Thread by @sahrasulaiman

My god what is this explicit effort to deracialize racial profiling, @StreetsblogUSA? Pedestrians are not being overpoliced during COVID-19. Police are using COVID-19 as yet another excuse to harass folks of color, particularly Black people.
usa.streetsblog.org/2020/05/06/don…

I literally feel sick to be attached to the national Streetsblog network lately. But I'm going to try to push the bile back down and explain why this is so insidious - how it perpetuates structural harms and centers whiteness in planning in the guise of allyship.

First, framing policing as something that inconveniences and hinders *all* peds, and, on occasion, PoC peds in slightly more annoying ways, is a form of #AllLivesMatter.

It denies the way policing and the criminal justice system have explicitly been structured and deployed to monitor, constrain, and criminalize the behavior and movement of Black and brown people.

[Just realizing the better thing to do would have been to write all this out first before embarking on a rage thread so bear with me... this might be a little slow coming together]

Doing so makes it possible, for ex, to frame police who are not wearing masks (or wearing them improperly) punching youth of color in the face as some sort of weird anomaly tied to asking police to engage folks on public health.

"seemingly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here

"Who amongst us could have predicted that mask usage and social distancing would be selectively enforced?"

Though two videos of graphic police violence are included, they are immediately deracialized and blamed on the vector of oppressive health policy, which apparently resulted in a Black doctor being cuffed instead of educated about distancing... [I'm sorry what?]

That doctor was in front of his own home and was accused of dumping trash on his own lawn - the packaging of the supplies he was about to take to the unhoused community as part of his effort to do outreach and testing.
nytimes.com/2020/04/14/us/…

In the next paragraph, an attempt is made to figure out how these discrete, not systemic, incidents fit into a livability framework by labeling them as part of larger slate of "pedestrian 'crimes'" that oppress white people, too.

This flattening of the barriers to access to the public space people of color face speaks to the major chasm that exists between livability advocates and urbanists of privilege and BIPoC advocates and those who use a justice lens... Namely: la.streetsblog.org/2016/09/28/equ…

[Quoting myself is incredibly douchey but writing about this very specific clash between frameworks in urban planning might be one of the nichier niches ever to niche, so...]

Where do you anchor your frameworks and narratives? On the bicycle (or pedestrian, in this case)?

...which allows you to think of bicycles (and sidewalks and public space) as great equalizers and our shared impediment as cars and a lack of bike lanes...

Or on the body on that bicycle/walking down the street and all of the vectors of oppression imposed upon it?

Depending on where you anchor your frame, you are going to have an entirely different set of understandings of and prescriptions for how to make streets and sidewalks and cities more open, just, and welcoming for all.

What it definitely would not lead you to do is keep deracializing distancing issues being leveraged to brutalize PoC by suggesting that if more health outreach had been done in Black/brown communities they wouldn't be so sick & this could have been prevented. [I'm sorry, what?]

I feel like all I've done is rant lately. Those unlucky enough to be my followers saw me touch on many of these issues in a lengthy thread yesterday - similarly born from frustration with our national network's (and urbanism mor broadly) myopia.

https://twitter.com/sahrasulaiman/status/1258127621017096192

*more

And I will still not link to this horsetrash piece that deliberately distorts what the BIPoC advocates, members of the Untokening, and those trying to be allies to marginalized groups have been trying to say around #openstreets. Just know it is horsetrash.

https://twitter.com/sahrasulaiman/status/1258241174524968960

I have been so fortunate to spend the last 8+ years at @StreetsblogLA. It hasn't always been easy but I am proud of how we have grown and continue to grow in our capacity to center equity in our work. [I realize they might want to disown me now, tho, so...]

But I'm deeply concerned by how much more white-centered the lens has become over the past couple of years and how much I am not heard nationally, despite repeated empty assurances to the contrary.

In this moment - of all moments - it is imperative that those who think about cities have the capacity to build new paradigms that center the needs of those that have been deliberately left behind.

https://twitter.com/sahrasulaiman/status/1249545699751907330

I know. I quoted myself again. I'm a douche.

But we cannot afford for our cities to emerge from quarantine less intact, less inclusive, less resilient, or less just. And I'll be damned if I will let my own network participate in keeping us from that goal.

Especially a national network that has perpetuated harm by ceaselessly (and cringe-worthily) beating the drum for #openstreets for the past two months while struggling with even a basic understanding of whom the streets have never been open for or why or how.

Love and peas.