on missing the forest for the trees

Slimm Fabert
Nov 7 · 5 min read

in the last 24hrs the New York Times has published not one, not two, but three different articles about a conflict going on in kansas city, missouri about The Paseo, a street that serves as one of the city’s major arteries on the east side of town.

to make it brief: earlier this year, the city tried to get the populace to vote on whether to rename the street from “Paseo Blvd” (more commonly referred to as The Paseo) to “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.” as far as i’m aware, the justification for the change is a combination of feeling guilty for being one of the few major cities in the country without a street named after MLK, combined with “well why not? everybody loves MLK.”

so, earlier this year, the city replaced the street signs for the entire 19-miles-and-change length of the Paseo with street signs that, at least, only committed minor crimes against kerning. however, in KCMO, in order to change the name of a street, city ordinance says you’re supposed to hold a vote first, where the residents of that street consent to having the name changed. they tried to get the votes and failed, and so “city officials” (hm, vague!) voted amongst themselves and went ahead and did it anyway.

kansas city is, even today, heavily segregated, and most of the people who live on the Paseo are black. so this conflict became very embarrassing to The Powers That Be when the residents started to protest that, no offense to Dr. King, but they liked the Paseo just fine, thanks, and didn’t much appreciate the city breaking its own rules to go against the wishes of a bunch of black & brown residents. and so: a display of solidarity towards the cause of anti-racism became just another example of leaders going out of their way to disenfranchise black residents. whoopsie!!

so, as part of our local elections, KCMO held a vote yesterday about what name the street should bear, and as of Nov 5th, 2019, the vote has ended with about 65% of participants in favor of allowing the Paseo to remain the Paseo. according to NYT, a local reverend referred to this as “a shameful day for kansas city [which] set us decades back in the march toward racial justice and racial inclusion.”

i currently live one block west of The Paseo, in a neighborhood called Manheim Park. the mood of the neighborhood, to me at least, feels like a microcosm of KC’s ongoing gentrification problem — on the north side of my street are mostly recently-renovated homes owned by middle-class white families, but if you skip one or two blocks to the east or south, you find block after block of houses with their roofs caving in and abandoned, graffiti’d apartment complexes. NYT describes The Paseo as “synonymous with black success,” which honestly seems kind of like a cruel joke to me — as a resident, to me it seems synonymous with the city’s gentrification pushing ever-eastward, pushing people out of the city proper towards Independence, MO, also known as the on-again off-again meth capital of the world. living near Paseo isn’t a source of pride because it implies material success — it implies resilience in the face of a city that continually prioritizes its rich white residents over, well, pretty much everyone else. to the people in charge, it seems that these neighborhoods and communities are worth nothing but the low price of the property they sit on.

kansas city is — and has been for decades — one of the most heavily segregated cities in the country. a local made a documentary for youtube about kansas city’s history of redlining and structural racism. to locals, the real dividing line in the city (displayed in the map below) is not actually The Paseo, but Troost Ave.

this map is from 2013, so i’m unsure how things may have changed since then. when i moved here in 2012, the other suburban white kid transplants talked about Troost as if it was terrifyingly sketchy — walking home alone there after dark was a death wish that only grew stronger the further you went east. if Troost was bad, then the Paseo was worse, and you might as well plan to be shot in broad daylight if you dare venture alone down Prospect.

now, having seen firsthand how Troost is becoming the new hot spot for gentrification, this terror among my fellow white college kids seems, uh, quaint. As Hyde Park — the neighborhood directly west of Troost in midtown, — gets steadily more expensive to live in, existing already-unchecked slumlords to the east sell their rotting properties off to out-of-state developers, and beautiful-but-neglected old apartment buildings to the east are torn down and replaced with shoddy new condos that no one can afford.

i’ve been watching this specific street name fight happen from the sidelines, so i haven’t heard directly from the people either in favor of or against renaming the street, but to me, this seems like an example of how sometimes people who ascribe to progressive politics can miss the forest for the trees — it is so much easier, after all, to rename a street after a famous civil rights activist than it is to actually make the structural changes that would allow poor folks & poc to stop living at the mercy of landlords and police.

if kansas city wants to honor Dr. King’s memory, maybe we could start by holding said slumlords accountable for renting properties that are unfit to live in. we could pass the KC Tenants’ Bill Of Rights, which would make it illegal to deny people housing based on past evictions, or to evict tenants just to renovate the property and double the price. we could even consider some rent control measures — god forbid! — or invest more in public schools and public transportation, both of which are notoriously awful and inconsistent in KC. we could at least maybe stop our cops from pouring bleach on food prepared for homeless people!

how often do we do this — pay lip service to a progressive ideal without actually doing anything that would make our marginalized neighbors’ lives easier? and worse — how often do we end up making our marginalized neighbors’ lives *harder* in the pursuit of patting ourselves on the back for making a good show of how totally good and progressive we are? why do we choose to do these performative-but-ultimately-useless displays of antiracist sentiment only in places where the people inconvenienced by the technicalities aren’t white? (if they really wanted to name a street after MLK so bad, they could have done it downtown where more [white] people would see it, but they didn’t.) if changing a street name is comparatively inconsequential, how often do we (accidentally or not!) turn displays of solidarity into displays of power in smaller arenas like interpersonal relationships?

i have zero doubt that this brand of performance of good will is an effective way to placate well-intentioned-but-unorganized people, to keep them from pushing for real, material, life-altering changes — will we remain naive and let them get away with it? or can we show solidarity to our marginalized neighbors by actually showing up to pressure our leaders to make changes that will genuinely make their lives easier?


for opportunities to assist in organizing for housing reform in KCMO, check out https://kctenants.org/