Displacement and State-Sanctioned Violence: A New York City Tale
Everywhere I go I carry my home with me, and for me home consists of two specific places. The first being the Dominican Republic, which is the place that my ancestry and familial lineage leans back to, and the place that I often occupies my mind when I think and dream about going back home. In addition to the Dominican Republic, the place that I call home, that I have tattooed on my body and that I defend and love deeply is The Bronx, NY. I have spent the majority of my life in The Bronx, apart from living in the Dominican Republic for a few years during my childhood, and visiting every summer after we moved from the tropical and Caribbean island to the islands of New York, The Bronx has been home for me for as long as I can remember. I was born there, I learned to speak English there, I found my love for volleyball there, and most importantly I found my identity as a Black feminist and a [young] community organizer there. In this very moment I can think of many stories that can speak to how being from The Bronx taught me how to be critical of my environment. I learned to be critical not of my people but of the violence, displacement and stigma that I, and friends and family alike, had to face as Black and Brown people from The Bronx. I was critical in a way that questioned the violence and injustices and stigma we faced. Every time I would hear people on the train saying that “The Bronx is dirty”, or whenever I had arguments with friends because they wanted to tell me how violent and dangerous and uninhabitable my borough was, I was critical. I found myself asking myself what the roots of the violence that we were experiencing was and what the root of the stigma was. I found myself thinking a lot about my people and the childhood friends and community members who were lost to violence, and even more so those who were loss to state-sanctioned violence. At the time that I was asking myself these questions I was also being introduced to gender and racial justice work. I was lucky enough to be apart of organizations, attend events, and be in community with people who were giving me the language and tools needed to ask these critical questions. In the process of being in this learning community I started to learn that the violence that I was seeing and experiencing, that hundreds of Black, Brown, immigrant and poor people in The Bronx were experiencing was due to structural and systemic racism and classism. I learned that the stigma that was associated with our borough was similar to the stigma that communities across the city were also facing and that it was all rooted in structural racism that took resources out of our spaces and then criminalized our streets and people for trying to survive. Of course some of the things that people did to survive caused harm, but when you live in a policed environment that is anti-poor and anti-Black harm is, first and foremost, produced and perpetuated by the government. Learning this was pivotal because not only was I become aware of the language to process what I had witnessed and experienced growing up, I was also able to make sense of what was happening around me, which was more violence sanctioned by the state.
“The city’s actions have made it clear that poor people and working class people of color do not belong there, and to make things clearer, the city has leaned on policing forces to criminalize poor people of color.”
There are many forms of state-sanctioned violence that impacted my borough and the city that I call home, but today the one that sticks out the most because of its gruesome impact of displacement and erasure is that of gentrification. The term gentrification dates back to 1964, when a British sociologist named Ruth Glass used the term to discuss the displacement that poor and working class people experienced at the hands of middle and upper middle class people, which caused the “district” or neighborhood to change completely. In the same year that Ruth Glass coined the term Black communities were organizing against state sanctioned racism, segregation, dehumanization and fighting for basic human rights. For example, in cities like Philadelphia, LA and Chicago Black and Brown students were organizing against poor learning conditions and demanding that their local government adequately fund their learning environments. In some of these cities the conditions and terms laid out by the students were met but other actions were taking place that would have a great impact on those students and their communities in the decades to come. What was taking place was the cities’ investment in the urban renewal project, and one city that was significantly impacted by this was New York City.
In New York City the urban renewal project was the plan that set the foundation for gentrification and created another avenue of violence and discrimination for Black and Brown communities. In the 1960s it specifically led to the destruction of the Lower East Side, a community that was composed of Black American, Puerto Rican, and immigrant peoples. It is important to note that in this case “destruction” looked like the literal destruction of businesses and buildings, and replacing those spaces with new and more comfortable buildings that were not affordable to the people of the LES. Regardless of how much the people of LES demanded that the city used their urban renewal project as a way to invest in new buildings for the community that was already there or use the funds to create community spaces the city still decided to use the project and its funds to kick-start the process of displacement.
Today, not much has changed. Motivated by urban renewal laws, broken window policies, and, in my opinion, a political and economic drive to keep New York City as a place where only the wealthy are allowed to live, the current investment that the local government has in gentrification is powerful. It is so powerful that the city has rezoned areas in order to allow for redevelopment with little to no regard to how the community has been pushing back against such rezoning actions. The city’s actions have made it clear that poor people and working class people of color do not belong there, and to make things clearer, the city has leaned on policing forces to criminalize poor people of color. In fact, in this last year alone the city trained and hired 500 more police officers to patrol the city. This investment in cops has resulted in very violent encounters where mainly young Black New Yorkers are tased, attacked and arrested for not being able to afford the overly price metro-card to navigate the city. The act of adding more officers on payroll, having them police the streets, and having their post be at train stations is an act of the state using violence to reinforce gentrification by stating that only those who can afford to live here are allowed to exist here. It is an act of violence and it serves as a reminder to what James Baldwin said during the early days of urban renewal project investment, it is a form of Black removal and that is an act of violence.
Now, the issue is how do we combat this violence? Thanks to the labor of Black and Brown people, there are a number of grassroots organizing efforts led by community organizations such as Hydr0punk and Take Back The Bronx that are doing anti-gentrification and anti-police work in NYC. These are organizations that and spaces that we must pour into because through their work and through the work of multiple community organizations we can reclaim our borough and our community.