To Los Angeles: United in Grief,United in Struggle

Abstract

I honor Black struggle for life and living in Los Angeles's panoptic landscape by detailing how it has led me to the work of Mike Davis and visions for abolition.

I saw my Los Angeles in Mike Davis's excavation of the city. Indeed, I came to realize that my family's Black California dreamin’ was bred through a panoptic excursion of the region's land development. And it was Mike Davis who provided clear words for it when I picked up City of Quartz. Vince Staples, Long Beach rapper and crip, shared in a recent digital spread that everyone should read City of Quartz suggesting that it provides insight into his family's experience in Los Angeles (Guan, 2016). Mike Davis's analysis now 30 years later is one of dissecting the carceral moorings of Los Angeles that rappers such as Vince Staples know all too well. But this knowledge is grounded in struggle, and grounded in the life and living of Los Angeles, where Davis's work is an imaginative opening toward abolition in the city. My family's eulogy for living in Los Angeles has birthed me as a scholar. Thus, I honor my family and kin by uplifting Mike's contribution to understanding sites of struggle in Los Angeles.

I was not a desert rat. Although we went “Up the Hill” along Highway 15 often to visit my aunt and my cousins who were sent to Victorville, a city in Los Angeles's high desert, in the early 2000s by the Housing Authority. My family along with many other Section 8 voucher holders moved to the newly built homes in the desert to bankroll developers who pleaded with the government for some profits after their plan failed (Karlenzig, 2010). I had never seen dirt roads and newly built suburban homes in the same vicinity until I went up the hill. My aunt, who was the candy lady in the neighborhood, made the most of it in between her dialysis appointments and the hell that poverty brings. Our journey over the hill, however, slowly faded as the planned abandonment by housing displacement led to the slow violence my family members experienced through drugs, incarceration, kidney failure, and lack of opportunity.

But our dreamin’ was full of sunshine where down the hill my dad led family barbecues in the planned parks and recreation centers stretching from Pomona to Riverside in the Inland Empire laden with dismal public space and growing suburban sprawl. My father did the heavy lifting for my grandmother, playing taxi by picking up elder relatives from motels and street corners to join in on the fun. We turned those parks into backyard boogies, childhood bliss, and basketball matches. My granny held it down. She was part of the last wave of the Black Los Angeles golden age with her decades-long factory job that bought a house that she frequently withdrew from to keep the whole family afloat.

But overtime, the parties faded.

People got busy with surviving.

To live a life just enough for the city.

Those visits to with my dad became visits to the Chino Men's Facility. I was a vocal adolescent, telling my father “You gotta get outta there,” when he first told me the news over the phone that he was in prison. It did not take him long to get out. But that is not part of the story we told in 2008, 15 years ago, when the true impacts of Black degradation took an untimely hold on my father. In fact, we told the story of a strong Black man, in a funeral home where proudly we had to open balcony seating for the overflow of those that came to pay their respects. A man who drove his daughters from Fontana to Leimert Park to Welcome Home Geronimo Pratt in 1997. I was young enough to sit on his shoulders so that I could see over a crowd of Black men who took to the revolutionary freedom that Pratt spoke of. My dad had always been empowered by Black revolutionary thought.

I first started to engage in a scholarly understanding of Los Angeles when I decided to study Skid Row in graduate school. Deborah Burton, a grandmother, a Black woman, and a Skid Row resident had been invited to speak in my undergraduate community organizing class at California State University, Northridge to talk about policing. Telling a room full of working-class students that Skid Row was the most highly policed community in the nation shattered any preconceived notions of poverty, and even more so our understanding of gentrification. She had made clear that any fight around remaining in place in Los Angeles is a fight about policing. When I went to graduate school in New York, Deborah's words still rang in my ears, and I decided to email Deborah to learn more about her struggles through fieldwork and of course the opportunity to come home more frequently. The first day of fieldwork was not in Skid Row but at the Norwalk Court Office, attending a trial for Deborah who was fighting charges made against her by the Skid Row business improvement district, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), and the Midnight Mission, a food and shelter organization, who all were trying to lock her up for 15 years for blowing a toy airhorn.

Deborah was sounding the alarm against policing and real estate that worked to spatialize criminality on Skid Row. In collectivity, Deborah worked to delegitimize the police state. And it was working so much so that when a juror left the courtroom after Deborah's not guilty verdict, he yelled “keep fighting!”

As I was conducting dissertation fieldwork on Skid Row and visiting family, my other aunt, now displaced to a trailer home park in Phoenix, started to unlock deeply held stories about my grandfather, a Skid Row denizen. He was a rolling stone. Capitalism had produced the conditions under which mental health, addiction, and care are devalued and thus my grandfather repeatedly cycled between the streets on the row and family couches. One time on my grandmother's porch, my aunt shared how he had called home one day to have her pick him up. Searching the streets of Skid Row, they finally found him laying down on the sidewalk. So weak, they picked him up and carried him to the car. He was down bad; even maggots had taken to the soles of his shoe. I did not witness this side of my grandfather, but my cousin did. That had to do with my mother. She fought tirelessly to live in the Westside in proximity to the University of California, Los Angeles, and the building we are in today. She wanted us to have an educational opportunity leading us to triumphantly navigate rent and eviction in the Palms neighborhood under the guise that the Westside had better schools and life chances than my mother's childhood neighborhood of Compton. Somehow my mom's plan worked.

However, it was Skid Row itself, the culture of resistance bred from its location, that made me into an activist scholar. Skid Row introduced me to Black radical thought and organizing. And it is from this tradition that I saw my fight in Los Angeles as one indebted to protecting the living. It is thanks to the efforts of Christina Heatherton and Jordan Camp who worked with the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) to produce two anthologies on what was happening in Skid Row that led me to the work of Mike Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Cedric Robinson, Clyde Woods, and many others. Together, with organizers and residents, these anthologies and scholars drilled into me that Skid Row, Los Angeles is a site of abolitionist struggle. A struggle that is working to end the violence that five people die a day from being unhoused in Los Angeles (Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, 2022). Or a struggle where unhoused people, especially Black unhoused people, experience the most arrests in Los Angeles than any other Angelino (Dupuy et al., 2017). Or a struggle that is combatting the fact that Los Angeles arrests and incarcerates more people than any other place in the United States (Hernandez, 2017).

Mike Davis’ writings taught me that the Westside/Downtown feud over shaping Los Angeles birthed a carceral landscape that my paternal line and Deborah Burton would know intimately. And the activism and experiences of Skid Row denizens showed me that this is a city of contested development (Dozier, 2019). Thus, Deborah Burton's visit to California State University, Northridge led me on a path where Skid Row and Los Angeles for that matter would enlist me into a struggle for abolition.

Pete White, executive director of LA CAN, most adequately helped me understand that a scholarship is not enough. Pete explained that it was imperative for me to build out similar organizing work in New York where I studied, and that led to my work with the Coalition to End Broken Windows and the Stop the Raids Coalition. Through my decade-long process of learning and engaging in Los Angeles and New York-based coalition building, from police divestment campaigns to stopping public housig raids, all roads led to a politics of abolition and to my surprise a contribution to the shift in consciousness epitomized in the 2020 rebellion.

Today in Los Angeles, organizing and research toward abolition is grounded within the legacy of Black liberation organizing in the city since the 1950s, and is a continuation of the work of Mike Davis. In the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition (2021) report, Automating Banishment: Data Driven Policing on Stolen Land, the coalition excavates the last two decades of grounded knowledge, organizing, and stealth analysis of the global police state in Los Angeles. Automating Banishment is collectively written by over 20 people and carries Mike Davis's original discussion of policing, surveillance, and land development in City of Quartz by detailing the city's ongoing efforts toward accumulation and elimination.

It was in February of 2022 that the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition hosted a webinar in conversation with Mike Davis through Haymarket Books. Hamid Khan founded the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition in the early 2000s to address the impending surveillance tactics employed through post-9/11 urban infrastructure. The Coalition has been a crucial source of knowledge on surveillance expansion in Los Angeles, documenting surveillance tactics, technologies, and who funds them. Hamid asked me to do the webinar with the Coalition and LA CAN. And in my general humble fashion, I told him that their knowledge and work is all the space that's needed, and my role is mute. He said, in so many words, “No…you are our hood scholar… we need you there.” I, along with Steve Diaz at LA CAN, Shakeer Rahman with Stop LAPD Spying, and Hamid Kahn spoke for over an hour about Los Angeles and Skid Row with Mike Davis (Haymarket, 2022).

During the initial test for the webinar, I had imagined that our meeting with Mike Davis would bring the bravado of a powerhouse of socialist theory and the history of Los Angeles and global capitalism. When the figure of him appeared on the screen, I realized he was ill, and soon I saw a guy who figured as a gentle giant. I started to wonder why I had not crossed paths with him sooner. During our test run for the webinar, he talked about his daughter who is a worker fighting against her management's ill-fated attempts to reduce the number of rodents at her mall restaurant job. And then for an hour or so, I gathered five important lessons from Mike.

The first lesson is to name names. We name who is behind shaping our cities. During the webinar, Mike highlighted the University of Southern California's role in shaping Downtown and the mega-acreage land ownership of the catholic church across the United States. The second lesson is that all urban reforms lead to land extraction and speculation. Third, that the police state is not hell-bent on predicting crime but on incapacitation. Fourth, that distant places, such as Ireland, are just as much a part of the architecture of policing as is our local context which shows how our lives are linked together. And finally, Mike said depressingly that the role of former anti-police organizers turned pro-police and reformist, such as Los Angeles's recently elected mayor Karen Bass, is our greatest site of struggle. Another way to think about this last lesson is that we must deepen our understanding of the rise of multicultural democratic fascism, where U.S. democracy has reformed the violence of colonialism and capitalism through state-sanctioned violence in the name of representation and progress (Bin-Wahad 2007; Jackson 1972; Meyerson and Roberto 2006).

I know grief and loss in this city. And the idea of having an opportunity to talk to Mike Davis one on one to hear his understanding of my Los Angeles was slipping away. I finally sent an email to him in July 2022, and embarrassingly, with two attachments of my recently published articles hoping for a chance to meet before it was too late. It took some time to hear from him, but when I did, I was hopeful. He wrote:

Sorry for taking a month to reply, but I’ve been quite sick. Thanks to pain relief now afforded by a prescription of morphine, I’m finally able to tackle a mountain of unanswered correspondence. Unfortunately I’m too tired for visits or interviews.

Your work is the best kind of engaged research so all power to your pen.

warmly – mike davis

All power to your pen? I had never heard such a revision of the Black power phrase. And then I realized what stories are for. Stories are a practice of sharing who we have forgotten, what we may not see, and what we must remember. Mike Davis tried tirelessly to tell a powerful story about Los Angeles's history. And my family's living in the city and the freedom dreams emanating from Skid Row offer us insight into the story of our collective fight. A fight to remain in place. A fight for our lives. A fight to end the war, domestically and abroad. And a collective fight for abolition. So, to my Los Angeles, in what Kendrick Lamar calls “United in Grief,” for our families, our movement, and for Mike Davis, I end with this:

All power to your pen, All Power to the People.