By Amber Butts
“Architecture is an instrument of domination. It organizes bodies in space with a varying degree of coercion, from what may appear as voluntary to the most extreme instances of violence. It does not invent racism, but it provides the spatial and territorial conditions for racism to exercise itself.”- Léopold Lambert
Sometimes I park in front of my grandparents’ old house on Fleming in Oakland, praying that somehow my dead grandfather (papa) will be sitting on the porch with a can of beer in hand and a smile to everyone who passes by. Even in my prayer/dream some of the new folks who pass by don’t return his smile. They turn their heads as if he is the stranger there, the one who doesn’t belong, the person with a new smell.
I knew it was a good day if I saw my papa sitting outside on the porch, even after his terminal cancer diagnosis. He always told me who didn’t speak, but he never let them know it was an issue. Sometimes, I’d see him stretch right there on that porch, in his blue striped pajama pants as if to say, “This is mine. I can be whole here.”
The people who live in that house now are not my grandparents. No one in that house is a relative of mine. But my memories are there, in the room we moved papa in to keep him as comfortable as possible while the cancer ate at all the recognizable pieces of him.
Yesterday I parked in front of the house again. No one opened the white curtains this time. But one of the owners came out and checked the mailbox, as if they haven’t learned in the almost two years they’ve lived there that the mail carrier doesn’t deliver mail until after 3pm. They look at me out of the corner of their eye, walking slowly back into the house. I bare my teeth, sniffling and let out a chuckle that has no joy in it. The grass still smells like my papa. It needs to be cut.
Granny and papa lived in that house together for over forty-five years. They raised children and grandchildren in it, had barbeques, baby showers, and birthday parties. But after papa passed away, the small two and a half bedroom, one bathroom house was suffocating to granny. She couldn’t breathe in it.
So the house was put on the market, and sold within a week. I regret it now, but I didn’t say goodbye at the time because none of it felt real. When I close my eyes, we are in that house again, with the rickety wooden living room floor. With papa’s urn being the first thing I look at when I enter and all our photos reaching out to it like a flower.
I cried the whole ninety minutes it took to drive from my house to granny’s new one. It used to take me ten minutes to get there.
When I arrived, there was a line of cars and two black metal gates in the front. The line to the right was for residents who had a remote key. The line to the left, the visitor’s line, was heavily surveilled.
In order to get in, security asks for your name, a form of identification, and the address and name of the person you’re visiting. They then call that person. If the person doesn’t answer, you have to wait, no matter how long it takes. And sometimes security asks you to pull on the side so other visitors (whose hosts answer the phone) can get through. You aren’t allowed in until someone verbally confirms you’re here to see them—even if it’s an emergency.
I’ve been there dozens of times and yet I keep thinking, how can this be home? Sometimes my brain doesn’t process that this is her home now, and I check my phone to make sure I have the correct address.
But even my grandparent’s old house has been repainted. The shutters are a bright orange and there’s a new door. The screen always gave us trouble because it never fully closed and constantly invited flies in whenever we’d cook. Now there are motion sensor lights and cameras on the property. The only thing that’s the same is the crooked, concrete driveway beneath the bleeding red they painted. And even that looks different to me.
Oakland is a city that’s rapidly changing, with buildings seemingly being built from the ground up overnight and predominantly Black neighborhoods disappearing. Most of the community gardens are either fenced in or privatized, and families seeking shelter in empty homes are arrested. Neighbors’ concerns are neglected or retaliated against by the city, their landlords, developers, and sometimes other neighbors. The neglect has led to fires, illnesses, evictions and even death.
I try to make sense of these “new” places. Of an Oakland that doesn’t feel or look the same. I wonder if these places still hold our memories, if the wind still whistles through the living room window of an old house that is now ashes.
There are four times more vacant homes than there are houseless people in Oakland. And everywhere around me, I witness how gentrification and capitalism have informed (and required) carceral policies. The city “moved” the encampment down the street from my house under the justification that it’ll eliminate hazardous waste from the streets and support public safety. But there are people living here. Folks who have been pushed out of their homes into the streets, cars and train tracks.
I’m pissed because our communities are prettied up while we are being denied access to them. The presence of trees, bike lanes, less potholes, more grocery stores and sustainable food options are all things we should already have, and yet, the only time it’s paid most attention to is when folks from higher socioeconomic statuses begin to take an interest in it—and us.
It’s not just the removal of folks’ homes and belongings that let locals know they don’t belong.
The employee that works at the grocery store around the corner from my house reports that over $6 million dollars worth of inventory was stolen last year, citing houseless folks. Their solution was to rearrange the store, putting the baby care items (including formula and diapers), liquor, deodorant, shampoo, cotton swabs, eye and over the counter medicines in the same area. In order to get into the area to get any of the items folks have to pass up at least one armed security guard, a large sign that reads they’re being recorded and a line separator. A sign reads, “All items in this section need to be paid before exiting.”
History as written on flesh, as an optic that guides ways of seeing, understanding, and accounting for [our] place in the world. I think it is the frame that produces Black bodies as signifiers of enslavement and its excesses, and it is the ground that positions us to bear the burden of that signification. -Dr. Christina Sharpe
My nana, a spectacularly Southern Black woman, was forced to travel the backroads of Louisiana and look directly at the decaying bodies on lynching sites. When she tried to skip the area by taking a shortcut, her life was threatened and she was directed back to the sites to look at the bodies until whichever white police officer was there at the time said it was acceptable to move on.
I think it’s both the external and internal structures that mark whether it is acceptable to pass them. Sometimes these structures are represented and reinforced by language, while at other times they are designated by body language, music, signage, cost, and design. They inform how folks are treated.
Sometimes nana wouldn’t eat dinner until after 9pm, all while watching white children and their parents eat, laugh and gawk at bodies who look like hers. On those nights, she said she ate because she had to, and I imagine her putting some of the food to the side in offering. She used to say, “racism in California is worse because it hides behind the lie that everyone is equal until the day they aren’t.”
Each time I enter the grocery store, take a bike ride around the lake or sit and read at the park, I can’t help but note how even in these supposedly neutral spaces, Jim Crow lives on to this day. At the end of Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws were instituted in communities. These formal laws supported anti-Blackness, segregation and social regulation. It mandated that Black and white races be separated in schools, parks, libraries, drinking fountains, restrooms, trains and restaurants.
Signage, structures and objects functioned as markers to highlight race and class distinctions, operating as violent extractions, placemaking and racial terror. When urban planners and architects drew blueprints, they designed with race in mind. And specifically, the building of white, accessible spaces that had little interaction and visibility of colored folks was paramount, regardless of how much difficulty it caused the “colored” to navigate.
Black folks being intentionally kept out of and/or unable to access particular spaces is not new. And the punishment that folks have historically received for attempting to access these spaces are byproducts of environmental racism. Home ownership, art curation, hospitals, sustainable food, affordable housing and the disparate responses to climate catastrophe are all environmental racism issues.
The attitudes create culture and culture informs policies, which then normalize and legitimize specific anti-Black practices. It functions both as a sustainer and reinforcer of cultures that produce the conditions for harm. These conditions also seek to splinter our historical memories.
Anti-Black design is still woven into the structures being built today. Though signage is no longer necessary, the buildings still communicate who belongs, who may return and who is allowed to mourn (and be mourned) here.
Sarah Collins Rudolph, a survivor of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963 received no counseling, restitution or recognition after the atrocity. She says, “You know, you go into church to praise God, and you come out without your sister. And today, we still haven’t gotten an apology from the city of Birmingham. Nothing. Nothing. [We’re] still paying bills for doctors for my eye.”
Reading Suggestions:
“The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History,” Anne Caroline Bailey (2017)
“Citizen,” Claudia Rankine (2014)
“In the Wake,” Christina Sharpe (2016)
Amber Butts is a writer, organizer, grief worker and educator from Oakland, CA who believes that Black folk are already whole. Her work centers Black children, Black mamas and Black elders. It asks big and small questions about how we move towards actualizing spaces that center tenderness, nuance and joy while living in a world reliant on our terror.
Amber comes from a long line of hairdressers, storytellers and loud women from The South. She likes cheese, comic books and sings off-key.
