What is unique about black people’s relationships to land and place?

What issues characterize black relationships to land and place?

How does our community talk about their relationship to land and place?

Why do black Americans have a unique relationship to land?

Some ways public policy has shaped black relationships to land and place

• Indenture or enslavement

• Laws requiring purchased or earned “freedom”

• American Revolutionaries/ Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment

• Freedmen farmers under Field Order 15

• Sharecroppers

• Exodusters

• Segregation-driven schools and land grant colleges

• Southern farmers targeted for policy-driven land loss

• Prosperous business owners targeted in white race riots

• Homeowners, despite redlining, racial covenants

• Owners of urban property devalued by white flight

• Communities displaced by urban renewal

• Middle-class land loss through subprime loans

Black Land Loss

Economic Potential of Black / Land

Narrow Framing

Historical Trauma

Black Land Loss

Questions about Land Loss

• How are black residents in D.C. connected to the experience of rural land in the South?

• Do residents who are losing neighborhoods to blight feel connected to a long history of land seizure and land loss?

• How are residents of other cities responding to gentrification caused by smart growth policies?

Critical Issue : Untapped Economic Potential of Black Land

Questions about the Economic Potential of Black /Land

• What land use conversations other than urban gardening are happening in your community?

• What environmental pollution issues affect the future of your community?

• Where are there spaces for small business to grow?

• How do black people want to use public land?

• How does housing shape neighborhood stability and local economy?

Critical Issue:Healing Historical Trauma

Key Questions : Historical Trauma

• What past grief is your black community still fixated on today?

• What current issues about place and land use arouse helplessness and fear of re-victimization in black neighborhoods?

• Where is D.C. succeeding in transcending the experience of historical trauma related to land? What evidence shows this?

Expanding the Narrow Frame

Key Questions: Narrow Framing

• Where are black communities already regenerating in the District? Why is it happening there?

• What ways of thinking about our neighborhood will we have to give up in order to move forward?

• Who is thinking and talking about land in ways that are totally new to us?

If we treat the way black people self-define their relationships to land

and place as authoritative, might that change how we do our work?

Implications for Action

• How are black folk in D.C making theory from their shared stories now?

• How can we use story in our organizing work?

• How would our organizing look different if it was based on those stories, instead of issues?

• What next steps might we take toward narrative -based organizing?

D.C. Stories We want to hear people tell about …

• Barry Farm

• Sheridan Terrace

• Relationship between people who have been displaced and those who have displaced them

• Chelsea Garden

• Public use of public land

• How art and culture create narratives

• The stories told by people who have been told that they have “no story”.

• Black bodies as land

• Go-go bands as a relationship to land and place

• Neighborhood stories, where people died or killed for land they didn’t even own

• Black relationships to land from the perspective of business owners

D.C. Stories We want to hear people tell about …

The Black/Land Project

www.BlackLandProject.org

ContactUs@BlackLandProject.org

Many thanks to HAFA-DC

For hosting this conversation!