Maybe When the World Burns Down: Reflections on the Un-Urbanist Assembly and the Art of Protest
These days breathing is my protest.
Words unspoken linger as I watch anti-Black violence unfold on screen after screen. I want to say that my mouth is full. I want to say that there’s no more room for Black names to spill from my lips like Black blood on concrete. To softly whisper that my hands are too full of injustice for picket signs and protest, my spirit too restless for heavy lids that stay lifted for fear of never being able to open again. But I cannot. Buoyed by my dear friend’s sentiment, “We wake up breathing. We are not helpless,” I know that while I may not have the words, I have my breath.
My heart beating to the steady rhythm of heartbreak, I breathe in service of my legacy. I may die and injustice will outlive me. But, perhaps, it will not outlive my children’s children’s children. I gather myself and exhale into a world so hell bent on stealing all the Black ones away. Breathing while Black is righteous resistance. Breathing while Black requires that we take from the earth, when they’d rather us have nothing at all. So, I breathe and I remember — I am not alone.
From Claudette Colvin to Erica Garner, the prowess of Black women’s physicality has ignited some of the biggest Civil Rights movements in history. In a country that is more concerned with the destruction of brick and mortar than the destruction of Black bodies, we hold power simply by existing. Through breath and beyond, Black women are no strangers to using our bodies to elevate the humanity of all people. On the eve of Juneteenth, Dr. Destiny Thomas decided to do just that. And within a day, she orchestrated a critical shift in an industry whose legacy is as deeply intertwined with injustice and anti-Black racism as America itself.
“Protest is the sacred communication of grief.” — Dr. Destiny Thomas
Over the span of 23 hours, the Un-Urbanist Assembly brought together a global audience of 8,000 people. 23 hours in honor of the life of Ahmaud Arbery, who was brutally murdered while jogging on February 23, 2020. The symphonic digital protest spoke to the powerful duality of Black women. Dr. Thomas, who remained awake and astute for the entire 23 hour duration, not only led a virtual teach-in to facilitate the unlearning of racism in the built environment, but also hosted several spaces for Black, brown, and Indigenous practitioners to assemble beyond the white gaze.
At 2:30 AM, I logged into the Planners as Culture Bearers session. I had nothing to offer but my bonnet and myself. Still, despite my hesitation at the invitation, I turned my camera on. I had never entered an industry space as vulnerable and undone as I did that one. But it was not long before I was joined by others with silk-protected tresses, gracious but tired smiles, and early morning Modelos. We conversed into dawn about the musicality, the poetry, the rhythm and the dance — the heartbeat — of Black, brown, and Indigenous communities.
Every single hour of the Un-Urbanist Assembly was masterfully orchestrated and vocal. There was a deepening in the communal understanding of the humility required to achieve collective justice. A lesson awaited everyone, even those well-versed in the colloquial traumas inflicted on communities of color in the name of urbanism.
Urbanism, and the term ‘urbanist’ is typically used in reference to the development and planning of cities and towns. Through her deliberate use of the term ‘un-urbanist’, Dr. Thomas calls for policies, programs, and processes that no longer center “white comfort” as the baseline for planning praxis. The value of Dr. Thomas and so many other Black planners’ work is beyond quantification. In the pursuit of a just future, the world of urban and regional planning is one we must pay very close attention to.
Cities, which have served as the backdrop for decades of inequity, will continue to be the foreground of the revolution. Black trans women are being brutalized in our streets. Black women are being kidnapped and murdered in our streets. Black men and boys are being killed by police in our streets. Black families are displaced and unhoused — in our streets. The devastation of this injustice is mirrored in the shattered glass that illuminated streets all over the world after nights of unrest.
From the highways that desecrated thriving communities to the bicycle and pedestrian amenities that come to the neighborhood only when the people who have spent their lives walking in the shoulder of the road can no longer afford to reside there — urban planning bequeaths a tradition in which infrastructure is valued over Black life. Until this cycle is broken within our profession, and within our country, we need protest as much as we need air.
Maybe your breath is your protest, too. Maybe your protest is painting murals on boarded up windows in deft defiance. Or, maybe your protest is forgoing sleep for 24 hours to call in an entire industry. Like art, protest requires the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination. This fight is multi-hued and textured. We must explore every medium until Black bodies are regarded with the same deference given to broken glass and scorched buildings.
In the words of Dr. Destiny Thomas, the culture bearers are the ones who cannot be silenced. Thus, we must make art. We must breathe. And, we must burn.
For all we know, that which we gather from its remnants is more powerful, more poignant than what is lost in the fire. Maybe when the world burns down, there is hope in the ashes. As injustice hinges in the flame, the clearing smoke is a sanctification of Black life and Black breath in living color.
