 Good morning, and welcome to the 2016 Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Lecture. My name is Logan Bosie, and I am a senior philosophy and religion major here at Gustavus. It is my pleasure to introduce our speaker, Dr. Rashad Shabazz. As of this fall, Dr. Shabazz is an associate professor in the Department of Justice and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University. From 2009 to 2015, Dr. Shabazz was assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Vermont, where he received two outstanding teaching awards. Dr. Shabazz completed his undergraduate work at the Minnesota State University in Mankato, so he knows all about the cold of January here in Minnesota. Dr. Shabazz's research explores how race, sexuality, and gender are informed by geography. He writes and teaches about topics such as the policies creating segregated communities that essentially are incarcerating to certain members. This experience creates a wide variety of social problems with profound negative impacts on the health of these communities. As we pause to honor Dr. King, our day is set against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement in Minnesota and across the United States. It is becoming clear to more and more people that work is still needed across the nation to fulfill the goals set forth by the civil rights leaders of 50 years ago. Thank you for coming today. Now please welcome Dr. Rashad Shabazz for his speech entitled, Why Geography Matters in the Struggle for Racial Justice. Good morning, Gustavus Adolphus community. It is a true pleasure and honor to be here. Three people are responsible for my visit and I'm not able to name all of them, but I want to name a few Logan for that wonderful introduction and for shepherding me from Minneapolis here. I would like to thank Thea for all of the work that she's done, the president of the college, as well as all of the other students and staff members that I'm going to have lunch and dinner and have had breakfast with. Chaplain, thank you very much. This is a real pleasure and honor to be back at this institution. While I was a student at Mankato in the late 90s, I came to two events here and one of them was I saw Toni Morrison speak and when I walked in she was standing right there and I remember saying, oh my goodness, it's Toni Morrison. She's like standing right there and to inhabit the stage that she gave a beautiful lecture on is a real honor. So thank you again for allowing me to come and speak. So I'm going to talk for maybe about 45 to 50 minutes and then we're going to have some Q and A, but I first want to say just a little bit about where today's talk is coming from. It's informed by the research that I've been doing for many years, but it's also shaped by current events. Black Lives Matter, the various police shootings are deeply informing the scholarly and political work that I'm doing. So and as I was actually as I was writing it, I thought a lot about Black Lives Matter and Logan I'm glad you mentioned it because I'll talk a little bit about Black Lives Matter. But given that this is Dr. King's holiday, I would like to begin my talk on racial justice and spatial justice by a quote, with a quote from Dr. King. He said in an interview in 1966 that our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. Police, geography generally, has always been at the center of struggles for racial justice. The very ideas of Black freedom that inform the politics and activism of anti-slavery, civil rights, anti-colonialism, and Black power rest on principles like mobility, the ability to use and access public space, the right to live where one chooses, to walk the streets in safety, and to have one's body be safe from harm. And in turn, the Black freedom movement understood justice, racism, and subjugation geographically. Principles like freedom, justice, citizenship, and public space were not abstract to Black freedom fighters, for they were much more concrete and deeply material. They were tangible and expressed through the way Black people were spatially or geographically organized. The geography of racism not only gave rise to political challenges in the South, in South Africa, in the Bronx, in Chicago, and in Minneapolis, but it also produced numerous cultural movements. Born amidst the rubble and abandonment of the South Bronx in the early 1970s, hip-hop was the cultural offspring of the spatial containment and exclusion that civil rights and Black power fought against. And like the forms of containment that produced it, space and place have been central to the artistic expression and mobility of hip-hop. So today, on this very special day, this Dr. King holiday, I will talk about the role of geography and the political and cultural movements of Black people. So I'm going to start by sort of laying the foundation, like what does the racial geography of the United States look like? What have been its implications? How has it informed the creation of communities? And then I will talk about the ways in which Black people have utilized that very geography to offer new modes of being, to create new forms of resistance and new communities. The transatlantic slave trade began in the 15th century, southern and eastern, southern and western Europeans sailed to the west coast of Africa, exchanging resources for prisoners of war. In some cases, Africans were kidnapped and brought to the west. The overwhelming majority of those inhabitants, of those Africans who were taken, were brought to the Caribbean, roughly 90% of them. And actually, only a small percent, somewhere between about five and eight percent, were brought to North America. The trip was known as the middle passage. I'm sure many of you know this, and you've seen or read the horror stories about the middle passage. But what is probably not explained very much is the specific role of geography in the construction of the transatlantic slave trade. History was constituted on multiple practices of geographic violence. It brought into existence a network of techniques, technologies, and mechanisms of constraint and immobilization that were used to contain and to punish Africans. While dungeons and other tools of restraint have long histories in Western Europe, slavery created an entire knowledge base of punishment that drew specifically on space, place, and immobility. Indeed, if we think about things like the slave ship, the big house, the slave quarters, the field, the auction block, the plantation, were spaces of punishment that the geography of slavery created. The plantation, that uneven colonial place of rule, drew its power from its ability to contain and to incapacitate Africans. Using fear, intimidation, and spatial isolation, slave owners were able to make the larger geography outside the plantation, spaces of illegal occupation for slaves. Slave ships were built to stack people in its bow for transport. Mashed together like animals with disease ever present, the slave ship installed a new sense of space in Africans. The well-known image of the belly of the slave ship filled with Africans en route to the Americas or the Caribbean is an illustration of these barbaric spatial practices. Slave traders used chains, cells, and other mechanisms of restraint to immobilize. The former slave turn abolitionist, Equiano, spoke of the, quote, iron muzzle, end quote, which fit over the head of slaves and locked their mouth, making it impossible for them to talk or eat. So this geography of slavery becomes what many philosophers call as a new ontology of space. And I'm going to throw out a few technical terms, but I'll be sure to explain them, right? Ontologies, we're talking about new ways of being, entirely new knowledge practices. And what slavery did was it radically altered the understanding of what space and place and mobility meant for West Africans, pulled from cells or pulled from communities in West Africa, put into the bowels of these ships, moved to other places in the globe. All of a sudden, the places which they understood as home and the ability for them to have control over the most vital resource in their being, which was their body, was stripped for them. And it created an entirely new way of understanding who they were, what safety meant, and how they understood and inhabited space. Take a sip real quick. Oh, and I meant to, I forgot to mention at the beginning, so like I have a prepared script and I always sort of write, but like any, like any good, like I know there's people out here who like rap music and I'm going to talk about rap music and hip hop, but like any good emcee, like you know, you read your lyrics and you have to be able to freestyle. So I'm going to like read my lyrics and I'll freestyle from time to time. Okay. Because you know, that's what makes it interesting, like you can't just read lyrics all the time, like you have to be able to like put a beat on and go. All right. So the geography of slavery, right, installed this new way of understanding space. And that new way of understanding space was reimagined and rearticulated post-1865. After 1865, slavery ends, you know, official forms of slavery ends, right. As activists and art, as activists and intellectuals have demonstrated to us that what the Thirteenth Amendment really did was it codified slavery, right. As the amendment says, no forms of slavery shall be allowed in people's backyards. Only if deemed punishable, right, only if deemed punishable by crime. So effectively what we've been a, what we've seen post-1865 is that plantation forms of slavery in the United States have disappeared. But new institutions have arisen to sort of control and to contain those bodies, that labor that was essential to the production of slavery in 1865. And that one institution has been the criminal justice system. And I'll talk more about that as I move on in the talk. But we see a new geography of racism emerge post-1865. Many scholars call it the sort of geography of white supremacy or the geography of racism. But it was crystallized in legal precedents and forms of constraint particularly known as the black codes, right. Has anybody ever heard of or read anything about the black codes? You can raise your hand if you have anyone. Okay, a few people. So essentially the black codes were a way to reinscribe the slave code by racializing all aspects of life in the South. In effect the black codes did three things. Pay attention to the spatial aspect of this. One, it circumscribed black movement. Two, it stripped all blacks in the South of citizenship. Three, it created a two-tier legal system, one black, one white, separate, and unequal. And as many of you know, it is this system that the civil rights movement and the SCLC led by King fought against from the early part of the, mid part of the 1950s until the latter part of the 1960s. The slave code, I'm sorry, the black codes, again with this attempt to reinscribe the slave codes, post 1865 there's a dilemma in the South, a tremendous dilemma. Four million people have been freed from bondage and they now enter into the labor market. And the South depended heavily on slave labor. You have to remember the South was deeply impoverished and slavery created poverty for everyone in the South. White people too. White working class and white middle class people in the South were deeply damaged economically and racially, but deeply damaged economically by slavery. Why? Because slaves performed the majority of the labor. They not only picked cotton, but they also built roads. They mined iron ore. They created many of the sort of public institutions or public roads that became essential to the production of the South. The South essentially had no public sphere, no public schools, no public works. And the slaveocracy, which controlled the overwhelming majority of the labor, as well as the overwhelming majority of the wealth in the South, hoarded it and kept it for themselves, making obviously turning black people into chattel, exploiting their labor and their lives, but also deeply impoverishing white people all throughout the South. So it's really important to understand that slavery was not obviously in the interests of black people in the South, and it was never in the interests of whites in the South. So when slaves are freed, when we have this new system, now we have 4 million black people who enter into the labor market, alongside of white workers who were deeply affected by slavery. And we see this, these two things happen. And there's this moment of possibility, because all of a sudden, white workers and black slaves of now newly freed black workers are coming to the labor market as equals. And it was this moment between about 1860, roughly 1868 and the early 1890s, where the South was trying to rebuild itself, this period called Reconstruction. I'm sure some of you know about this. Reconstruction was this attempt to rebuild the South, create public institutions, create a new society, and black people were going to play a significant role in the new society. But the ugly reality of racism reared its head. In this moment where black and white workers were trying to create solidarity, hierarchy came into play. The Great Thinker, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, W. E. B. Du Bois, wrote this huge book, it's about like 700 pages, called Black Reconstruction. And toward the end of Black Reconstruction, Du Bois says there was this moment of opportunity and optimism in about the 1880s, where blacks and whites began to find common ground. Black people began to hold public office, mayors, even black senators in Louisiana, own property in places like Louisiana and Alabama. But then the reality of racism reared its head. And rather than working alongside of black workers, white workers wanted to own them, as their forefathers once did. And we see the rise of white supremacy in the South, and the black codes codified that. Two-tier legal system, making public blackness akin to breaking the law. All of these things began to radically inform the new South. And by the mid 1890s, we see the ugly reality of lynchings, chengangs, convict leasing system, and racial violence. The violence was so ugly that between about the early 1890s and the early 20th century in places like Alabama, hundreds of lynchings had occurred. And you all know the horror of lynchings, burned, beaten, shot, stabbed, black bodies hanging from trees. So this is the new reality, the new geography. And what the geography of the South presented for black people was inhospitality and violence. One scholar writes that the entire space of the South became a space of danger. So these new mechanisms of restraint and violence were challenged. They were challenged by young blacks who wanted a new possibility. They wanted mobility. They wanted access to public resources. They wanted their bodies to be safe. And two things occurred. One, in the early part of the 20th century, right at the dawn of the First World War, the great black migration. Hundreds and thousands of black people moved out of the South, looking for access to public resources, better wages, and full citizenship. And they moved to major industrial cities in the North. And just as I tell this to my class all the time, the reason why black people end up in places like New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, and Los Angeles is because of train lines. Train lines that moved out of the South into the industrial Northeast, into the burgeoning industries of the Midwest, and into the growing industries of the West, which is a main reason why Minnesota has never had a large black population. There were no direct train lines from the South, right? Which is why Chicago had the biggest black population throughout much of the 20th century, along with places like Brooklyn and Los Angeles, simply because of the train lines. So we see this mass migration of black people out of the South into the North. And the hope when they move from the South to the North is that they are going to have access to the public sphere. They can send their children to good schools. They can ride the bus in whatever way they choose, or wherever they choose, and that they will have decent wages. They won't have to deal with the tyranny of Jim Crow racism. But what we find is that as black people migrate South to North, the very mechanisms of constraint and immobility move with them. So we're going to use Chicago as an example. Chicago had the largest influx of black migrants of any northern city, more than New York, more than Philly, more than Los Angeles. And the overwhelming majority of black migrants were forced to live in two places on the South and West side. The South side, which is where I'm born and raised, got the largest number. Some between about 1917 and the early 1940s were looking at somewhere around 100,000 moved to the area. And they moved to this area known as Bronzeville, which ultimately came known as the Black Belt. And it was called the Black Belt because it sort of looked like a belt. It's just a sort of stripled land that black people inhabited. And they were forced to live in the Black Belt. Why were they forced to live in the Black Belt? Because all of the other housing arrangements were foreclosed to them through legal mechanisms. And that legal mechanism was called restrictive covenants. And so for those of you who own houses, particularly if you own a house here in St. Peter or maybe in Mankato, look at the deed of your house. I know you haven't looked at it in a long, long time, especially if you've been in it in a few years. Look at the deed of your house. And in the deed of your house, there are restrictions. You can't paint your house purple. You can't put an airplane on the roof, whatever it may be. And throughout the early 20th century, all the way up into the mid-1950s, urban areas had restrictions on housing that said no Japanese, no Mexicans, and particularly no blacks. Now, this had a significant impact on where black people could live in Chicago. 80% of the housing market in Chicago was governed by restrictive covenants. 80%, which basically meant that black people were forced to live in the only place that did not have restrictive covenants. And that place was Bronzeville, the black belt. And as they moved into Bronzeville and Brooklyn and Oakland and Los Angeles, they lived in substandard housing. In Chicago, the housing was so horrible that disease festered in the housing. Rats were ever present. The electrical units were severed and hanging out. Paint was peeling from the walls. And the kind of housing that blacks were forced to live in was a form of housing called kitchenettes. Now, for those of you, some of you have read the book, so I'll show some of you have heard about kitchenettes. But for those of you who haven't, a kitchenette was basically an old apartment or sometimes a mansion, sometimes even a basement, that was cut into multiple units to accommodate multiple families. So for example, if I'm a property owner and I own a three-story apartment that has three bedroom apartments, right? Now, today you would rent that apartment for maybe you and a roommate or maybe a family of three. In the early part of the 20th century, really between about 1917 and the early 1950s, kitchenettes accommodated multiple families. One family would live in one room, another family would live in another. Another family would live in another room, and another family would live in a living room. So you would have four families living in a three-bedroom apartment. And it was called a kitchenette because there was a small little unit that was an ice box and a small stove, a hot plate that you plug in. And that was the kitchenette. The overwhelming majority of people who lived in the black belt were forced to live in kitchenettes because it was not enough housing. So land owners, property owners cut them up, rented them out to multiple families, and they made a financial killing. Rather than renting an apartment to a family for $17, a two or three-bedroom apartment, they would rent out four rooms to four different families for $10 apiece. They effectively gouged black people who had no other opportunity to live anywhere else in the community. And so these housing conditions contained, curtailed both the spatial mobility, the physical mobility of black people, where they could and could not live, and they also sent them into poverty. We all know over the last 80 years, with the exception of the first few years of the early 2000s, that housing has been the dominant mechanism of producing wealth in the country. The dominant. Especially those who were able to get into the housing market after World War II. Housing totally radically transformed after World War II, all right? Freddie May and Fannie Mac came into existence. The federal government stepped in and backed guaranteed loans. You put 3% down, the federal government will back the other 97%. And by putting that 3% down and purchasing that home, you do what? You gain equity. You gain equity, right? So, you know, as your parents tell you all, like, you're just throwing your money away written. Like, it's just you're just tossing it out the window and you need to purchase something so you can gain equity. Well, here is how the racialization of the housing market utilized the geography of confinement. Black communities could not get banks or the federal government to back loans in their communities. So, effectively, white wealth got subsidized. If you moved into a white community that had restrictive covenants that said no blacks, as whites moved into white communities that were mostly suburban after the Second World War, they were able to get their loans back. They were able to gain equity, which over time grew. They sold those assets, distributed those resources to their children. Their children also purchased homes or utilized those monies for vacations to send people to college. And it produced intergenerational wealth. Effectively, the federal government with the compliance of the banking industry subsidized white wealth for roughly 80 years in every single vanilla suburb across the nation. And this was based largely on a ranking system that ranked which forms of housing were good bets. Multiracial communities, not a good bet. The federal government said, no, no, no, no. You don't need to live there. We're not going to back loans there. All white communities will back them. And the institutionalization of that through federal policy, federal policy created an uneven geography of wealth where white communities and white towns and suburbs were able to develop wealth creation while in black, they were divested. And it has implications that resonate with us today. It has implications in terms of who sits in my college classroom, who's sitting next to me when I'm on vacation, who has forms of mobility, and who can create wealth. So these geographic apparatuses, apparatus, apparatus, there we go, apparatus, had significant implications. And it was these things that black freedom movements fought against. Let me just sign back into my computer. Y'all all right? Y'all good? All right, so we got about 20 more minutes, and then we're going to do the Q&A. So this is the landscape that black nationalist movements, anti-slavery movements, black power movements, civil rights, and black cultural movements fought against. So in the form of anti-slavery, the geography of racism that contained and immobilized black people throughout the South, stealing one's body became an act of resistance, stealing one's self away from the geography of the South, running away from plantations, running away from the state, and leaving the region. This became an act of resistance, a pushback against forms of containment and restraint. And we see this in the writings of Frederick Douglass, as well as Solomon Wilcox. Everybody here should know Solomon Wilcox, right? The author, the writer of 12 Years a Slave, won Best Picture a couple of years ago. I hope many of you have seen it. If you haven't, you should definitely see it, my first movie recommendation of the day. I'll give you others. But Solomon Wilcox, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, who shepherded hundreds of people out of the South into the North. These are profound acts of resistance, but they are also deeply geographic because they are about mobility, the very thing that blackness was not supposed to have. And against the backdrop of the geography of white supremacy that was constituted under Jim Crow and the black codes, movement out of the South again, that mass migration of blacks out of the region into the North. And I didn't mention this before, but there was profound resistance to black people moving out of the South. Southern states didn't want it. Southern industry didn't want it. And Southern landowners specifically didn't want it because they benefited from the unequal system of tenant farming that black people were forced to undergo in the South. So this ability to take control of one's body, to move it to a place that was more hospitable, where people had access to rights, where people had access to public institutions, was a humongous and transformative system of resistance. One other, if I can just mention one other in terms of slavery, and I have to mention this because Toni Morrison stood here. She stood right here. If anyone has ever read Beloved, a haunting and horrible and beautiful book, that penultimate scene where Setha is trapped with her children in Ohio, and what does she do? To ensure that her children do not return to the horror of slavery, she kills them. She removes, she erases their body to ensure that it is not put through the torture and the horror of slavery. So these forms of resistance are deeply shaped by, again, mobility, place, geography. OK, let me sort of move forward now and talk about the Civil Rights Movement. No black political movement understood the importance of geography more than the Civil Rights Movement. The Southern Civil Rights Movement, the SCLC, contested Southern white supremacy through the daring and dangerous act of putting black people in places where their bodies were barred from. Yes, black people defied public ordinances by sitting in lunch counters and riding in the white section of buses, among other tactics. And these efforts to desegregate were also to show the horror of Southern white supremacy and to uphold the belief that a beloved community, a multiracial community, was possible. Indeed, the Civil Rights Movement attempted to realize as the promises of American democracy through their activism. And that's very important. It was really the Civil Rights Movement that provides us with the conceptual framework and the tactics of being able to engage and understand American democracy. But desegregation efforts were also about rewriting the spatial and racial organization of US cities. Desegregation challenged the belief that race should define how communities are organized. And in doing so, they sought to create a new racial geography that encouraged the physical interaction across what Du Bois pointedly called in 1903 the color line. But the Civil Rights Movement was not the only movement to challenge the racial geographies. Black nationalist movements did this as well. They challenged the stifling poverty that affected their communities. And let me say something quickly about why geography and poverty go hand in hand. When we talk about wealth inequality, as Bernie Sanders, my former senator from Vermont, go Bernie, when we talk about wealth inequality, we are talking about something that is inherently geographic. Poverty and wealth are organized spatially. Poor people and wealthy people do not live next to each other. They do not live next to each other. We can map poverty and inequality through zip codes across the nation. So when we talk about the racial geography, which we can map in terms of zip codes across the nation, we are also simultaneously talking about poverty. And what the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power and other movements have always been confronted with is, on the one hand, the deep segregation that affects their communities and the way in which poverty is embedded within them. So poverty is deeply geographic. One geographer argues that capitalism flows and it moves to places that are capital friendly and wealth congregates in places that enable for capital to be stuck, as he calls it. So for example, one of the sort of black radical movements that attempted to confront this was the Black Panther Party. I'm sure people have heard about the Black Panther Party. And for all of their coolness, brothers in leather jackets with guns, scaring the hell out of white people all over the nation, for all of that, what the Panthers did was they provided basic service programs to communities all over the nation, free breakfast, free lunch, shoe program, visiting family members in prison and health. Those were the five things that Black Panthers did more than anything else, basic services. And they provided those basic services on the south side of Chicago, in Brooklyn, in the South Bronx, in West Oakland, in South LA because those were the spaces where black people were congregated and where poverty was concentrated. So they recognized there was something about these places and these people that these services were needed. And the state had all had abandoned them. And the Panthers came in to provide those services. Black nationalist movements also have this sort of geographic bend because what they have focused on is the creation of whole, sustainable communities. Though they have pushed back against Dr. King's beloved, desegregated community and they fought for autonomous control of black communities, the point has been about controlling the resources, the dollars, and the politics of those communities to make sure that they are whole and stable. So this recognition that place is essential to the production of a black politics is something that has stretched over a century, from the Panthers to the nation of Islam, from the SCLC to anti-slavery movements in both the South and the North. Geography matters and space matters significantly. Now with the last few minutes, oh, I just want to say one more thing. I want to talk about the contemporary movement and then we're going to talk about hip hop. Contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter also challenge the geography of racism. They do this through protesting police violence that is visited up on black people's bodies. That place, the place we all, as a species, hold dear are our bodies. Our bodies are our place. We hold them dear. They're more important than our homes. They're more important than our churches. They're more important than our mosques and synagogues. And they're more important than our coffee shops. Because without the body, what else matters? Why? And black bodies have been places that violence has been visited upon. White ones are protected not only through state but by a cultural and ontological belief that they are precious, valuable, and in need of preservation. Black people's bodies are not seen as valuable, precious, and in need of protection. Indeed, transatlantic slavery and plantation slavery, Jim Crow, the black coals, poverty, segregation, and mass incarceration illustrates this point. Moreover, they demonstrate that black people's bodies are vulnerable to racism and white supremacy. Indeed, racism is not only immoral, illegal, and horrible, but they also are actions that are visited upon blacks that manifest in broken bones, cracked teeth, bloodstained shirts, ripped flesh, and death. The writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his new book Between the World and Me, which I highly, highly recommend everybody read, asked this question, quote, how do I live free in this world, in this black body? End quote. One of the things it means is that violence, be it interpersonal or through the state, can damage and erase our bodies at any time. So what Black Lives Matter is trying to do is to illustrate that black people and our bodies matter, that they are valuable, that they are precious, and that they must be preserved. And state-sanctioned violence in the form of police shootings, Tamar Rice, Michael Brown, and the thousands and thousands of others over the decades that have not been able to be captured by video, by cell phone video, must be preserved and recognized. So in conclusion, I'm gonna spend a few minutes talking about hip-hop, and I'm gonna talk about why it matters, why geography is important to it, and how it has helped to create a new narrative around mobility and anti-racism. All right, so everybody understands, I think everybody understands what hip-hop is. Like most of the time when I talk to people about hip-hop and I say, what is hip-hop? Everybody says rap music, and okay, so here's the T, right? Rap music is part of hip-hop, right? There are four elements, anybody know them? All right, give it to me. Excellent, excellent. I'm just saying them again, we'll repeat it. There's four elements to hip-hop, right? So think about hip-hop as a cultural umbrella that has these four elements. There's B-boying and B-girling, sometimes called breakdancing. There's aerosol, art, or tagging, sometimes called graffiti. There's rapping, sometimes called MCing, and then there's DJing, right? Those are the four elements, right? And hip-hop has always been about the interconnection of those four elements. So why does space matter to hip-hop? Hip-hop was started in the South Bronx in the early 1970s, and it emerged against the backdrop of the geography of containment and the geography of containment and abandonment that I have been describing here. Contained communities, segregated communities where poverty and racialized, particularly bodies of color, were either kept or abandoned. So the South Bronx became that place. And you know, when you don't have a tax base, when you don't have a good tax base, what happens is that it impacts schools. So in the South Bronx and the Sevens, you had all these young people who wanted to be creative and engaged and politically engaged, right? And some of them didn't wanna join the Panthers, they didn't wanna get involved in sort of street protests, but they wanted to be engaged with art and politics through a creative mechanism. So they utilized art, but they didn't have art programs in their schools. Why? Because they didn't have a decent tax base. Because to purchase a home, because you couldn't get a loan to purchase a home in the South Bronx. Why? Because it wasn't a good investment. Why? Because it was multi-racial. So what these young people did is, they said, well, you know what, look, if I can't get a decent music class in my school, right? If there's no dance in my school, I'll do it on the streets. So hip hop was constituted, created, and practiced in the public sphere of the South Bronx, right? And if anybody lived or was in the Bronx or was in New York in the 70s, you saw this because the tagging and the graffiti was on trains and walls. MCs and DJs did their thing in the park. Bee Boys and Bee Girls danced in subway tunnels and on street corners. They effectively made the entire South Bronx an abandoned, deeply impoverished community into an art studio. And the most powerful youth cultural force of the latter 20th century came out of that place. It could not have come from a middle class community. Because they had art programs in their school. It could not have come out of a wealthy community because they could individualize their creative potential. It came out of this place of poor and working class, black and Latino youth who wanted to be culturally engaged, who wanted to do art, who wanted to be seen and heard in the world. Rap music is the most popular form of hip hop, right? Everybody in here, particularly like 40 and down, y'all listen to rap music. It's on your phones and maybe 40 and up and I hope that that's the case because rap music is great. The geography of rap music is, geography is also deeply embedded in rap music and everybody here who listens to rap music knows that. Where's Drake from? Where's Jay from? Jay-Z. What about Nas? Where's Nas from? New York, right? MCs, rappers always signify where they are from. Why? Because there's always idiosyncratic forms of cultural production that are built into the ways in which that artist was trained. There's always these sort of particular cultural formations that undergird the creation of a rapper's consciousness, how she delivers her flow, how he articulates certain words, right? And those things are spatial. They are about very specific communities. Sometimes not even the whole city, sometimes it's just a block. Two blocks, three blocks, right? We know Kanye is from Chicago because he's told us 500 times, you know? We know that, we know that. We know that Snoop is from the LBC, you know? We know that. We've heard that a million times, right? And these are not just, again, these are not just insignificant articulations, but they are an acknowledgement of the role that that place has played in the production of their cultural lives. Katy Perry don't do that, right? Adele don't do that. She's not like, you know, representing West London, right? She's not doing that, right? Rap music is the only form of American popular music that does that. And it's not only in the lyrics, right? I'm from Compton, I'm from so on and so forth, right? Please see Straight Outta Compton if you haven't seen it. Should have been nominated for Best Picture, but we know how that goes, right? So it's not only in the lyrics, but it's also in the flow, right? And so for those of you who listen to rap music, you know what I mean by flow. Flow is the way in which you move your lyrics along the beat. And we know that East Coast rappers, their flow tends to be quick. They move it across, regardless of what the beat is, they move it across the beat fairly quickly. Why? Look at the city, particularly New York, Philly, Boston, intense, high-paced, quick-moving cities. If we move 60 years back, and we think about jazz traditions, and we think about bird and dizzy and the creation of bebop, why does bebop have this frenetic fast pace? Because it was cultivated in New York City. We can do the same thing in terms of blues. Delta blues in terms of its tempo, much slower. It moves up to Chicago in the 30s, in the 20s and 30s. It gets electrified and the tempo increases radically. Same thing happens in hip-hop. We see the tempo of rappers being deeply influenced by the geographies in which they inhabit and the regions which they come from. So it's not only about representing Atlanta or Minnesota, because I know there's some Minnesota rappers, but it's also about the ways in which these places inform the musical ability, the tempo, the rhythm, and the style of their art form. So, in closing, I want to say that we are all geographically informed. Everyone, no one here lives outside of geography. Geography informs the foods we eat, our sexual proclivities, the way we speak. We're in Minnesota, ya, no. It informs so much of who we are. Space has always mattered, and it matters to us as a species. Our identities are deeply informed by the geographies in which we inhabit. And if we consider the ways in which black people have organized their politics around the various geographies of injustice, both their politics and their art form, it really illuminates that we cannot acknowledge the role of space enough in terms of thinking about things like social justice. When King demanded people sit at lunch counters, it was not just to desegregate, but it was to create a new way of human beings being organized in cities all throughout the South. He knew that that would radically shift the country. Right now, today, we have roughly three cities that are multiracial, three in the nation. That's the Bronx, Long Beach, and Oakland. All the rest of them are deeply segregated, and they are maintained by the same mechanisms of segregation that created them 100 years ago. This is 2016, 100 years ago. So, if we are to create that beloved community that King and the SCLC pushed for, then we must take stock of the role that race and geography play in shaping not only the lives of people of color, particularly black people, but how they inform white ones too. And with that, I'll say thank you for allowing me to speak with you today. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Shabazz, for that talk. We have just about 10 minutes for questions for anyone who would like to stay and ask them and listen. Please feel free to do so. I should introduce myself. My name is Sean Easton. I'm director of the Peace Studies, one of the many grateful programs that co-sponsored this talk today. A quick announcement. There will be a meet and greet with Dr. Shabazz. This afternoon, I believe three to four, the location will be on flyers as you go out. So, please take one and join us later on. So, we're going to have people with mics on either side over here. If anybody has a question, please put up your hand and we will do our best to get to you in the order that you have raised your hand. All right, thank you very much. Hi, thanks for the great talk. Thank you. I have a question, I don't know if you know the answer, but I'm really curious about the history of Minneapolis and the geographic divisions of North Minneapolis, which is clearly the black community with all the problems and then the rest. I've read a little history about Edina and how that became very white. So, I'm wondering if you can give us some insight on what's happening to our state, the big city here. Yeah, I'm so glad you asked that question. So, this is the first time I've publicly said this, right? I'm working on a new book and it's on Minnesota and it's on black people in Minnesota. Yeah, yeah. And actually, I was trying to tell Thea about it earlier so I'll tell her about it and then also try my best to answer your question. So, the book is about the migration, it's about black migration between the first and the second World War, and it looks at the movement, particularly, I'm particularly interested in how black musicians moved into Minneapolis and the St. Paul area. And the thesis now, it could change as the research continues, but the thesis now is that because the black population here was so small, for black musicians it meant that if they wanted to gig, if they wanted to play, that they had to have extreme musical dexterity, right? So, they needed to be able to play like top 40, polka, rock, they needed to be able to do it all, right? And so, like Chicago, for example, when black musicians came up from Mississippi and Alabama, they could continue to play the blues because there was a black population there and a small white population that wanted the blues. But because they came to Minnesota and the population was largely white, they had to be able to play what the audience wanted. So, they developed this incredible musical dexterity and that musical dexterity, I think, helped give rise to what has become the Minneapolis Sound. And everybody knows what the Minneapolis Sound is about, it's about Prince, right? And so, yes, Prince was the genius, right? Still is, man's incredible. But there was this musical dexterity that was created the generation before him through his parents and his parents and his parents' contemporaries. So, I'm interested in how the genius child, Mozart Jr., the Mozart of North America, was able to draw on the musical dexterity of his parents' generation and synthesize and hone all of that through, you know, he started really playing about eight or not, between eight and 18 and create the Minneapolis Sound, right? So, that's what the book is about. But in terms of black community here, so what I've discovered thus far is that, obviously there were no train lines that brought people directly from the South. So, black migration here was a second migration. So, people went to like Gary, Indiana, Chicago, Detroit, Philly and Ohio and Cleveland. And they heard about the liberal politics and the job openings in Minnesota, particularly places like 3M and other big industrial companies. And so, we had, black Minneapolis was largely populated through individuals making the trek here. Bus, car sometimes, various train lines that, you know, would like drop off here and drop off there. So, that's one of the ways, as I understand it now, that black Minnesota gets populated, you know, post-War War II. But we also see the same thing in terms of what we've seen Chicago and Los Angeles and New York in terms of segregation, housing restrictions or housing covenants and the concentration of poverty in those particular areas. So, at this point, that's sort of all I can offer you in terms of an explanation. But what I will say is that, again, space matters, right? Because certain places were closed off to them either through legal means or through wealth. Black Minneapolis, North Minneapolis where Prince was born and raised. He went to North Minneapolis High School. Is that the name of the high schools? North Minneapolis High School. He went to high school there, played basketball, interesting enough. That community began to take on the very structures of inequality that the South Side of Chicago took on on a very different scale, right? Because the black community, black Minnesota, up until the early 70s was still less than 5%. It was very, very small, right? So the scale was different, but the structures and the forms of inequality that shaped them were very much the same as other communities, right? So there's this difference on the one hand in terms of how black Minnesota comes into being, but there's also these similarities in terms of they're still organized in the same way that many other black cities have been. Good question, thank you. Yes? Hello. So you discussed Martin Luther King as well as several rap groups. And from my perspective, it seems that their message is the similars where they're advocating for black liberation, but they're also very polarizing, Martin Luther King advocated with peace and with respect. Whereas a group like NWA, we all know what the acronym stands for, advocates for peace with profanity and violence. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, NWA didn't advocate for profanity and violence. Well, violence was something that was visited upon black Los Angeles. Housing segregation, police violence, that's what F2Police is about, like F2Police is a response to police violence articulated on black people throughout South LA, right? So they're not advocating for it, they are narrating it, right? And now we'll say like there's some deep and profound gender issues that we should interrogate in terms of thinking about groups like NWA. And that's important that we do that. And at the same time, we should also be attentive to the fact that NWA and other rap groups and other black nationalist groups were advocating for autonomy, control, and justice in black communities, right? And I'll say this, while I philosophically agree with King's message of a multiracial community, I do think black communities being autonomous is a good thing, right? That's a good and positive thing that they can control the resources of their community, the politics that they can ensure that their housing values are maintained, that they can receive, that they can gain access to public resources, like those are good things, right? They shouldn't have to be, white people don't have to come in for those things to be present, right? Communities of color can have them independently of that. With that being said, obviously, desegregation is a good thing for humanity because it's important that we sort of rub up against each other for numerous reasons. So I don't see King and black nationalists and rap groups as being on different ends of the spectrum. I think they have very different tactics of addressing forms of inequality. And for King, his messages resonated with people because they were palatable in some ways, right? And that was part of the strategy, like King wasn't stupid, like he understood what people would agree with and what people would not. And he knew that Malcolm X, who was much more fiery and a nationalist, he knew that the majority of white people were not going to deal with him, right? Which made King significantly more successful because he was approachable, there was his whole beloved community, we shall all get along. And so Malcolm helped him with his strategy significantly, right? In the way that conscious rappers benefit from those who are not, right? But they still very much have a similar message. So that's how we look at it. I would say that they're not in opposition, they just have different tactics. First, I wanna thank you for coming, Dr. Shabazz. Thank you for being a chameleon and meeting us where we are. One question I have is, what do you think the effect of gentrification is? I see you talking a lot about geography and I would say the elephant in the room is that it's strategic, you know? And where people live and how it affects people. So I would like to know what you think, the overall effect of it has been and do you think it's reversible? And when I say the effects and how it's reversible, I'm talking about how where people live creates this bubble and you know, they become oblivious to life and the reality of other people's situations and where they live. So what do you think is next, I guess? Yeah, that's a good question. I'm so glad you raised that. Yes, gentrification is the elephant in the room. Gentrification is a huge problem. Hands down is a significant problem. And gentrification relies on the structures of segregation and the geography of wealth and equality to maintain itself. So without those things, gentrification can't exist. We are seeing young, mostly young whites moving into cities all over the nation. And you know, as their parents and grandparents fled them 30, 40 years ago, now they're sort of coming back and as they come back, right? I mean, this is just an illustration of just how race and class work, as those people move back into the city, capital producing institutions follow them, right? So like, I know Minneapolis is being gentrified. When I moved out of here in the late 90s, you could see it coming, right? So I haven't really spent a whole lot of time in Minneapolis in the last few years, but I know that rent prices have spiked significantly and everybody wants to live either in or in walking distance to downtown. And let me just say like, it's not a bad thing that people want to be in an urban space that is vibrant and culturally rich and filled with all kinds of things that are going on. That's not a bad thing. The problem is that because of the inequality that is built around race, when white people move to places, two things happen. Capital producing institutions follow them and resources follow them and the people who were there have to move, right? So how do we address this? Given that the federal government subsidized segregation for roughly 80 years, the federal government is going to have to subsidize desegregation now, right? And what that means is that as cities become more and more expensive, like you can't live in New York City unless you're fairly wealthy, all right? Same thing with LA, same thing with Oakland, even Phoenix is starting to get like this, Phoenix. So we are going to need some form of institutional federal subsidies to ensure that as communities, as whites move back into the city, that this doesn't radically reshape the entire community. And I think that without some form of structural response to gentrification, that we are going to have European cities in the next 20 years. And what I mean is that if anybody's ever been Europe is spinning or read about it, you know that European cities are mostly white and wealthy and the poor immigrants live on the outside. We are going to see that in the United States if we do not radically address this problem right now. We're unfortunately out of time, but if you want to ask more questions, please come to the meet and greet and also Dr. Shabazz's books are on sale in the back of the room. Thank you very much once again. Thanks everybody.