Jasmine Mahmoud

Biking Seattle’s Redlining: An Interview with Merlin Rainwater

“The policies that created segregation have been so successful, that if you live in a white world, it’s kind of hard to see out of it. You just have to learn to see it.”

-Merlin Rainwater

Consider the following language. When was it written? Where was it written?

No person or persons of Asiatic, African or Negro blood, lineage, or extraction shall be permitted to occupy a portion of said property, or any building thereon; except domestic servants may actually and in good faith be employed by white occupants of such premises

No residence property shall at any time, directly or indirectly, be sold, conveyed, rented or leased in whole of in part to any person or persons not of the white or Caucasian race.

Tracts or parcels of land in this plat shall be used or occupied only by members of the white or Caucasian race, excluding Semites, and no other persons shall be permitted to use or occupy said tracts or parcels, except employees may occupy the premises where their employer resides.

From the 1920s to the 1940s, this language was widely written into deeds in housing stock not in Detroit, or Chicago, or St. Louis, but rather in Seattle. Now documented on the “Racial Restrictive Covenants” section of the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History project at the University of Washington, much of this language—although outlawed by the 1968 Housing Rights Act—still exists on today’s home deeds, acting as a vestige of the racial restrictions that pervaded Seattle in the early 20^th century. Despite that past ubiquity, many Seattle residents remain unaware of the ways in which the city was (and arguably still is) systematically racially segregated: through these restrictive covenants (private agreements made by white homeowners to exclude non-white and ethnically white residents), and through redlining.

Redlining, as many have documented, was the system begun in the 1930s by which the federal government worked with banks to spur the economy during and after the Great Depression. They did so through homeownership; in particular: racially restrictive homeownership. Banks drew up color-coded city maps based on existing and desired racial segregation. Banks then offered white residents seeking homes in white areas (areas drawn on the maps in green and blue) the best mortgage rates, and contrastingly, black residents seeking homes anywhere, but especially in black areas (drawn in red — hence the naming redlining), either no option for home loans, or exorbitantly high rates. Redlining took place in 239 cities across the U.S.; the process was backed by the federal government, invested money and wealth-making property into white people and neighborhoods, and divested from black and other non-white people.

Many residents of progressive-ish Seattle remain unaware about restrictive covenants redlining and their effects on the city today. Due to the growth of Amazon and other companies, Seattle has been the fastest growing city of the last decade. But that population growth took place without equitable urbanist policies in place. As such, many residents have dealt with drastically increased rents, lack of protections for vulnerable residents, displacement of non-white neighborhoods of color including the historically black Central District, and increased homelessness (an estimated 41% of Seattle’s homeless population is black). These changes and their racialized impact dialogue with past urbanist practices that dispossessed people of color from neighborhood space.

Merlin Rainwater, a Seattle-born resident, has been trying to change how Seattleites—in particular mostly white Seattleites—understand the history of race and racial dispossession within Seattle’s neighborhood spaces. Earlier this year, she launched the Red Line Rides, a bike tour (and subsequent walking tour) of redlining in Seattle. So much of her tours are about teaching white residents to, in her words, “learn to see” how and where white Seattle was built by systemic and racially restrictive practices, and the strong residues of those practices today.  I interviewed her to learn more about the what, when, why, where and how of the tours.

Interview edited for clarity. 

JASMINE MAHMOUD: Tell me about your history in Seattle. Where did you grow up? What are your initial memories of the city?

MERLIN RAINWATER: I was actually born in Seattle, but I grew up mostly in a little town … about 16 miles out of Seattle: Edmonds. We belonged to the Quaker meeting that met in Seattle, so I had a strong connection with the neighborhood around the University [of Washington], the University District. Both of my parents were born in Washington State. My father’s grandparents on his mother’s side were pioneer settlers outside of Seattle. And my mother’s parents homesteaded in Eastern Washington.

When I moved back to Seattle in 1974, Seattle was in the middle of a major recession, and it was pretty cheap to survive here. When I got married, my husband and I were able to buy a house, a very reasonably priced house in an area that had been redlined and that was on the margins on the Central District, the historically black part of Seattle. Looking back on it, almost 40 years now, we were really the first wave of white gentrifiers moving into the historically black part of town.

Read the full post on Urban Cultural Studies.

Port Urbanism, Blackness, and the Shipping Crate in ‘Collapse: Works by Dewey Crumpler’ — a conversation with curator Sampada Aranke

“He would do these walks along the port, and see these shipping containers come in and out, and became particularly interested in the way that was shaping his relationships to the walk, to these meditative zones that are supposed to be about taking in nature and enjoying the stunning views of the Bay. It’s in the shadows, these giants cranes.” –Sampada Aranke

Scattered everywhere are green bananas. In the foreground, bunches of the unripe fruit iteratively sit upright and lie sideways on the damp, cold sand of a beach. Snails and crabs also reside on this beach. Their burnt sandy color almost camouflages the shell creatures within the sand as they move among the bananas: this fruit is their feast now. A large gold-yellow shipping crate sits centered, mid plane and suggests this feast was intended for human beings. But now shipwrecked, the looming crate sits stuck in sand, broken with an horizontal fracture at its side, with its goods—the tropical fruit from elsewhere—spilled in this location where the sand meets the sea. Something has broken this crate, this beast, this large, heavy symbol of global trade and consumerism. In the distance, three other crates meet worse fates. They, too, are even more stuck in the low-tide beach, almost submerged in the damp, dense, heavy sand water. They, too, are broken with cracks that empty out their contents: more green bananas. Hundreds of the green bunches line the sand as it turns into the sea. Some bananas have a hint of ripeness—a hint of yellow—that echoes the yellow color of the crate, and hints at the global processes, and people, that have imperfectly brought these goods from someplace else to here.

I viewed Untitled 3, 2017 (acrylic and mixed media on oil canvas) last month as part of Collapse: Recent works by Dewey Crumpler at the Hedreen Gallery in Seattle, WA. Dewey Crumpler is a Bay Area-based artist and Associate Professor of Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. A description for the show reads:

Collapse considers the beauty and terror of financial systems and their ecological, social, and aesthetic impacts. These works take on the disturbances of potential catastrophe, rendering the container as the locus of awe, wonder, destruction, and fear. In these works, Crumpler asks us to consider how goods transported globally via ships and ports might open up other histories of destruction and creation. By citing aesthetic practices that range from religious iconography to dreamscapes of ruin, Crumpler lays bare the connective tissues between past, present, and impending futures of collapse.

The shipping crate centers all works in the show; the crate acts as a concrete signifier of port urbanism and an abstract lens to the processes and aesthetics of global capitalist processes and of blackness. To learn more about the exhibit, I spoke with its guest curator, Sampada Aranke, Assistant Professor in the Art History, Theory, Criticism Department at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago.

JASMINE MAHMOUD: A main motif throughout the exhibition is the shipping crate. In Untitled 3, the gold yellow crate sits centered, midplane and endlessly surrounded by unripe green bananas. In Untitled 4, stacks of crates in red, green, purple, yellow, blue, grey—stacks that appear like rectangular bunches of yarn—sit piled in rows in a ship sinking a stormy sea. And in Untitled 5, perhaps an aftermath of the previous work, crates of blue, orange, and brown splash and sink (and perhaps float) into the sea. How does the motif of the crate dialogue with urban, spatial, and geographic claims that Dewey Crumpler makes in his work?

SAMPADA ARANKE: I call the show Collapse, and the series actually doesn’t have a unifying title or a kind of gathering conceptual umbrella except for the crates that keep coming up. That really comes up with Dewey … taking these walks along the bayfront in Oakland and Berkeley, and the port being this really dominant place. Dewey writ large has always been … he’s within the Black Radical Tradition, he’s has a really engaged critique of capital and of commodification, and that’s been a vibrant tenor in his work for years.

Read the full post on Urban Cultural Studies.

St. Louis Map Room

How do maps reflect a place and its culture? How do maps inscribe meaning into place? What do maps conceal about a space and its culture?

This week, my class engaged these questions at the St. Louis Map Room. The Map Room is a temporary exhibit located at Stevens Middle School, a shuttered St. Louis Public School in Vandeventer, a North St. Louis City neighborhood. We entered the school, walked down a hallway, and then turned right into the gymnasium. There we saw dozens upon dozens of huge maps (about 15’ by 15’), most of them hanging vertically in two rows. On a platform at the center of the room, another huge map rested. Another smaller map appeared on the t-shirt of a staff member. All maps were of St. Louis.

We met Emily Catedral, a teaching artist and site coordinator for the Map Room. She led our engagement, first giving a pointed lecture about the role of maps in history and culture.

Read the full post on Urban Cultural Studies.

Walking the Divided City: on Euclid Avenue in St. Louis

As our bus turned right—east—onto Page Avenue, a major thoroughfare, we saw single-and multi-family homes alongside boarded up ones. Something (unexpected to some) adorned the latter: murals upon murals upon murals full of images of famous black St. Louisians. There was one of Jamala Rogers, activist, author, and columnist for the St. Louis American (black-owned weekly newspaper), and another of J.B. “Jet” Banks, former Missouri State Senator, who served for three decades.

After a stretch of Page, our bus turned left—north—onto Kingshighway, a heavily trafficked major thoroughfare. We continued north and approached the next major intersection at Natural Bridge, where White Castle, McDonald’s, and Rally’s stood as the places to eat. A right turn on Natural Bridge, and then another right turn on Euclid led us to our first destination: Euclid Avenue near Greer. We exited the bus and stood briefly on Euclid, near North Side Community School, a charter school. Across the street from us: Handy Park, named after W.C. Handy, the black composer and musician who wrote “St. Louis Blues.”

From our post on Euclid Avenue our charge was simple: walk south until Maryland Avenue, some two miles away. The only other directions: be mindful and observe. These observations formed the assignment due days later: jottings with initial impressions and composed fieldnotes about the experience of walking along Euclid Ave.

This assignment was part of “Urban Ethnography in St. Louis,” a course I am teaching this semester at Washington University in St. Louis.

Read the full post on Urban Cultural Studies.

Touring the Divided City

Our geography divided us into two teams. Blue marked those from Jeff-Vander-Lou; red designated those of us from Forest Park Southeast. And then, with a simple reorientation, those divisions vanished, at least temporarily.

In their stead: new partnerships. Each pair included blue and red forged across neighborhood boundaries. My partner and I—both black women in our 30s—boarded the school bus together. Born in St. Louis, she grew up and spent most of her life in Jeff-Vander-Lou (JVL); recently she completed an international MBA. The beaches in Thailand, and the heat in India, the revelry in Ireland—this filled our conversation.  Time on our phones on Facebook trying to figure out if we had friends in common also filled our time.

Read the entire article, at the Common Reader‘s site, here.

The black falsetto, or when artists live

Last month, I spoke at the first Americanist Dinner Forum of the 2016-2017 year. Peter Benson, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of Graduate Studies in the Program in American Culture Studies (AMCS), curated the engaging and moving event. The theme: “When Artists Die: On Prince et. al.” Pat Burke, Associate Professor of Music, and Jeffrey McCune, Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies were amazing panelists. Pat brought our attention to how race frames the narratives of artists’ deaths; Jeffrey made us sonically focus on Prince’s voice and how it stages relationships among religion and sound. My remarks–with media–are below.

The black falsetto, or when artists live

Delivered September 29, 2016 at the Americanist Dinner Forum, Washington University in St. Louis

We can think about Prince through his falsetto. [“Kiss”] I was born in 1982; my first memories of Prince were not visual but sonic—on the radio in the car with my mom. One time as he came on, she turned up the radio and said “Prince can squeal. I love a man who can squeal.” My mom’s preferences for black male vocalists who could squeal—Prince, Al Green, Marvin Gaye—shaped my own. In fact my first concert was—at five or six—Michael Jackson. We had lawn seats in very back but my proximity to my mom made it the best seat. When Michael Jackson started “The Way You Make We Feel,” my mom sang in my ear “you knock me off on my feet now Jazzy.” Through my mom, Michael was speaking to me.

But back to the falsetto. Falsetto, some theorize, makes black male singers more feminized and therefore more palatable to white audiences. Andrew Grant Jackson describes how Smokey Robinson’s “beautiful falsetto made him nonthreatening to white audiences.” (33)  Lisa Taylor details Prince’s “strategy of holding black audiences, while always aspiring to cross over to the far more profitable white leisure audience” as “inform[ing” the construction of his image throughout his career” (166). But there are many ways to be and be seen as black. These readings particularly cheapen Smokey Robinson and Prince, singularizing their music as successful only by reaching white audiences. So as we remember Prince, and Marvin, and Michael, I want to think about them through the black falsetto in five other ways.

First, we can think of Prince’s falsetto, and Smokey’s, and Marvin’s, and Michael’s, as part of black musical repertoire. In The Black Diaspora: Five Centuries of the Black Experience Outside Africa, Ronald Segal details how “[t]he vocal embellishments were those of black musical tradition and included growls, falsetto, humming, moaning” (383).

Second, falsetto gives sonic room to various modes of being black. After Prince’s death, Slate ran “How Prince Led the Way to Our Gender Fluid Present.” Chelsea Reynolds wrote on Vox.com “Prince tried to help us understand the differences between identity (how we think of ourselves), behavior (what we do), and perception (how others think of us). Prince dismantled and queered what contemporary culture has tried to bracket.” Frank Ocean wrote of Prince “He was a straight black man who played his first televised set in bikini bottoms and knee high heeled boots, epic. He made me feel more comfortable with how I identify sexually simply by his display of freedom from and irreverence for obviously archaic ideas like gender conformity.”

Frank Ocean gives us a third way to think about the black falsetto. It announces futurity. [Frank Ocean performing “Thinkin Bout You” on SNL] Seated, eyes often closed, Ocean and his pleasurably strained falsetto often shouts away from the mic as it declares “I’ve been thinking about forever” and projects what José Muñoz might call “not yet here” (1). Similarly, novelist Nathaniel Mackey in the Bedouin Hornbook describes how the black falsetto enacts a new world. He writes:

the deliberately forced, deliberately “false” voice we get from someone like Al Green creatively hallucinates a “new world,” indicts the more insidious falseness of the world as we know it.

(Listen, for example, to “Love and Happiness.”) What is it in the falsetto that thins and threatens to abolish the voice but the wear of so much reaching for heaven?

I found this excerpt in Fred Moten’s “Black Mo’Nin” in the edited collection Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Moten’s chapter is about the image of Emmett Till at his funeral. I wont reproduce that here but I ask for us to hold Till’s memory, the memory of black teenager killed for flirtation with whiteness. In In the Break, Fred Moten writes “Mackey understands the falsetto to be the strained, maternal, and material residue of ‘a legacy of lynchings’ that illuminates and amplifies that legacy’s ongoing sexual cut of sexual difference.” Falsetto as enacting a new world ties to falsetto as mourning for the anti-blackness in this one.

Fifth, we think of the black falsetto through Maxwell. “Give me these moments, give them back to me.” Maxwell covers Kate Bush’s 1988 song “This Woman’s Work” a title evoking the dual meaning of labor as work and childbirth. Maxwell’s falsetto is a piercing presence, that recalls, even though captured in a recoding, live performance as particularly precious in its liveness, ephemerality, and inability to reproduce. Peggy Phelan has written:

Performance in a strict ontological sense is nonreproductive. It is this quality which makes performance the runt of the litter of contemporary art. Performance clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital. (148)

Falsetto is sonically present and labored in a way that questions how sound circulates. In a different register, Prince’s battle, two decades ago, for ownership of his name with “slave” written on his face questioned how and why the circulation of capitol is so central to music industry profits. Then, Prince said: “When you stop a man from dreaming … he becomes a slave. That’s where I was. I don’t own Prince’s music. If you don’t own your masters, your master owns you.”

Black falsetto makes new worlds, mourns this one, as critiques capitol deemed necessary to its sonic circulation. That is where I would close if not for a recent experience.

But I want to close thinking about when artists live. This summer I bought a ticket to LouFest to see Ms. Lauryn Hill. I told friends how I excited was and received a set of similar responses: “she’s not going to perform,” “she’ll be three hours late,” “she’s always drunk,” “you shouldn’t go.” Press frames Ms. Hill similarly. In 2014, Chicago-based writer Stefan Schumacher penned a really mean article in Medium entitled “It’s Finally Time to Stop Caring About Lauryn Hill.” Even though there was a very caring response from Talib Kweli, discourse about Lauryn Hill present as not her brilliant past has rendered her dead.

In Lemonade, Beyonce cites Malcolm X. His articulation makes sense of Lauryn Hill as disrespected, unprotected, and neglected. As she if she is already dead.

Daphne Brooks has written:

I am especially drawn to the notion of black women musicians as archivists, excavators and agitators who use sound and musicality as ways to galvanize and disturb historical memory in the public sphere.

One archivist, Brooks writes, is Lauryn Hill in “Black Rage,” Hill’s 2012 reimaging of “My Favorite Things.” Lets watch it.

Daphne Brooks says of Lauryn Hill “Her performative threat, her compelling insinuation, is one that we might act on to create a new time…” That night at LouFest, Lauryn Hill started pretty much on time. Her performance—as a skillful conductor of the seven-piece band and vocalists—was one of the best performances I’ve ever experienced, reorienting me to revel in the joy and strain of her sonic creations, and in the presence of this black woman who has been so disrespected, unprotected, neglected but who is still with us. When we think about when artists die, we must also consider how those, like Ms. Lauryn Hill, who many mark as dead, live, still creating new time for us.