No Justice, No Streets! Black radical placemaking and its political aesthetics in George Floyd Square

ABSTRACT

Building from Black geographies and Black media studies, I propose “Black radical placemaking” as a communicative approach to reimagine urban planning practices toward more racially equitable futures. Using George Floyd Square as a case study and through photographic fieldwork, I argue that Black radical placemaking promotes a political aesthetics constituted of racialized inclusion, mutual aid, and reparative justice. This stands opposite to traditional urban planning practices that have historically privileged whiteness, predatory capitalism, and social control of BIPOC communities. Lastly, the study discusses how Black radical placemaking can transform communication, media, and geography scholarship toward a social justice arc.

KEYWORDS:

• Black radical placemaking
• Black media studies
• Black geographies
• race
• political aesthetics
• urban planning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use corporate media as a term to refer to networked news platforms produced by big media conglomerates that are primarily invested in monetary profits. Political economy scholars of communication critique corporate media as detracting from democratic values and supporting neoliberal narratives that put the blame for society’s inequalities on oppressed groups. See, McChesney, Robert W. Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (New York: The New Press, 2016); Pickard, Victor. America's Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

2 See, Dean Spade, “Solidarity not Charity: Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival,” Social Text 38, no. 1 (2020); Tanchuk, Nicolas, Tomas Rocha, and Marc Kruse. “Is Complicity in Oppression a Privilege? Toward Social Justice Education as Mutual Aid.” Harvard Educational Review 91, no. 3 (2021): 341–361.

3 Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, “Prosecutors say Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd for 9 min 29 s, longer than initially reported.” New York Times, March 30, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/us/derek-chauvin-george-floyd-kneel-9-minutes-29-seconds.html.

4 Armond R. Towns, “The Street is the Message: Racial Violence and the White Control of Mobility,” in The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication, eds. Krajina Zlatan and Deborah Stevenson (New York: Routledge, 2020), 437.

5 I use BIPOC as a term throughout the paper to indicate the social construction of race and racializing of Black, Indigenous, or Other People of Color in the context of the U.S.’s origins as a white supremacist, settler colonial, and racial capitalistic nation.

6 Brandi Thompson Summers, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 3.

7 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xiii.

8 Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

9 Adam Bledsoe and Willie Jamaal Wright, “The Pluralities of Black Geographies,” Antipode 51, no. 2 (2019): 419–437; Camilla Hawthorne, “Black Matters are Spatial Matters: Black Geographies for the Twenty-First Century,” Geography Compass 13, no. 11 (2019): e12468; Ashanté M. Reese, Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, DC (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

10 Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” in The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, eds. N. Badmington & J. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2008), 80.

11 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, its Overrepresentation – An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3, (2003): 257–337.

12 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Édouard Glissant, Treatise on the Whole-world (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020).

13 Kandice Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

14 Katherine McKittrick, “Dear April: The Aesthetics of Black Miscellanea,” Antipode 54, no. 1 (2022): 9.

15 Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 8.

16 Armond R. Towns, On Black Media Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022), 20.

17 Towns, “The Street is the Message,” 437.

18 Towns, On Black Media, 9.

19 Sarah Sharma and Armond Towns, “Ceasing Fire and Seizing Time: LA Gang Tours and the White Control of Mobility,” Transfers 6, no. 1 (2016): 28.

20 George Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape,” Landscape Journal 26, no. 1 (2007): 10–23.

21 Lisa B. Y. Calvente and Guadalupe García, “A Haunting Presence: Archiving Black Absence and Racialized Mappings in Louisiana Plantation Sites,” Cultural Studies 36, no. 1 (2022): 22.

22 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “What is to be Done?,” American Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2011): 246

23 George Lipsitz, “Making Black Lives Matter: Conjuring and Creative Place-Making in an Age of Austerity,” Kalfou 4, no. 1 (2017): 43.

24 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), 111.

25 “Mapping Prejudice Project,” University of Minnesota, https://mappingprejudice.umn.edu/racial-covenants/what-is-a-covenant.

26 Aradhya Sood, William Speagle, and Kevin Ehrman-Solberg, “Long Shadow of Racial Discrimination: Evidence from Housing Covenants of Minneapolis,” 3468520 (2019). Social Science Research Network.

27 Sood, Speagle, and Ehrman-Solberg, “Long shadow of racial discrimination”.

28 “Diving Deeper: Understanding Disparities Between Black and White Residents,” Metropolitan Council, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J8KdEYskg4l2WvBTOESTogftChaYr8yo/view; “Mapping the Black Ownership Gap,” Urban Institute, https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/mapping-black-homeownership-gap

29 Myron Orfield and Will Stancil, “Neo-Segregation in Minnesota,” Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality 40, no. 1 (2022): 2.

30 Jake Blumgart. “Minneapolis and St. Paul: Trying Times for Two Leaders.” Governing, April 30, 2021, https://www.governing.com/now/minneapolis-and-st-paul-trying-times-for-two-leaders.

31 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

32 Alesia Montgomery, “Reappearance of the Public: Placemaking, Minoritization and Resistance in Detroit,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40, no. 4 (2016): 778.

33 In Sam Coombes, Édouard Glissant: A Poetics of Resistance (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018). 16.

34 McKitrrick, “Dear April, 11”.

35 Scholars have also focused on “black placemaking” that privileges creative, celebratory, playful, pleasurable, and poetic experiences in order to resist negative stigmas circulated by mainstream accounts of Black places. See, Marcus Anthony Hunter, Mary Pattillo, Zandria F. Robinson, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Black Placemaking: Celebration, Play, and Poetry,” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 7–8 (2016): 31–56.

36 Stuart Hall, “Introduction,” in Different: A Historical Context, eds. Mark. Sealy and Stuart Hall. (London: Phaidon Press, 2001).

37 Hall., “Introduction”.

38 Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, Andrea J. Ritchie, Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer, and Luke Harris, “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women,” African American Policy Forum. Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (2015): 1.

39 Clyde Woods, “Regional Blocs, Regional Planning, and the Blues Epistemology in the Lower Mississippi Delta,” in Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural Planning History, ed. Leonie Sandercock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 85.

40 Camilla Hawthorne, “Black Matters are Spatial Matters,” 8.

41 Jordan Culver, et al. “George Floyd Protests in Minneapolis: Police Use Tear Gas, Smoke Grenades; More than Two Dozen Arrested,” USA Today, May, 31, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/30/george-floyd-protests-updates-news-minneapolis-response-overnight/5288818002/. Two years after the 2020 unrest, an 86-page report conducted for the City of Minneapolis concluded that the city mishandled the unrest after Floyd’s murder, instead flaming chaos rather than healing in the city. “City of Minneapolis: An After-Action Review of City Agencies’ Responses to Activities Directly Following George Floyd’s Death on May 25, 2020,” March 7, 2022, https://lims.minneapolismn.gov/Download/RCAV2/26623/2020-Civil-Unrest-After-Action-Review-Report.pdf.

42 Minnesota Public Radio ran a series which featured everyday residents and activists contributing to the transformational acts at the intersection of 38th and Chicago. Significantly, no official city or MPD representatives contributed anything to the memorialization of Floyd at the intersection, “Making George Floyd’s Square,” December, 2, 2020, https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/12/02/making-george-floyds-square.

43 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

44 Meet on the Streets, George Floyd Square movement’s “Justice Resolution 101”, August 7, 2020, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1imey1mzBoCnmhaV1JhQ5GPy1dfqeTEL8/view.

45 Although not police abolition, recently on March 31, 2023 the Minneapolis City Council approved a plan to reform some policing practices that have historically engendered racial bias. The vote was a result of a settlement agreement between the city and the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, which charged the city with a pattern of racial discrimination in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by the MPD. “Minneapolis City Council unanimously approves sweeping plan to reform policing,” March 31, 2023, https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-city-council-unanimously-approves-police-plan-george-floyd-human-rights-racism-minnesota/600263516/.

46 Ruth W. Gilmore, “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye T. Johnson and Alex Lubin (London: Verso, 2017), 238.

47 Natchee Blu Barnd. Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017).

48 Blu Barnd, Native Space, 6.

49 Eve Tuck, and K. W. Yang. Decolonization is not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1, no. 1 (2012).

50 LANDBACK movement: https://landback.org/

51 Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIlwain. “#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (2018): 254–266; Robin M. Boylorn. “How to be a (Black woman) Journal Editor During a Pandemic: An Introduction to an Inaugural Issue.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 19, no. 1 (2022): 1–4; Eve Ng, Khadijah Costley White, and Anamik Saha, “#CommunicationSoWhite: Race and Power in the Academy and Beyond,” Communication, Culture & Critique 13, no. 2 (2020): 143–151; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s rac (e/ist) problems,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 465–476; George Villanueva. Promoting Urban Social Justice Through Engaged Communication Scholarship: Reimagining Place (New York: Routledge, 2022).

52 Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 152.