phillydreamsandnightmares

[phillydreamsandnightmares]

In October of 2015, I was dating my friend Raeese. We would spend weekends in Philly looking for different skate spots when I finished doing homework at my brothers in West Philly and he got off work in Center City. We would meet at Love park and make plans from there. 

Raeese was a practicing Muslim at the time and myself a practicing Jew. He’s Black and I’m white. We found commonality through our differences and shared our cultures and beliefs. Both of our parents were accepting of our relationship so we never really considered that some might have other perceptions. 

Towards the end of the month, Raeese and I were going out to skate but didn’t have subway fare so we hopped the turnstile. We walked into the station when suddenly a police officer tackled Raeese. He was wearing short sleeves and had a nazi tattoo on his forearm. The officers name is Ian Hans Lichterman and he was on duty from 2000 until he quit in 2018. He began using excessive force on Raeese, handcuffed him and brought him down to the station. I was left there in tears. 

I called my Dad and he immediatley called his friend who is a lawyer. Soon after, Raeese was able to come home. That day, he was traumatized. To this day, I question whether Lichterman followed us and brutalized Raeese because of our relationship or whether my presence had any impact on Raeese surviving the altercation. 

I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to answer these questions. Throughout highschool, my Black friends were beaten up in front of me as police officers pushed me back and threatened to use more force if I intervened. I believe that these experiences leave me with no other choice but to dedicate my life to the movement. 

In December of 2018, I was flying from San Francisco to the Philadelphia airport and I saw Raeese. We hadn’t spoken in a while but he told me that he moved to LA to pursue a career in modeling and that this was his connecting flight. He told me that his mugshot was being used in the poster for Meek Mill’s docu-series on the criminal justice system and mass incarceration. It’s right above Gucci Manes. We didn’t say anything else to eachother, but we hugged before the flight took off and then parted ways. I feel like closure is a nonexistent phenomenon. Alternatively, I’m grateful to be cognizant of the ways in which different people experience different spaces and I will continue to fucking fight. 

[phillydreamsandnightmares]

[phillydreamsandnightmares]

[phillydreamsandnightmares]

[phillydreamsandnightmares]

FOOD APARTHEID & POLICE VIOLENCE

The built environment of Philadelphia reflects the social hierarchy of race and class, where the cityscape both produces and is produced by urban inequality. Through post-Fordist processes of economic restructuring, changes in capital accumulation led to the uneven development in the urban landscape as we know it today. As a result, low income communities of color face disproportionate occurrences of police violence as well as a lack of access to healthy food. Through a brief analysis of spatial separations in Philadelphia, we can address the interdependent organization of food systems and policing. 

According to a 2019 city report, in Philadelphia only one in nine grocery stores sell healthy food while more than four in five retail food stores sell foods high in calories, fat, sugar or salt. The report also stated that access to stores selling healthy food is “overwhelmingly concentrated” in Center City, University City, West Mount Airy, Chestnut Hill and Upper Roxborough - neighborhoods which are predominantly white and high income.

As white flight brought capital to the suburbs and formed wealthy enclaves within the city, grocery stores followed suit. The lack of grocery stores in low income communities of color demonstrates the lasting impacts of suburbanization, highway development, and the rise of neoliberalism on the cityscape. 

Macro political-economic processes have caused an unequal access to resources based on uneven development and simultaneously established infrastructural exclusion. Infrastructural exclusion is the reorganization of space and resources which disconnects certain social groups and geographic places from public access. Food insecurity is a direct result of infrastructural exclusion. Food insecurity represents the presence of hunger but also the lack of physical and economic access to healthy food that is culturally relevant and meets people's dietary needs. More often than not the geographic occurrence of food insecurity is defined as a food desert. In response, recent scholars have argued that the use of the term food desert indicates a natural occurrence and fails to acknowledge the systems of power that are at play. Instead, the term food apartheid better encompasses the origins of food insecurity as the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. 

A study by Phojanakong et al. (2019) demonstrated that household food insecurity in Philadelphia is significantly associated with experiences of racism by police and courts as well as in public places. 

In the U.S., race is both a political and legal construction where racial categories and their coinciding meanings act as forces of social and spatial control, maintaining the construction of whiteness as the status quo through direct or indirect violence (Omi & Winant, 2015). Law enforcement thereby has always acted as a force of weaponized state violence, not to protect the people but to prevent disruption. Racism has been utilized on a systemic level to create and naturalize spaces of polarities: white and nonwhite, wealthy and impoverished, healthy and unhealthy, safe from police and at risk of brutality.

Cityscapes are therefore constructed and maintained by apparatuses of control. The notion of the crime ridden inner city is a product of the conditions created by global capitalism, where capital requires inequality to accumulate. In this ideology, racism and capitalism are inseparable and the spaces they create are not neutral. Spaces are actively produced by social relations, which is evident in the mutual occurrence of food apartheid and police violence in low income communities of color.

By divesting the current power of police forces and private corporations and investing in community resources and welfare, we can transition away from the oppressive systems that the settler state depends upon and move to end the public health crises of racialized state violence and food apartheid in Philadelphia.

[phillydreamsandnightmares]

FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL

An internationally celebrated author and journalist, Mumia Abu-Jamal is prominently known for his work with the Black Panther Party and Philadelphia based MOVE organization. Mumia was first sentenced to death in 1982 for the alleged murder of Philly police officer Daniel Faulkner which occurred on December 9, 1981. He has been held in solitary confinement on Death Row for thirty years, despite a federal judge overturning his death sentence in 2001. Today, he remains in prison with a life sentence without parole. 

The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal highlights an important example of racial profiling and racialized trials, exposing the inherently racist “justice” system. In sum, federal court decisions reflected racial bias as the prosecutors argument to the jury ignored reasonable doubt. The prosecutor continued with a racist jury selection through their use of preemptory challenges. Further racism persisted with trial judge Albert Sabo who used the Fraternal Order of Police as a general excuse from holding new fair trials.  

It is clear that Philadelphia police and courts perpetuates the prison industrial complex by targeting Black communities. 

In a 2013 interview, Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow! interviewed Mumia Abu-Jamal from State Correctional Institute Mahonoy located outside of Philadelphia. In the beginning of the interview, Mumia stated that Pennsylvania has the absolute highest number of juveniles with life sentences out of any state in the US as well as any jurisdiction in the world. When asked about the movement born out of his imprisonment and the prison industrial complex, Mumia responded saying that “it is the essence of a grassroots movement because it came from the bottom not the top” and that the MOVE organization was unprecedented in organizing. The movement continues to demand an end to mass incarceration, what Mumia terms slow death row, and solitary confinement. After explaining the context of Mahonoy as the imprisonment of Black manhood from men who don’t even shave to men in their wheelchairs, Mumia went on to discuss his notion of the “open air prison.” He stated that the US is now a national security state where we become a less free nation every day. As a call to action, Mumia closed by saying: 

“If you don’t want to join our movement, join some movement but damnit do something.” 

[phillydreamsandnightmares]

REDLINING & BROWNFIELDS

A WHYY article from 2017 discussed the modern day impacts of redlining in Philadelphia, from vacant homes to environmental toxicity. Stated as “an 80-year-old social engineering effort,” redlining shaped spaces in the city based on race and class. The 1930s plan to revive the housing market following the Great Depression was carried out by racist mortgage lenders  withholding credit from communities of color and immigrants. Banks and federal agencies blocked North Philly and other neighborhoods from opportunity by eliminating potential credit. Through the New Deal, the HOLC and the FHA divested capital from urban areas into new white suburban homes. It wasn’t until the LBJ era when civil rights activists called attention to the blatant racist segregationist agenda. Although unofficial today, Philadelphia’s neighborhoods remain segregated causing certain areas to be disproportionately impoverished. 

Following an interactive map by Azavea/Next City displaying the HOLCs redlining and demographic composition from 2015 US Census Bureau data, the article shows another map by PolicyMap/Next City which shows the HOLCs redlining and occurrences of toxic brownfields. It’s obvious that real estate discrimination resulted in a multitude of other injustices, including environmental justice concerns. 

When debating the notion of correlation versus causation, the article draws attention to the actions of the FHA which in 1939 specified that white neighborhoods should be separated from communities of color by “physical impediments like waterways or railroad tracks.” It continued to state that these barriers aid in “the prevention of the infiltration of … lower class occupancy and inharmonious racial groups.” The FHA did not change its racist practices until Congress mandated an act in 1968 requiring the agency to do so. 

The article frequently referenced Richard Rothstein, author of “The Color of Law.” During the initial outbreak of BLM protests following the murder of George Floyd, a NowThis video of Rothstein explaining redlining went viral. The underscore of both that video and this article are that wealth disparities are rooted in the denial of property ownership for Black families. 

Neighborhoods began to deteriorate with post-Fordist job losses which led to increases in crime and drug abuse. Today, these impacts are still felt by communities and have caused a multitude of other related inequalities. 

[phillydreamsandnightmares]

In 2018, WURD radio - a Black owned Philadelphia talk radio station - interviewed the attorney Ebony Griffin from the Public Interest Law Center to discuss the work she is doing for the city’s community gardens. 

The interview begins with the story of a city in Florida, to shed light on the barriers faced when growing your own food. In 2013, the City of Miami Shores enforced the ban on vegetable gardens in private homeowners front yards. Inspectors began to label gardeners as “law breakers” and subjected fines of $50 a day unless the vegetable gardens were destroyed. It wasn’t until 2019 that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed SB-82 which states that local governments cannot ban homeowners from growing food in their front yards.

As Ms. Griffin put it: “Spaces and places where people are trying to grow their own food have been severely challenged.”

In the city of Philadelphia, Ms. Griffin provides pro bono legal support to gardeners in the city who are facing various obstacles through the Garden Justice Legal Initiative.

Each case is different as struggles with land access can involve acquiring titles or long term leases, or even just securing basic access through long term leases by the city or the Neighborhood Gardens Trust. In addition to land access, gardeners may not know the requirements in place for garden insurance - which acts to cover certain mishaps. 

One of the main barriers gardeners in Philly are up against are collections from land holders for unpaid property taxes. In 1997, the city of Philadelphia started a wide scale tax lane securitization. Twenty some years later, private land holders are making their ways to collect debt on the land they weren’t even using. 

Ms. Griffin also helps gardeners through land bank issues, helping them understand how that process is supposed to work in relation to the tax lanes mentioned above. For community gardens, land banks are intended to compile parcels or gardens and make them whole. Instead of the complications from different ownership, the land bank has the authority to acquire privately owned land and reclaim or repackage it and give or sell back to the gardeners. Tax lane securitization makes that process difficult and expensive because those who are acquiring the land have to pay back the land owner as well as other transaction costs. 

Ms. Griffin provides assistance in forming EOIs or an expression of interest, which essentially start the process of acquiring land for community gardens. She also helps with the disposition policy which outlines the different reasons or ways in which the land bank will sell/donate/give away land. For instance, if an organization is a tax exempt nonprofit they’re able to acquire land from the land bank for free. 

As forces of gentrification have increased property values, parcels have been pushed to sheriff’s sale in the interest of the original land owner. On the other hand, if the privately owned land has been occupied for 21 years or more, gardeners can acquire the land through adverse possession if they meet the legal requirements of use being “actual, continuous, visible, notorious, distinct and hostile.” In other words, you cannot have been using the land in secret or in permission from the land owner. 

Regardless of the situation at hand, Ebony Griffin has offered her services in order to protect the 400 plus community gardens that exist in Philadelphia. She is available by phone or email at 267-546-1306 or egriffin@pubintlaw.org. 

[phillydreamsandnightmares]

If you’ve ever walked around Philly when it’s warm out, chances are you’ve heard a distant beat being played by a drum line. As the music gets louder, you see Elmo in front of them dancing. Soon enough, everyone around you joins in and is smiling and laughing. Strangers suddenly become friendly neighbors as the space of the city is humanized. 

Moments of crisis are no different. When a fire took place in 2018, Elmo and his drum line were there. When the protests erupted after the murder of George Floyd, Elmo and his drum line were there. Spaces of tension and inequality are infiltrated with reminders of music, dance and community love.

William Fulton, also known as “Philly Elmo,” and Tony Royster’s Positive Movement Entertainment (PME) drumline emerged out of the need to redefine spaces. 

When Royster was growing up he discovered drumming as a safe haven. He’s battled homelessness and despair, using the rhythym of his beats as a guiding force towards positivity. PME’s motto remains “put down the guns, pick up some drums.”

“Basically where I come from was like, I say, the heart of negativity, you know its drugs, almost everyday shooting, people dying.” 

“The drill team was my outlet to not be subjected to growing up and being a drug dealer.” 

Fulton & Royster’s movement was born out of North Philly but quickly moved around the city to spread joy for everyone. 

“If you have a heartbeat, then you have rhythym. It’s in everyone.” 

In April, Philly Elmo & PME were spotted marching in South Philly as a distraction from the challenges of the pandemic. 

As Philadelphia faces ongoing issues of inequality that have been exacerbated by the pandemic, Philly Elmo & the PME drum line offer hope and optimism through their lively public performances. 

[phillydreamsandnightmares]

THE SOUNDSCAPE OF PHILADELPHIA

Growing up in the Philadelphia area, most social events revolved around music. Whether it was the house parties at Temple, concerts at the Electric Factory and the Theater of Living Arts, DJ events in remote subway stations, or music festivals like Made In America and Roots Picnic - 

music brought people together from every part of the city.

As a city composed of distinct neighborhoods, each space produces a unique sound.

Historically, Philadelphia has been renowned for the city’s contributions to various genres. The Academy of Music, on Broad and Locust, is the city's oldest venue - hosting operas and concerts every year since 1857. In the 20th century, the city became filled with classical music, choirs, pop, punk, gospel, Irish music, jazz and soul. More recently, Philly has pioneered the scene for rock, indie, edm, hip hop, dancehall, r&b and neosoul.

Notably, Philly is home to the Roots & Questlove, Patti LaBelle, Boyz II Men, Hall & Oates, Chubby Checker, Jill Scott, Will Smith, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Diplo, and Marian Hill.

Hip hop is said to have originated in the late 1970s out of the South Bronx, but was popularized by Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff in West Philly and the Roots in South Philly. Today, the heart of hip hop has moved to North Philly - where Meek Mill set the stage for todays rap scene.

“North where I was raised at, South Philly I plays that”

Hip hop communicates the struggles and blessings of everyday life, emphasizing the spatial composition of society and contributing to the geographic culture. 

Inequality is embedded in sound as art becomes an outlet for experience. 

That being said, to experience Philly all you need to do is press play.