Читать книгу The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race - Carl C. Anthony - Страница 10

Foreword

IT WAS CARL ANTHONY who first brought me to the historic African burial ground in New York City. The year was 2001. The Ford Foundation had selected Carl to direct the Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative (SMCI) in North America, a bold program to create opportunity for disadvantaged communities. Building on our previous collaboration in the San Francisco Bay Area, Carl had invited me to join his New York team to design and implement the strategic planning, peer learning, and leadership development for this program. On the day of the SMCI dedication ceremony, Carl recommended we first visit the African burial ground site, sink our roots in, and invite the ancestors to guide us. I never suspected the life-changing impact this visit would have on the core of my being and on our work together for the next two decades.

The African burial site was discovered in 1991 as excavation began for the General Services Administration building in the lower part of Manhattan. The requisite anthropologists had been on site according to city policy, but they too were unprepared for what they found: not pottery shards or mere glass remnants, but bones—human bones. These bones were unearthed twenty-five feet below the surface, orderly and well preserved.

As they called in additional experts, what was revealed over the coming months included not only one intact skeleton of an African American slave inside the remains of a coffin, but another and another, gradually unearthing hundreds of graves. The moist wet clay and earth composition had assisted in their preservation. Silver pendants, military buttons, and burial objects helped reconstitute the origins. Carbon dating set the year at about 1700 and an average death age at thirty-seven. African American community leaders and other concerned allies came forward to halt the destruction of this remarkable site. Although 419 bodies were initially located, as many as 20,000 free Africans and African slaves are estimated to have been buried in the 6.6-acre site.

The more I discovered, the more stunned, grief-stricken, and outraged I became by the hidden history. One quarter of early New Amsterdam had been African. Slaves had built the wall of Wall Street in 1653 to protect the Dutch from the indigenous Lenape tribe, which the Dutch settlers had nearly annihilated only days after the Pipe of Peace (or Hoboken) agreement. Yet, while enslaved Africans had borne the arduous work of building a European-style city, including its protective wall, they were excluded from the burial grounds in churchyards within the city limits. The free blacks and African slaves died segregated from the very city that was built on the backs of their stolen labor.

Experiencing all this with Carl added a further transformative dimension. We exchanged insights for our own lives and for the collaborative work ahead. The segregation, fragmentation, and spatial apartheid embedded in the land-use patterns of our twenty-first-century metropolitan regions took on deeper meaning as we uncovered this history of African slaves, buried and forgotten for centuries. Why had we not learned of this before?

Before leaving, we poured an offering of water onto the sacred ground—an expression of honor and gratitude for the many lives and history revealed here. Our journey back into the history of this place continued in our own bones as we reentered the churning sidewalks of Lower Manhattan. We rejoined present time, but we were changed. We left this place with resolve to restore our broken world.

Carl Anthony and I have witnessed this regenerative process over the years—with groups in our multiracial leadership development work, with organizations undergoing culture change, and with communities struggling to undertake regional equity organizing and coalition building. I have also seen this same integration occur with individuals in my practice as a psychologist. This transformative and liberatory process occurs in people who integrate their internal psychological parts, but it is equally thrilling to experience a similar revitalization in communities where a segregated neighborhood is reconnected to the streams of opportunity in their metropolitan region. Carl’s book reveals that this is a continuum—our broken relationships and uncertain attachment to our own mothers and fathers, and to our extended families, create a pattern that makes it difficult to care for ourselves and for one another, and for this world we share. When individuals undergo trauma therapy and discover an inner secret, a healing can often occur, something like a numb limb that begins to wake up. There is pain at first, as the blood starts to recirculate, but the subsequent benefit it brings is usually calculated to outweigh the pain. The ability to resume using the limb and the utility it brings are obvious; however, this is not always so evident in the case of race. Carl’s book forges these connections and builds these bridges.

The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race traces the mythic roots of spatial apartheid, a condition which has become the norm in our metropolitan regions and our national narrative. Carl Anthony challenges the absence, invisibility, or erasure of entire segments of our community, advocating instead their full participation in our democracy. He demands that concepts of sacrifice zones must end. With grounded strategies and bold invention, he insists that the limbs wake up and the body be restored, revealing the hidden narrative.

What does radical belonging mean? How do we recover parts of ourselves as we recover the history of lost peoples? And how do we simultaneously restore a lost relation to land, to place, and to time? Who is served and who is harmed by cultural amnesia and fragmentation? Carl Anthony takes up these and other questions with outrageous and courageous acumen in the pages that follow. Throughout the journey from the first Flaring Forth to the rise of humanity in Africa and from the transatlantic slave trade to the evolution of our current social movements, Carl demonstrates that reestablishing a relationship to each of our histories is an essential healing process that connects us all to the Beloved Community.

Carl Anthony, architect, educator, and urban strategist, is one of the visionaries of the emerging climate justice movement. And his book offers a passport to this adventure, guiding us from the story of me to the story of we. As Carl travels from his roots in Philadelphia’s Black Bottom, he invites us to explore our own. As Carl discovers his place within the larger community and the cosmos, he offers a framework that is liberating and unifying for diverse cultural groups, as well as for diverse parts of ourselves. His narration guides us from separation to inclusive community where none are marginalized in future planning processes and all become aware that we each matter to the whole.

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Carl on the frontlines of movement building over the last two decades and for the unrelenting demand he makes to explore new horizons and expand our circles of engagement. His book is inspiration for emerging leaders (including youth), community mobilizers, faith and labor organizers, urban planners, artists, activists, and multiracial coalitions. It is also wisdom for educators, policy experts, philanthropists, and change-makers of many varieties, field-builders, and pathfinders. As we each accompany Carl on his journey in this book, we have the opportunity to unearth lost parts of our own stories, as well as reclaim those of our communities.

Carl Anthony’s book is not only an astonishing window into deep history, it is also a mirror to the present. Further, it provides a portal to an emergent future, a glimpse of a new land. As we accompany Carl on this dangerous journey, enhanced by his expert guidance and cultural humility, we have the opportunity to see with new eyes—revealing that our story (as individuals and as a species) can change, the hidden parts can be found, and wholeness rediscovered. This new possibility calls us forth to a great transformation. What better time than now?

M. Paloma Pavel, PhD, Oakland, California. Spring 2017