I think the strangest idea to me presented in the “Reel Time/Real Justice” article by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Gary Peller is the concept of disaggregation. In the case of Rodney King, they took the video that captured his beating and broke it down into components. In these components, these still shots of the scene, they explained what the officers were doing in each shot and how each part of the beating was justified as actions to subdue aggression. When you watched the tape as a whole, the racism was easily sighted, but by breaking it into components, the evidence was presented to a jury in a way that seemed justified. The more shocking discovery was that, this concept wasn’t something new. The idea of disaggregation was also present in the Richmond vs. Croson case of 1989.  It seems as if people in general see blatant racism and understand it, but instead of addressing it, they choose to break these events down in a way that takes the racism out of these situations.

In reference to: In Bushwick, Artists Try to Rewrite Gentrification’s Usual Story

This article presents and interesting way to fight back against the displacement of gentrification. A small community of artists has decided to pool together money and buy apartment buildings and turn them into workspace instead of continuing to rent out apartments. The article states that the rent in Bushwick has gone from around one dollar a square foot to around four dollars a square foot, which means that apartments that once cost $500 now cost around $2000. This is obviously unfair and a price that most struggling artists cannot afford. So the idea of pooling money together to buy a space presents a very interesting idea. Their methods of collecting money goes as follows: either collecting money from investors or gallery owners that want to support young artists to create a trust that would help buy a large building that could be converted into studios for artists, or getting a small group of artists to donate money to put down payments on smaller buildings that they could make into studios. These artists are essentially trying to buy their way back into their property and instead of fighting gentrification head on, they are trying to keep hold of their environment in the same way that landlords and real estate speculators and corporations try to gentrify their town. It’s an interesting role reversal that hopefully has the opposite effect.

It’s an odd thing: using the guise of making towns aesthetically pleasing in order to push out the individuals that you feel are “disorderly” or “not normal”. It’s strange to read how something like the zoning of land into commercial, residential and manufacturing sections, which is meant to diversify the community, actually causes more segregation and separation. The article states that zoning   caused and even greater racial and class segregation because places of employment were separated from lower income residences, and laws were used to limit the growth of manufacturing and affordable housing, which basically weeds out the lower income residents from a particular neighborhood. I think one of the strangest examples in the article was the administrative obstacles and real estate pressures that were faced by “The Special Greenwich Village Hudson River District” which focused on protecting the printing, meat market, and graphic arts industries as well as providing low-income housing for seniors and individuals with disabilities, including those with AIDS, but all the private and public funds that went into developing the Manhattan waterfront, and the pier and other parks in general. All these actions seemed to try to better the appearance of the neighborhood, making it more expensive to live in, again casting out people who appear “disorderly”, which this article specifies as nonwhite homosexuals, minority youth and lower income individuals.

Collectively, all three articles portray “Quality of Life” policing and the Broken Windows Theory as concepts that are based on unreasonable assumptions about humanity itself.  In Giuliani Time: The Revanchist 1990s, Neil Smith states that Giuliani blamed “the downward spiral of urban decay” on graffiti artists, unruly youth, homeless people, panhandlers, prostitutes among other clusters of individuals.  Once these factors for unrest were identified, policy in the ‘betterment of New York City’ was created around pushing out those signs of disorder.  This folds itself over into the Broken Window Theory generated by George Kelling and James Wilson.  In Turnstile Jumpers and Broken Windows,Tanya Erzen states that the broken window theory is based on the idea that an area that looks disorderly gives way to more serious crimes.  This disorderly aesthetic includes the presence of homeless individuals, broken windows and trash covered streets.  So there comes along this theory that supports the idea that these groups on individuals that Giuliani states cause the city to look disorderly, actually increase the crime rate.  Ultimately this system of thinking finally gives way to quality of life policing.  In the article “Quality of Life” Policing, it states that there is massive amount of power given to police to decide who gets punished on a major level for minor crimes such as  panhandling and littering.  This is justified under the idea that, as Erzen states, “…New York is a city where graffiti taggers, turnstile jumpers, and kids in a public park are either already criminals or simply criminals in the making”.  Yet, the more that I look at the ideas presented in these articles, the more I see explanations that are made up in order support a horrible solution to a societal problem.  Just by giving the police power to aggressively eradicate anything that they deem looks “disorderly” does not cause a more stable society, but a society that fears its justice system instead of depends on it.  What we need to look towards is not “quality of life” policing, that boils people down into simple beings and allows some police officers to easily act on prejudice tendencies, but create a system that brings about equality and a community’s faith in the police system.

I think everyone has always understood that the distribution of wealth has been a horrible weight looking over the world, but the Oxfam Study opened my eyes to the idea of home truly massive that gap between the have and the have-nots truly is.  The study finds that by next year the richest one percent will control more than half of the world’s total wealth.  It goes on to describe an even more shocking detail: that the eighty wealthiest people own $1.9 trillion, which is equivalent to the cumulative wealth of the 3.5 billion individuals on the bottom half of the income scale! That is insane! Yet, even though many of these wealthy individuals put their money back into the community to create parks, these actions are not as public oriented as they seem.  In “The Billionaire’s Park,” David Callahan explains how the investment of individuals like Mr. Diller into seemingly public spaces , are in more affluent places and developed in a style that leans more towards the interest of the wealthy.  Essentially this philanthropy is taking away the voice of the public center when it comes to the question of what to do with public space.  This idea is further supported in “OWS: The Part of Wall Street Meets Its Nemesis”, which paints the story of Occupy Wall Street and the end that came to it by the idea that the government decides which space is public and allowed to be occupied.  In a space that is obviously public, it seems that the mass public, those who represent the 99%, are not allowed to take up space in that area because they do not fit the aesthetic off the private sector. So what is it that we, as the 99%, have to do to regain our voices in how to develop public space, a small construct that will hopefully lead to strengthening our voices in other political outlets? We must change the system that equates money with power.  But then, how do we do that?

The article “Toxic Soup Redux: Why Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice Matter after Katrina”, is what first introduced me to the ideas of environmental racism and environmental justice. Even though I always see that racism is a concept embedded into our society, it was strange to see how it even seeps into environmental concerns. I can only say the idea makes me both shocked and concerned.

The most heartbreaking stories came from the articles “Law Enforcement Violence and Disaster” and “For Public Housing Residents After Sandy, ‘A Slow Motion Katrina’”. Both of these articles show the environmental racism that emerges from environmental disasters, specifically Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy. The complete police brutality for the victims of Hurricane Katrina who could not escape from New Orleans in time is tragic, especially the emphasis on the abuse towards women and transgender individuals of color. The events in response to Hurricane Sandy also mimic this idea of environmental racism when houses in places like Cobble Hill and Park Slope, generally wealthy areas, quickly got back their utilities while houses in Gowanus and Red Hook were left without power for eleven days which causes problems for disabled individuals that lived in these establishments.

The question is, how do we bring about awareness to the idea of environmental racism and further educate individuals on this topic so there could be a larger rally to fix the environmental injustice in certain areas over others?

The article “The Birth of Gentrification” constantly refers to the acts of landlords and investors to push towards gentrification, such as Cinderella schemes and homesteading, as schemes. And when reading these articles, I can’t help, but picture gentrification, or the steps to achieve a more gentrified community, as schemes.
I feel a bit ignorant for thinking that gentrification, for the most part, flowed through in an almost natural way. I believed: Of course, everyone wants to save money, even those who have money, so it makes sense that the gentry would start coming and occupying poorer neighborhoods, which invite more gentry, which invite commercial businesses that interest those gentry and as the dynamic of the area changes, the prices rise and the previous residents are forced to leave because they cannot keep up with the increased cost of living. However, I was missing the key factor: the “schemes” of these landlords and others to speed up this process of gentrification in order to make a profit. The series of disinvestment, reinvestment, tax delinquency, brownstoning and homesteading along with creating a public appeal for these changes, pushes towards gentrification. And although, gentrification is usually portrayed in a dark light, one cannot deny the positives of gentrification: it ultimately helps repair the results of disinvestment in a community; that is to say it helps the economy of the community and restores the buildings and other edifices within the area. I guess the real question is how can we receive all the benefits of gentrification without displacing both the existing residents and present cultural aspects of the community?