my thesis pt. i: background and motivation for a project on grassroots economies toward Black Liberation
Abstract and Preface to my 'City Planning' Master's Thesis
Something must be in the water this week (beyond the sediment as the flush out our local water mains) cause I’m back with another post. But here we’re returning to the world of “planning”. This May, I finished writing and defended my Master’s Thesis, entitled: “Message From The Grassroots: Exploring Black liberation in grassroots economic practice and planning in the Americas” (available on DSpace @ MIT here).
Sidenote: I had the pleasure of defending the thesis on May 1st, International Workers’ Day and going from there to our encampment against Genocide in Gaza.
This project was a labor of love and mutual comradeship between myself, our ancestors, comrades new and old, mentors and scholars, and many amazing organizers and people I have met to this point along my journey. I’m hoping to share portions of the thesis, but I know almost nobody wants to read the almost 80 pages I put together (and that was the condensed version).
So for now, I’m sharing the abstract that gives an overview of the project, as well as the Preface, which is more personal than anything, but it does start to get at some of the perspectives and inspirations that I draw from in this work — my own background and experiences, Toni Morrison’s understandings of “Rootedness”, call of Ella Baker to ask and interrogate ‘who are (my) people, the revolutionary leadership of figures like Walter Rodney and Amilcar Cabral, the example and discipline of comrades in organizations like the Black Alliance for Peace and the Red Barrial Afrodescendiente, and many many more. I end with an excerpt from June Jordan’s “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies”, which has been a soundtrack to my writing process and a challenge that I have taken on intellectually.
I hope this resonates / is interesting. I'll continue to share excerpts or things that have inspired this work, as I start getting back to a regular writing process.
Peace,
ac
Abstract
Building from theories of underdevelopment and economic warfare on Black peoples (Africans and Afrodescendants) globally, this study brings into the fields of urban planning and local community & economic development the analytic and urgency of the Black Radical Peace Tradition. This involves an exploration of alternatives to traditional paradigms of economic development and planning that might help reclaim and reconstitute “the economy” towards practices and efforts that serve human life and dignity, popular sovereignty, connection to the Earth, and self-determinative capacities of African peoples throughout the Americas. Intent on contributing toward an anti-colonial praxis in this field, the following study is in part an application of the lens of Black political economy to geographic and urban challenges. It is also an exploration of grassroots people-centered efforts, both operating within the spatial-political confines of empire and those revolutionary programs outside of its physical bounds. And finally, it is a reflection on the possible purposes and roles of the “intellectual” and “planner” in supporting the liberation of Black peoples in the Americas, as part of the program of the liberation of all peoples globally.
Preface
“One day I know the struggle will change. There's got to be a change—not only for Mississippi, not only for the people in the United States, but people all over the world.” – Fannie Lou Hamer
Who am I? Where are my people? What is my role? Why am I here?
In the last three years, I have asked myself these questions innumerable times. What you see here is in some ways trying to reconcile these to the best of my ability while finishing my degrees in City Planning and Business Administration. The questioning is not over, but this is a temporary destination along my journey. There is an academic orientation to this work, but it is not a search for answers or solutions, it is mostly an exploration of what lies between or within the gaps and intersections of Black liberation, urban planning, and community and economic development. More than anything, this work is a response.
This work is responding to people: those who uttered or wrote the words in italics you will find at the beginning and end of each section, whose legacies challenge me to resist, build, study, and act. More specifically, this is responding to what I have seen and experienced as a lack of focus on people within the fields of ‘urban planning’ and ‘community and economic development’ – at least the global majority of people. And it is the people who must be at the center of our work.
It is responding to place: those places I’ve called home – Springfield, Ohio; Chattanooga, TN; Washington, DC; Medellin, Colombia; Somerville, MA; London; New York; and others. And the future prospect of resting my head in a liberated place – a home where all of us are free.
It is responding to space: the space between African (Black) peoples throughout the world, that may be full of longing, pain, and confusion – but also joy, spirit, culture, love, and beauty.
And it is responding to time: the moment in which we find ourselves demands that we act, that we take serious and disciplined collective action against the war on the people of this Earth. We cannot allow ourselves to accept the genocides, imperialist interventions, dehumanizing media and political narratives, destructions and desecrations of communities as normal. It is time to move beyond individualism, to struggle collectively for justice and liberation. The time is now.
Finally, this is an invitation to anyone reading. An invitation to heed the challenge of Dr. Walter Rodney, who dared all of us in these spaces to become guerilla intellectuals, to strive toward the theory of Amilcar Cabral and commit class suicide so that we might join the peoples of this Earth, the working classes, the poor, the colonized and marginalized, in the struggle for liberation. It is an invitation to take a hard look at the challenges of this world and your role, get organized with others, and struggle for all of our liberation.
Rootedness in personal & political, ancestry & people
In this study, I aspire to honor Toni Morrison’s understanding of ‘Rootedness’ in art and writing, an ongoing search for a Black forms of writing and art that makes “conscious historical connection” to ancestors and blends an “acceptance of the supernatural and a profound rootedness in the real world at the same time.”1 In this, Morrison calls back to the way that Black people, African people’s see and have long seen the world. In aspiring to this tradition, I also take Morrison’s challenge to find ways for you, reader, to participate in this piece – if accomplished, this should not be a lecture but a process of relationship-building through your screen or paper, in a manner that is “affective and participatory.”2
This is important even in a discussion about economic development and planning. If we are seeking a people-centered development and planning, we must make space for the people, and more importantly, people must see and take space for themselves. This is a choice to take steps toward contributing to what Carol Boyce Davies calls a “rooted exchange of knowledge between the academy and the community” so that the knowledge generated in this relationship might “serve the liberation of our communities from the oppressive European histories and epistemologies,” while permitting us “re-territorialise” our understandings of the world.3 Because, while I currently sit firmly with academy, in this endeavor, we are answering the late Walter Rodney’s demand that “the black intellectual, the black academic, must attach himself to the activity of the black masses” in order to break from the captivity of an academy in service of white power and white cultural imperialism.4 For us, this rootedness can serve this purpose and sets us up for a process of ‘grounding’ so that we might have a frame of reference to understand the usefulness of economic development and planning for the liberation of Black peoples. This rootedness and exchange are fundamental prerequisites to engage in the forms of what Campbell et al. call “Sankofa urbanism”, taken from the Ghanaian proverb that compels us to ‘reach back for that which we have forgotten’.5 This is a challenge to explore and utilize ancestral knowledge (of our peoples, environments, and more) in order to deploy those toward urban and sustainability goals of our contemporary world. In summation, this calls us to ask: “what does the past tell us as we look to our future on the planet?”6 At the end, you and I can return to this question and the framing laid out above to see if we are any closer to exploring dimensions of the question, “how do we get free?” There is economic development in that, but there is much more, and I hope we can take this journey to some places that are new, and some that are old.
“...How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number? South Africa for instance:
do we agree that more than ten thousand
in less than a year but that less than
five thousand slaughtered in more than six
months will–
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?
I must become a menace to my enemies.
And if I if I ever let you slide
who should be extirpated from my universe
who should be cauterized from earth
completely
(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the
terrorist degree)
then let my body fail my soul
in its bedeviled lecheries
And if I if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.”June Jordan, “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies” (excerpt)7
Toni Morrison. (1984). “Rootedness: The Ancestor As Foundation”. In Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Ed Mari Evans. DoubleDay, New York.“rootedness” 1984
ibid
Carol Boyce Davies (2021) “Re-grounding the Intellectual-Activist Model of Walter Rodney”. In The Groundings with My Brothers. (1969 [2021]). Verso, New York. pp. xi
Walter Rodney (1969) “The Groundings with My Brothers” in The Groundings with My Brothers. (1969 [2021]). Verso, New York.
Campbell et al. (2023) “Sankofa Urbanism: retrieval, resilience, and cultural heritage in cities through time”. Front. Ecol. Evol., 11.|
ibid pp. 5
This poem was dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto, President of The People’s Republic of Angola: 1976