Across the country, Black city-builders are imagining and creating more just and beautiful communities. What are they learning and dreaming? On April 21, Next City hosted the virtual release of Urban Consulate Confidential, a series of candid cross-city conversations hosted by Orlando P. Bailey in Detroit, made possible by the Ford Foundation, and rooted in radical truth, joy and love. The release event drew over 550 registrations from around the world.
In this one-hour virtual premiere event, Bailey welcomed three featured guests from Washington, D.C., Minneapolis and Cincinnati to delve deep into key themes and invite audience reflection and action. As it so happened, this conversation occurred 24 hours after the Derek Chauvin verdict in Minneapolis, so the ongoing trauma of George Floyd’s murder and racial violence was top of mind.
Here are key outtakes from their conversation:
Naimah Bilal
Urban Consulate Cincinnati
"City-building is both seen and unseen. I think a lot about world building when I think of city building. N.K. Jemisin has this really beautiful analogy that she uses to frame it as a fiction writer. How do you even start to create a world that doesn't exist? And the analogy that she shares is that it's almost like this iceberg effect, right? There's the 10% of what you see in our built environment, the cityscapes. The streets, the roads, parks. But 90% of that iceberg is completely unseen.
And when I think about city-building, I think about all of the people and energy and souls and spirit and advocacy that is totally unseen. I think about the caretakers in my life who take Grandma to the doctor every day. That's a city builder. I think about the single mother who doesn't have the supports and infrastructure because of inequity, and she has to work two or three jobs to ensure her children have what they need. That's a city builder.
So city building is an act of creating, and it likely being unseen and unrecognized. And that 10% that we see is but the physical manifestation of a lot more."
-Naimah Bilal
"I'm not a planner per se. I'm certainly not an architect. I've never seen myself as someone who worked in the built environment. What I do is show people through research that it's not the people that create the conditions in which they are in, it is the policies that have extracted wealth, talent and opportunity from Black communities — that throttle the growth and prosperity in Black communities.
There's nothing wrong with Black people that ending racism can't solve. I say that over and over again because when we see the conditions of Black cities, when things go wrong in Black majority cities and neighborhoods, we blame people. And my job is to show that no, that's not the case. It's actually the policies that extract the wealth, talent, and opportunities from us. And that's what you're seeing — a lack of investment."
"I will say just one more aspect of being a city-builder. It's also about building family. If you can leave a place and honestly say that you have another brother, you have another sister, you have another auntie, another uncle, then you are a city builder.
If you walk into a place, and you've not met and locked in lifelong friends and family, and it's an inconvenience for you, then you are not a city-builder.
We have lots of people who are focused on brick and mortar, and are so disconnected from the people themselves that they're actually not building community, they're deconstructing it and tearing it apart. And so it's all about people. All about people."
-Dr. Andre M. Perry
"I would argue that I know several hundred Black people across this nation — and many of them are Urban Consulate family too, right? — if we were to invest directly in them today, we would not even have to wait a generation to change our country.
Reparations at its core is just a return on the investment that we have put into this nation from the very, very beginning. We know that's a $32 billion investment into our ecosystem that benefits every single person. If we look at Chicago, New York, D.C., Cincinnati, Detroit — if we go around our country — we can quantify immediately, the benefit to investing in Black people.
We're going to see a decrease in our health care costs, right? We're going to see an increase in life expectancy for folks. We're going to see an increase in graduation rates. We're going to see an increase in all of the joy and the peace, we're going to see more people at work, we're going to see more inventors who actually are getting their technologies patented, who are moving forward in life. And overall, we will see national productivity actually put us back on a competitive market with the rest of the world.
Getting rid of this anti-Blackness actually catapults the United States of America into a place that makes sense for the type of country that we are supposed to be."
-Shauen Pearce
FINAL QUESTION:
What do you want more people to understand about this collective work to build more equitable cities? Dr. Andre M. Perry responds:
1. Safety:
"The same attitude that Derek Chauvin had, teachers have. Mailmen have. City-builders have. Policymakers have. Presidents have. So for me, the point is absolutely clear that you need to get guns out of racist hands in the military and police forces. That has to be central, there are few other things that will lead to protection in my mind.”
2. POLITICAL REPRESENTATION:
“We don't have the political representation reflective of where and how we live. Period. Our voting rights are constantly eroded. If we are blocked from various offices, we are not going to be protected.”
3. INVESTMENT:
“We do need investment because of years of wealth extraction from anti-Black racism, Jim Crow, all these other things. We do not have the wealth other people do, and wealth is a predictor for health, education, all these other issues. So we do need investment in the form of asset acquisition. Why I'm a supporter of Reparations is because you can actually create a level playing field. But if people don't get investment, it will still be a hard road. We know because of New Deal housing and transportation policy that investment can lead to building up communities, almost within a generation. And so we have an opportunity — not just with this American Rescue Bill, but also the Infrastructure Bill — to actually direct resources that will lead to our protection.”
4. RACIAL EQUITY SCORECARD:
“I do believe we need some form of equity scoring at the city, state, and national level. Just as we score bills against their impact on the budget, we should be scoring bills on their potential impact on Black and brown people in this country. If you're going to have a bill, and it's not going to lead to Black jobs, it's not going to lead to wealth-building, it's not going to lead to ownership — then it's not a good bill. Period."
Read more on scoring from Dr. Perry here.