A little under two years ago, the Nation published an article entitled “Make the Road New York: Success Through ‘Love and Agitation” about Make the Road New York, an organization with “the largest nonunion immigrant membership organization in New York City.” Our course readings introduce us to a number of NYC organizations, each with very specific mission statements. By contrast, Make the Road New York’s mission encompasses a wide range of social issues (“stop-and-frisk racial profiling, affordable housing, environmental and civil rights, and workplace justice”), which surprisingly has not caused a drop in their success rate. The article elaborates on the organization’s strategy of identifying worker theft, mobilizing the community, informing the affected workers, establishing unions and proposing employee-friendly legislation. The article portrays the organization as the epitome of a people’s organization, with an egalitarian structure and very high participation. Due to its egalitarian structure, I was shocked to learn about the high status political connections the organization has made, since those connections are usually made between two people of power and not one politician and an entire community. In conclusion, the article glorified the successes of Make the Road New York so much so that the reader may think a people’s revolution is on the horizon.

This week, I read an article from Bushwick Daily on a graffiti artist who has been defacing various murals around the neighborhood in an outcry against gentrification. The anonymous tagger seems to believe that the murals are indicative of the kinds of populations shifts Bushwick is currently facing. What was once legendary and edgy street art has been toned down and had its rough edges sanded off into a series of “mass appeal” murals which are drawing in more affluent populations who are displacing Bushwick’s original residents.
While the author of this piece does not do so in the most professional language, he does make a point of explaining why this graffitti artist is misguided in his approach to combating gentrification. The street murals around Bushwick were designed for everybody to enjoy – not just wealthy newcomers to the neighborhood. If a person wants to speak out against gentrification, they should be able to do so in a more direct manner, getting into direct contact with local officials and policymakers. I recall when we were first asked to attend community board meetings which encourage this kind of civil behaviour, and most of us didn’t know where to find them or how they worked. I wonder what we could do to better advertise and explain these options to community members in an effort to prevent more harmful outbursts in the future.

Going through this weeks readings, I couldn’t help but draw connections to some of our previous readings on the criminalization of homelessness. The second excerpt from Gilmore’s work, Producing More Prisoners, highlighted how lawmakers were making an effort to incarcerate primarily black and Latino citizens using similar tactics to those used to sweep homeless people into prisons. By increasing the penalty for actions frequently performed by populations deemed “undesirable,” government officials were able to effectively target minority populations more aggressively for criminal activity and enforce laws on them more heavily than white populations.
Of course, it is said that history repeats itself, and Crenshaw’s essay on the Rodney King beating exemplifies this perfectly. Just as the criminalization of homelessness led to tensions and eventual violent outbursts between governments and displaced populations, so too did the increased policing of minority populations lead to chaos and violence. What’s particularly frightening about the racial violence from this weeks reading is that, unlike riots over homelessness and gentrification, rioting and violence over racial tensions are still very real today.

The second reading declares that the “key issue was sentence length” (Gilmore 89). It’s staggering to think that there were indeterminate sentences, which means a person going in wouldn’t have something to look forward to in terms of escape. From a psychological standpoint, this would have made it very hard for these criminals to be rehabilitated. In a system they feel they’re being cheated by (by not knowing the duration of their stay in prison), they wouldn’t be invested in the programs offered. Similarly, not knowing the grounds for release would eradicate the hope some would have for an earlier sentence. These prisoners who then worked toward rehabilitation with the prison system to “persuade local parole boards of their readiness to rejoin society” (89) would not be demonstrating this readiness for any reason other than the desire to get out. Thus, they would most likely say or act any way the parole board would want, only for as long as it took to be freed. Food for thought: do stated sentences or uncertain ones produce more “rehabilitated” convicts?

I think that the best response to this reading is, thank you instructor for showing us this type of reality that many times the media purposefully avoids. Not only did these people cut the life off the streets, but they also prevented any sort of progress to be made by the middle and lower classes and pushed them to a corner of the city. When I read things like these it makes me wonder whether the people who committed such atrocious crimes against the poor and immigrants ever read about the times of slavery in the United States, or whether they were aware of all the suffering endured by the population during these times of inhumanity and political, social, and economic inequality. The reason why I mention this is because I was told that the main purpose of studying history is to learn from the mistakes made by humanity and live to avoid taking the same wrong steps. But after reading about the existence of “Fortress Los Angeles” makes me conclude that, in fact, these people were so ignorant that never in a million years would they have the brains to acknowledge the pain that they caused to so many people.

Question: What did you guys find the most disturbing after reading this? Can you draw any parallels with today’s society?

Based on this article: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/20/why-are-brooklyn-street-artists-so-obsessed-with-the-past.html

It’s very interesting to note that through all neighborhoods combatting gentrification, Bushwick chooses to do so through street art. In a way, using this method to bring attention to issues of gentrification is one of the most effective for the area. The current residents who are speaking out against gentrification are often artists of different sorts. As the article puts it, “Many of the works [of street art] fetishize the gritty ‘old Brooklyn’ and sense of ‘community’ that has been lost to gentrification” (Crocker). This makes me think that street art is, in fact, the best way for Bushwick to take back its identity. By uniting through street art, a sense of community is restored. Last year I went on a street art walking tour of Bushwick and the tour guide confided in me that he lived in Bushwick and was part of an underground coalition of street artists who helped one another out and often collaborated. In an odd way, art can help save this community.

The separation of affluent neighborhoods and less fortunate ones is just a physical representation of the dichotomy between the classes. The article is aware of this, stating that, “genuinely democratic space is virtually extinct” (Davis 156). This goes a bit farther, I think, with individuals of different classes hardly ever exchanging anything more than temporarily shared space on the sidewalk. I wonder if movements of activists and urban reformers should be aimed only toward making areas for the poorer classes (public spaces such as parks, for instance) or toward making areas for all people accessible to all people. This would be a harder task, surely – the wealthy probably would have some reservations about letting their white-washed lives be tainted with sights of poverty – but in the end it could cause a more empathetic and unified city. This may be impossible; is there any way to encourage the interaction of people between different classes, particularly through public space?

(This response is on this article, and, following, this website.)

When we read Smith’s piece on the urban frontier, I found myself in hilarity because of how much the pioneer aesthetic is in hipster culture. Arrows, vaguely indian motifs, sun-dried skulls—in the more insidious bits, straight-up-appropriated indian headdresses—it’s all there. But I thought of it as something that everyone was sort of ignorant about (Why arrows? I dunno, it looks cool.)—not so much intentional in its rhetoric as innocuous. But then—Colony 1209.

Colony 1209 is a luxury apartment building in Bushwick located on DeKalb avenue near Bushwick avenue. Residents are up in arms about it because of some pernicious tax practices the building is using to get more profit while gentrifying the area. It’s website is also washed in frontier rhetoric. The splash page reads “Welcome to Colony 1209: On Brooklyn’s New Frontier.” Their about page reads “Homesteading—Brooklyn Style.” Their amenities page talks of exploration; the location page says “We already surveyed the area for you.” The entire thing is sort of sickening, because it seems to refer to Bushwick as unrefined territory—its native naturally being cast as the sort of savage other us young adults are meant to displace. But the entire frontier myth works through this cowboy lens: see, conquer, this land was yours and now is mine, go somewhere else. It’s intentionally hostile to natives of Bushwick and I don’t understand how anyone could write this copy without feeling dirty. Is marketing always in favor of the gentry?

Here’s an event featuring the author of this week’s reading, on Thursday for anybody who is interested!