also demonstrates the ways that Black communities link safety to freedom, safety to place (outside of the white gaze), and safety to being in community with other Black people. In what follows, we examine these links as a premise for understanding a concept of Black safety as a place-based experience of safety in and with community that is predicated on freedom from antiblack racism.

Racism, whether subtle or overt, whether systematic, structural, or individualist, is always predatory and always violent. From the onset of the transatlantic slave trade, violence, both in its physical and symbolic forms,h as been integral to the operation of power that underpins racism (Hall 1997). In classifying the world into races, Europeans violently reduced "complex forms of life ... to mere epithets" (Mbembe 2017, 17). They sought to gain control of the world and its resources and justified the violence by which they did so by othering nonwhite people. In this process, the concept of Black came to denote exclusion, brutalization, and degradation, and African people were denied recognition as co-human (Mbembe 2017). Instead, Black skins became a form of imprisonment and through the unbelievable physical and symbolic violence of slavery, Black people became human-object, human-property, and human-capital (Mbembe 2017). Slavery ended but the racial formation and the violence of racism evolved, taking on new ways of dispossessing Black people of the power of self-determination. Thus, violence has always been a cornerstone of racism and accordingly long shaped the context within which Black people came to live in the United States. To this day, as Cristina Sharpe (2016) puts it, everyday Black existence is living in and with the violent terror of anti-Blackness. Black people's quest for freedom from racial oppression despite mechanisms of anti-Black racism has therefore always simultaneously been an effort to seek safety from physical and symbolic racial violence--in essence, a humanizing effort. Black safety, then, is an affective experience of unboundedness that Black people might feel in places where they have certain "freedoms to" and "freedoms from," particular experiences that affirm their humanity while reducing the threat of physical or symbolic violence. These interconnected expressions of "freedoms to" or "freedoms from" are often manifested in Black places and spaces and in community with other Black people.

The idea that Black people might find safety in a place of their own making, a Black place, is not new. Black people in the Americas...