I’m working on a proposal today for the American Academy of Religions conference coming this fall in the “Mysticism, Poverty, and Social Justice” unit. This is a fun new tradition for me where I try to find something among AAR’s massive call for proposals that resonates with what I’m thinking about these days, use it as a writing prompt to push some sharper thinking out of me, submit it, then wait to be rejected because I don’t have a PhD, am not associated with an academic institution, and in all fairness am probably not saying anything that’s contributing to academic discourse. Which is fine. It’s a fun practice for me either way.
Anyways, in my procrastination this morning, I look back at the last proposal I put together. Here’s the abstract:
The commodified public spaces of American neoliberal cities are where we (I) discover Jesus living among us today as a non-binary black person struggling for survival without a home, traumatized by and resisting compounding violences. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s and subsequent theoreticians’ concept of the Right to the City, I will interrogate the socio-political environment of actually existing public space, identify which users are welcome, for what purposes, and how racialized capitalism has commodified the public realm as another domain for value extraction: thereby, within its supposedly value-neutral pro formas, necessitating the forced and legalized cleansing of such spaces of bodies, communities, and usages perceived to dampen profits. Upon this analysis, I argue nonconforming bodies and anti-capitalist, anti-racist built environments are, as living rebukes to suppresive imaginaries, aesthetically and performatively a public theology of protest and possibility—generating frictions on the current system while projecting options for alternative socialities that may point us toward beloved community. To build this case, I will draw, respectively, on the womanist ethics of Katie Cannon and Timothy Gorringe’s theology of the built environment. The roots of this paper lie in my experiences as an advocate working among people experiencing homelessness, and our collective efforts to develop radically inclusive, democratic tiny home villages with and for folks from the streets of Denver.
Cutting edge stuff, com’ on!
The story in my mind when I put this together was a particular trans/non-binary person I met in Denver during the first year of building and trying to hold together the actual life and operations of Beloved Community Tiny Home Village. They were a standout leader who brought so much to the early days of our organizing. But once we shifted into actually community, they never experienced a sense of belonging or community. The tensions of life together in the village — and some genuine trans-phobia — ground against unmetabolized trauma and were eventually expressed as threats of violence which led to their expulsion. We were brand new to trying to do something this complex, so bogged down in just trying to keep a property that we could exist on and find the funding to keep the lights on, that we just didn’t invest enough in care, healing, and transformative or restorative justice/conflict work.
It’s a tragedy I look back on: that even in this radical attempt at inclusive community and healing justice, a person experiencing so many compounding forms of oppression wasn’t able to find in our village a space that could adequately conform to their needs or hold their pain.
And so I look back on that proposal above, not just as a critical reflection on neoliberal racial capitalism, but as a story that forces me to look back on myself and the efforts toward alternative community I have participated in.
Yes, beneath the supposedly welcoming veneer of public spaces lies a commodified urban geography carved up by matrixes of race and class tailored for extraction by the owner-class. Yes the body of this person I considered a friend is a prophetic lament against such systems.
But — and this is exactly where so many progressives and leftists get stuck — we cannot reduce the problems we face just to structural causes. Their body is also a reminder to me of the tragic partiality of the transformation I’ve undergone and communion I have learned to practice. I’m listening to that lament again this morning (a day that happens to be the 9 year anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s murder). I’m meditating on who I need to become and what we need to keep building, together, so that all may be home and all may be well.