The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race. Carl C. Anthony
builds these bridges.
The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race traces the mythic roots of spatial apartheid, a condition which has become the norm in our metropolitan regions and our national narrative. Carl Anthony challenges the absence, invisibility, or erasure of entire segments of our community, advocating instead their full participation in our democracy. He demands that concepts of sacrifice zones must end. With grounded strategies and bold invention, he insists that the limbs wake up and the body be restored, revealing the hidden narrative.
What does radical belonging mean? How do we recover parts of ourselves as we recover the history of lost peoples? And how do we simultaneously restore a lost relation to land, to place, and to time? Who is served and who is harmed by cultural amnesia and fragmentation? Carl Anthony takes up these and other questions with outrageous and courageous acumen in the pages that follow. Throughout the journey from the first Flaring Forth to the rise of humanity in Africa and from the transatlantic slave trade to the evolution of our current social movements, Carl demonstrates that reestablishing a relationship to each of our histories is an essential healing process that connects us all to the Beloved Community.
Carl Anthony, architect, educator, and urban strategist, is one of the visionaries of the emerging climate justice movement. And his book offers a passport to this adventure, guiding us from the story of me to the story of we. As Carl travels from his roots in Philadelphia’s Black Bottom, he invites us to explore our own. As Carl discovers his place within the larger community and the cosmos, he offers a framework that is liberating and unifying for diverse cultural groups, as well as for diverse parts of ourselves. His narration guides us from separation to inclusive community where none are marginalized in future planning processes and all become aware that we each matter to the whole.
I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Carl on the frontlines of movement building over the last two decades and for the unrelenting demand he makes to explore new horizons and expand our circles of engagement. His book is inspiration for emerging leaders (including youth), community mobilizers, faith and labor organizers, urban planners, artists, activists, and multiracial coalitions. It is also wisdom for educators, policy experts, philanthropists, and change-makers of many varieties, field-builders, and pathfinders. As we each accompany Carl on his journey in this book, we have the opportunity to unearth lost parts of our own stories, as well as reclaim those of our communities.
Carl Anthony’s book is not only an astonishing window into deep history, it is also a mirror to the present. Further, it provides a portal to an emergent future, a glimpse of a new land. As we accompany Carl on this dangerous journey, enhanced by his expert guidance and cultural humility, we have the opportunity to see with new eyes—revealing that our story (as individuals and as a species) can change, the hidden parts can be found, and wholeness rediscovered. This new possibility calls us forth to a great transformation. What better time than now?
M. Paloma Pavel, PhD, Oakland, California. Spring 2017
WE NEED A NEW story about race and place in the United States. The civil rights movement brought forth a flow of narratives recounting valiant struggles to overcome racism and achieve social justice. Much environmental history has expressed concern for the destruction of forests, the degradation of landscapes, the uprooting and destruction of indigenous people, and the loss of species. All these concerns will continue to have force. But the experience of African Americans and other people of color has a key theme to add to the mix: the stories of the people who helped to lay the foundations of the nation despite being marginalized in an atmosphere of hostility and disrespect. Telling these stories and listening with compassion will help us heal and begin to understand that we are all, down to the core, sources of great creativity.
Conventional politics has operated as if there were a deep and unbridgeable gulf between environmentalism and social justice. Environmentalists revere and respect the natural world as a foundation for the life of future generations while social justice advocates are committed to equal opportunities for those who live in the present. When the first Earth Day happened in 1970, it was profoundly disassociated from the civil rights movement. It centered on protecting and restoring nature without acknowledging people’s need for social and economic justice. The environment and people are interrelated. Both demand our attention and respect. African Americans and other peoples who have labored in our cities and countryside, like all other humans, have not only a responsibility to care for planet Earth but also the right to share in its bounty.
It is clear that industrial growth is destroying life on Earth. We need a platform for all people to come together and decide to reduce our negative impact on the global biosphere. We cannot just say, “All we want is our fair share.” Nor can we say, “Save the planet by any means necessary,” and call the rest “collateral damage.” We are all in this together, and true sustainability must include social justice along with environmental protection.
Marginalized communities—subjugated economically and racially—have firsthand experience of what it means to build sustainability in the face of hardship. This cultural and individual resilience is a resource for leadership. We need to acknowledge the leadership emerging out of the social and environmental justice movements and work to dismantle the obstacles to leadership faced by people of color. The knowledge they can bring to our planning and environmental professions is invaluable.
I am fortunate to have played many roles in my life, but my most deeply embedded identity is as the survivor of seven-and-a-half decades of growing up and living in racially constrained environments—first in Philadelphia, then in New York, for a summer in London, and, finally, on the West Coast in South Berkeley. Throughout my life and work, I have been seeking answers to questions about racial inequities that have troubled me since childhood and searching for ideas and disciplines to integrate the various dimensions of my personal and professional experience.
A class field trip to see the Better Philadelphia Exposition when I was eight years old filled me with a strong desire to become an architect and urban planner. During the following years, as I looked forward to those studies, fundamental questions were forming in my consciousness: Who am I? Where do I belong? What is my connection to the communities I am encountering? In a more external frame of mind I wondered: Why do white families move out of our neighborhood as soon as families like mine move in and why do my neighborhood and my home become more run-down every year? When I looked at the conditions surrounding me as a child, I did not realize that my city and I were not alone—these patterns of segregation and neighborhood disinvestment were prevailing throughout the country in the years of my childhood.
While I was at Columbia University in the early 1960s, I joined the emerging civil rights movement. Suddenly, I found myself in a series of struggles in which my peers were defining an agenda for a new generation. We were confronting the assumptions of the status quo and demanding the right to vote, to interstate bus travel, to be seated and served in restaurants, and to decent jobs. I wondered how architecture, the field that I was embarking upon, could respond to these demands.
I became a lifelong advocate for civil and human rights for African Americans and other communities of color in the United States. As a founding member of the Northern Student Movement, I learned a lot about community organizing, particularly how to build mutual trust and respect among the diverse groups in the community. Eventually, I found a niche for my architecture skills in the civil rights movement by coordinating the participatory planning and construction of an outdoor community space—the Harlem Neighborhood Commons.
I reflected on my situation as a college student: the people in Harlem are black and so am I. Out of three