Читать книгу The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race - Carl C. Anthony - Страница 11

Introduction

WE NEED A NEW story about race and place in the United States. The civil rights movement brought forth a flow of narratives recounting valiant struggles to overcome racism and achieve social justice. Much environmental history has expressed concern for the destruction of forests, the degradation of landscapes, the uprooting and destruction of indigenous people, and the loss of species. All these concerns will continue to have force. But the experience of African Americans and other people of color has a key theme to add to the mix: the stories of the people who helped to lay the foundations of the nation despite being marginalized in an atmosphere of hostility and disrespect. Telling these stories and listening with compassion will help us heal and begin to understand that we are all, down to the core, sources of great creativity.

Conventional politics has operated as if there were a deep and unbridgeable gulf between environmentalism and social justice. Environmentalists revere and respect the natural world as a foundation for the life of future generations while social justice advocates are committed to equal opportunities for those who live in the present. When the first Earth Day happened in 1970, it was profoundly disassociated from the civil rights movement. It centered on protecting and restoring nature without acknowledging people’s need for social and economic justice. The environment and people are interrelated. Both demand our attention and respect. African Americans and other peoples who have labored in our cities and countryside, like all other humans, have not only a responsibility to care for planet Earth but also the right to share in its bounty.

It is clear that industrial growth is destroying life on Earth. We need a platform for all people to come together and decide to reduce our negative impact on the global biosphere. We cannot just say, “All we want is our fair share.” Nor can we say, “Save the planet by any means necessary,” and call the rest “collateral damage.” We are all in this together, and true sustainability must include social justice along with environmental protection.

Marginalized communities—subjugated economically and racially—have firsthand experience of what it means to build sustainability in the face of hardship. This cultural and individual resilience is a resource for leadership. We need to acknowledge the leadership emerging out of the social and environmental justice movements and work to dismantle the obstacles to leadership faced by people of color. The knowledge they can bring to our planning and environmental professions is invaluable.

I am fortunate to have played many roles in my life, but my most deeply embedded identity is as the survivor of seven-and-a-half decades of growing up and living in racially constrained environments—first in Philadelphia, then in New York, for a summer in London, and, finally, on the West Coast in South Berkeley. Throughout my life and work, I have been seeking answers to questions about racial inequities that have troubled me since childhood and searching for ideas and disciplines to integrate the various dimensions of my personal and professional experience.

A class field trip to see the Better Philadelphia Exposition when I was eight years old filled me with a strong desire to become an architect and urban planner. During the following years, as I looked forward to those studies, fundamental questions were forming in my consciousness: Who am I? Where do I belong? What is my connection to the communities I am encountering? In a more external frame of mind I wondered: Why do white families move out of our neighborhood as soon as families like mine move in and why do my neighborhood and my home become more run-down every year? When I looked at the conditions surrounding me as a child, I did not realize that my city and I were not alone—these patterns of segregation and neighborhood disinvestment were prevailing throughout the country in the years of my childhood.

While I was at Columbia University in the early 1960s, I joined the emerging civil rights movement. Suddenly, I found myself in a series of struggles in which my peers were defining an agenda for a new generation. We were confronting the assumptions of the status quo and demanding the right to vote, to interstate bus travel, to be seated and served in restaurants, and to decent jobs. I wondered how architecture, the field that I was embarking upon, could respond to these demands.

I became a lifelong advocate for civil and human rights for African Americans and other communities of color in the United States. As a founding member of the Northern Student Movement, I learned a lot about community organizing, particularly how to build mutual trust and respect among the diverse groups in the community. Eventually, I found a niche for my architecture skills in the civil rights movement by coordinating the participatory planning and construction of an outdoor community space—the Harlem Neighborhood Commons.

I reflected on my situation as a college student: the people in Harlem are black and so am I. Out of three hundred architecture students at Columbia University, there was only one other African American. This was a time before black studies when the students were all white and didn’t feel a need to study the black experience. There was no context for exploring how what we were learning might relate to the black community. Since none of my questions were being addressed by the university curriculum, I made frequent visits to Michaux’s, the black bookstore in Harlem where I educated myself about the heroic struggles of Africans in the diaspora resisting racist exploitation and oppression and Africans in the homeland freeing themselves and their lands from colonialism.

Through a process of self-education, I came to feel that understanding the role of Africans as the first people—the ancestors of us all—might help to combat and even heal the damage that racism inflicts on the psyche of African Americans. In addition, it seemed that the story of human origins might help us understand our common destiny as the human species. All humans evolved from common ancestors and spent the first 170,000 years of human existence in Africa. Why, then, are people from African and African American communities today routinely looked down upon and even despised?

As I approached graduation at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in 1969, my fellow students and I were planning how to use our travel grants to explore the roots of our profession. Of course, everyone was going to Europe and starting in Greece. For them, it was a well-trodden path. It was not so for me. My roots were not in Europe—were they in Africa? I was unsure. Nothing was marked on the map. I had already stepped out of the box to pursue training in architecture and planning. Now that I wanted to study my own roots in this field, I didn’t know where to begin. I understood that what we seek to do in the present is built upon what our ancestors have done in the past, but I seemed to have no past upon which to build.

I was thinking about all this when I came across Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization by the great architectural theorist Lewis Mumford. Originally published in 1924, the book documents the beginning of European settlement patterns in the New World and is one of the first architectural histories ever published. Mumford (1955, 1–10) observed that people who came to the United States from Europe brought their building traditions, which provided them with a frame of reference. As a child, I had found myself in a community, but there was no sense of a shared reference point.

I suppose that everyone wants to go back to the place where their parents or ancestors came from to find their roots. At that time, though, the general feeling was that black people had no roots¹ or certainly none that were relevant to the study of architecture or city planning. Instead of going to Europe with my fellow students, I stopped there just long enough to consult their rich libraries for material on African building traditions and then I went on to explore and document those building traditions in West Africa for nine months with my friend and, at that time, partner Jean Doak. There, I faced the question: How can I understand who these people are—people I have met just recently—when I don’t know who I am despite living in my own skin for thirty years? I faced a paradox: Americans saw me first as black; Africans saw me first as American. I went to Africa in search of my own history, but when I got there, I realized that I couldn’t understand the things I was seeing and experiencing because I didn’t understand who I was. I didn’t know what vantage point to use to interpret my experience.

The work in architecture school was built upon the presumption that a usable path forward in pursuing work and projects was informed by one’s history. While my roots appeared shallow, my immediate history as a member of the African American community in an age of white flight and inner-city abandonment made me ask how my professional career could serve my community. I had this question even before I entered architecture school. Throughout my school days, I experienced a growing feeling that something was missing in my studies—something about the needs of the African American community I aspired to serve and the need for support of professionals serving such communities. It seemed obvious that these topics were essential, but there was no context for them. I attended classes at Columbia, up on the hill, looking down on Harlem and seeing people living under devastating conditions. My education provided no explanation as to why and how it got that way. No one asked or talked about what should be done or why services were not being made available to the most vulnerable communities. People seemed to be ignoring what was right under our noses.

By 1976, I had graduated from Columbia University, studied traditional building in West Africa, and moved to Berkeley, California, where I collaborated with some of the most innovative and creative designers and planners in the field. Landscape magazine published my two-part article on the architecture of the big house and the slave quarter in its bicentennial issues. I understood that my ancestors had been enslaved and that somebody had planned the places where they lived, deciding that they would live in minimal quarters distinctly different from the places where their masters resided.²

Whenever I had a chance, I continued reading and thinking about indigenous villages, towns, and cities in Africa; the slave trade³ and the development of colonial cities on the Atlantic coastline; and the racialization of space in North American urban development from 1500 to the present. The future of our urban, suburban, and rural communities depends in part upon our willingness to face this terrible history and consciously make something of it. I was particularly focused on the “landscape of freedom,” which I imagined as the title of a book I wanted to write about the experience of the African American freedmen during and after the Civil War. I had many questions: What happened to my ancestors when they were emancipated? How did they live? What environments did they live in? What ideas shaped how they lived? What external circumstances continued to constrain them?

In my years of teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, I was eager to share my thoughts and findings with my students and fellow teachers, but the nearly all-white student body and faculty had little or no interest in the historical drama of Africans and African Americans. I decided to leave the university and enter private practice.

A decade later, black studies programs emerged in colleges and universities across the nation, responding at last to the gap in awareness that I and other African American students had experienced.

In the mid-1980s, my friend and mentor Karl Linn, who had moved to California from the East Coast, introduced me to the writing of Catholic priest and cultural historian Thomas Berry.⁴ Berry’s insistence that humanity needs a new story excited me since I had been feeling that African Americans needed a new story—a story that is more inspiring than the horrors of the Middle Passage, slavery, and pressures of racism that seemed to intensify after emancipation.

Berry (1999) suggested that neither of mainstream culture’s two dominant stories—one centering on the promise of redemption in the afterlife and the other trusting in the power of science and industry—could unify people and inspire them to engage in collective efforts to respond to the serious environmental problems that have resulted from our long practice of massive extractive industry. Berry insisted that we need to reinvent ourselves as a species within the community of life. Identifying ourselves primarily as members of nations, religions, or racial groups had proved to be a sure route to oppression and strife.

Thanks to my third-grade teacher and the assignments and field trips she organized, I had always held a fascination with history and an excitement about—and love of—nature, particularly stars and trees. Looking at the fossilized remains of trilobites and a dinosaur footprint within a short distance from my home gave me a sense of deep time and appreciation for the big story of life on Earth in which we are all connected. I now found this same excitement when I read Thomas Berry.

Deeply inspired by Berry’s writings and his collaborations with evolutionary cosmologist Brian Thomas Swimme and scholar of world religions Mary Evelyn Tucker, I wanted to make their vision relevant to a larger pool of readers. In order to do this, I needed to fill in the two large gaps I had encountered in their narrative: I had found hardly any mention of cities or people of color. I felt a strong desire to correct these significant oversights and to help craft a new story that could include those elements. I hope this book will make an initial contribution and will encourage others to add their own stories. We all need to embrace and understand our own histories and identities, and we all want to feel understood by others. Since most people today live in cities and analysts predict that the majority of residents in the United States will be people of color by 2044 (US Census Bureau 2015), efforts to expand the new story seem particularly relevant.

My search for threads in the new story found me reaching back to the very origins of the universe and then coming through humanity’s origins in Africa—the emergence there of agriculture, nomadic herding, and city building that developed into a variety of thriving cultures until they started to unravel with the incursions of Portuguese fortune hunters, known in the old story as explorers. The story developed as I studied the slave trade, the plantation era, the gradual undermining and reversal of black rights after the Emancipation Proclamation, and the betrayals of the Black Codes and the Jim Crow laws in the South, resulting in waves of black migration to the cities of the North, where the new arrivals were exploited by greedy real estate speculators and thwarted by racist policies that kept them in ghettos and denied them loans to make necessary repairs and improvements to their property.

Finally, I studied the unfolding experiences of my father, an orphan from birth and a self-made man with many achievements; my mother and her accomplished and cultured family; and my own experience, growing up alongside my brother in racially defined black neighborhoods in Philadelphia.

Our African ancestors were uprooted from their lands, transported many thousands of miles, and forced to work without remuneration for the benefit of others. Still, the majority survived and found ways to retain their dignity and humanity. Many lived truly heroic lives. Many of their descendants now live in cities where they suffer from lack of opportunities to develop their potential.

At every juncture in my life, I realized that something big was missing. The university was supposed to prepare students to step into their roles, but there were no institutions to prepare and train people of color for a role in shaping vibrant communities. Working in the civil rights movement, I had developed unique and valuable skills, such as participatory planning, but I soon noted that while many of these skills had been developed by African Americans for use in African American communities, they were being used primarily by white people.

I felt myself being split in two. My professional architect self, with specialized knowledge, spatial intelligence, and passion for designing and planning the physical world, seemed restricted to white spaces while my civil rights and community advocate self seemed to be valued only among people of color. These two parts of me lived in separate worlds, which was painful and confusing. I found myself in a crisis. I left my architectural firm and gave up the practice of conventional urban planning. I began to search for a larger vision that could contain my whole being.

When I became active in the environmental justice movement, I sought to support the development of environmental leadership in low-income communities of color. I was prompted by my intense thinking on what the future holds for people of color. Again, the threat of being split in two loomed: Earth Island Institute, the organization whose board I had joined, was made up of white environmentalists. It was hard work to invent a new framework for lifting up the voices of people of color within that movement.

The answer that emerged during long and deep conversations with Karl Linn was the Urban Habitat Program. We developed the program within Earth Island Institute, modeling it after the community design centers (CDCs) of the 1960s and the advocacy planning work promoted by architect-lawyer Paul Davidoff. But while CDCs had been serving neighborhoods, we positioned the Urban Habitat Program at the center of San Francisco’s entire metropolitan region to mobilize people in many neighborhoods. My work with Earth Island Institute and the Urban Habitat Program spawned my next twenty-five years of projects with the Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative at the Ford Foundation followed by Breakthrough Communities with its focus on promoting sustainability and justice in US metropolitan regions. These projects are the first steps in building a worldwide movement organized around a new story of unified effort to heal communities harmed by racial injustice so that they can participate in repairing our damaged ecosystems and social networks.

As an architect and urban planner, I was seeking to construct a usable story based on an accurate picture of the past. I was looking for evidence that all the suffering of my people meant something, that African Americans and our African ancestors played an important role in shaping the modern world—in particular, the cities and towns in which we live. I felt inspired and empowered as I considered the development of the African American community against the backdrop of the unfolding universe and the evolution of life on planet Earth.

The new planetary narrative emerging in our time suggests new ways to think about race and new strategies and directions for thinking about, planning, designing, building, and living in cities. Placing our contemporary issues in this larger context encourages a deeper regard for the miracle of life, gratitude for the diverse species with whom we share the planet, and appreciation for the gifts of air, water, and sunlight that we have long taken for granted. Everything that we do or aim to do should be grounded in and governed by our relationship with the Earth, the cosmos, and the diversity of human and other forms of life with which we coinhabit this precious planet.

I hope that this book will inspire readers to reflect on their own stories and to share them—whether by telling them to one or many friends and family members or by writing and sharing them online or in print. Deeply respectful and compassionate listening to one another is essential to establish a foundation of trust and a sense of our common humanity.

Although this book includes notes and references, it is not intended primarily as an academic work. Some of the notes contain interesting side stories and details that expand meaning and deepen understanding. The references and additional resources are there to encourage further study and guide readers to interesting and accessible sources. I intend the book to appeal to readers of all skin colors, to young and old, to both environmental and social justice activists, and to those of a spiritual or a scientific bent. I want it to be accessible to thoughtful high school dropouts and, at the same time, engaging for serious students and scholars of history, science, and human meaning. It will take all of us to meet the challenge of re-envisioning and revising our social, economic, and environmental systems—a major effort that Thomas Berry referred to as the Great Work of our time.