race relations

"I knew where I was," muses Slimm, the 25-year-old road captain from the Los Ryderz Bike Club regarding his fateful decision to roll past 65th on Broadway - the heart of East Coast Crips territory, "but I was just riding by..."

Thursday's ruling approving the County's bid to acquire the lots from developer Eli Sasson via eminent domain effectively closes the book on the 26 years the community has been held hostage to blight.

People had been so caught up in detailing the crimes against humanity her “poopy feet” had wrought that there was very little space for reflection on the larger implications of what it was that people were cheering.

Between May and September of this year, the lawsuit Public Counsel filed on behalf of the Labor/Community Strategy Center (LCSC) this past December 13 states, both Metro and the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department (LASD) failed to adequately respond (or respond at all) to multiple requests for public records regarding policing and fare enforcement practices, breakdowns of data on those arrested, cited, and engaged by law enforcement, and the agreements and communications between Metro and law enforcement agencies regarding law enforcement's role in policing transit. [The lawsuit can be found here: PDF]

The fact that the community has spent nearly 26 years waiting for this project to materialize is just one of many reasons that the County's vote to condemn the lots came as no surprise today.

She had had enough of hearing her community spoken about in offensive ways by well- (and not-so-well-) meaning planners and advocates, enough of giving 110 percent of herself only to realize a fraction of what she put forward was being seen as having value, enough of how disinterested those with power over what happened in marginalized communities remained in the larger picture, and enough of being tokenized.

So much of what we do within this field is aimed at addressing vulnerabilities - including threats to health, safety, and overall well-being - in order to build healthy, resilient, inclusive, livable, and just communities and cities. And yet, all too often, those with the power and resources to influence debates on what constitutes a valid form of vulnerability or how it should be addressed themselves have limited experience with or knowledge of the wider range of intersectional vulnerabilities faced by just about everyone that is not an able-bodied heterosexual cis-gender white male.

A conversation about how to have uncomfortable conversations, moderated by Charles T. Brown and featuring Tamika Butler, Sahra Sulaiman, Sonia Jimenez, and author Richard Rothstein.

The family is afraid that a full accounting is a long ways off. Detectives told them that they may not have an answer or see the video of the incident until the investigation is complete - six months to a year from now.