Sick and Tired: Reflections on Design, Illness, and the Fight for Racial Justice
This talk was given as the inaugural keynote lecture of the annual Design Futures Forum. The Design Futures Student Leadership Forum (DFF) is a leadership development initiative that builds capacity for future leaders to apply the power of community-engaged design to address systemic racism in the built environment. The 2020 Forum is presented with support from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Enterprise Community Partners.
Land Acknowledgement: This talk was presented from Memphis, TN, which is the indigenous land of the Chickasaw and Quapaw tribes.
Today I want to speak to you on the topic of “ Being Sick & Tired As a Designer for Racial Justice.”
This title is inspired by the words of Mississippian Civil Rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer, after she was viciously beaten by police in 1963 in a Mississippi jail for exercising her right to vote. The beatings and harassment she received injured her with “severe kidney damage, a blood clot behind one eye, and a permanent limp” (1). In 1964, she testified about this at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City as she shared about the violent discrimination and conditions that black folks suffered in Mississippi.
In my journey, I have known a bit about being sick and tired. As a child, I was often sick from complications with kidney and bladder challenges. Last week marked 1 year since fibroids, endometriosis, and severe anemia led me to get a life-changing hysterectomy on July 10, 2019; and last month, on June 10, I was unexpectedly rushed to the ER and hospitalized, for what I am now still learning to be a chronic syndrome within my digestive system. Since, 2013, I have undergone 6 blood transfusions, including one on October 10, 2014—the night the Mirror Casket was revealed during “Ferguson October.” Ironically, these each happened on the 10th of the month, so there’s divine numerology that I should explore.
Defining “Sick & Tired”
When I layer in the amount of exhaustion and burnout that being a designer and organizer can entail, I delineate meaning from Fannie Lou Hamer’s “Sick & Tired” paradigm in a few ways as they relate to our current COVID19 pandemic, economic crisis, racial justice protests, and general unsettling political state of affairs.
And as we think about the intersections of public health, racism, and built environment, we have to admit in accordance with the social determinants of health that we are living in conditions hellbent on keeping us sick and tired. The neglect, inaction, and silence of our leaders causes us to experience a special breed of collective trauma, but as we know too well, such illness, tiredness, trauma is disproportionately stacked against Black people, for racism itself is a long-standing pandemic that we, our elders, and our ancestors have been fighting for generations to end. Just last night, we lost one of those elders—Congressman John Lewis—who’d fought against racism since his teenage years.
As designers, we can carry the torch that’s been lit in order to fight against institutional racism within our field, structural racism across the built environment, but first we must acknowledge three admissions regarding this:
Racism is the most toxic civic and social disease that has rotted the nation’s roots and pervaded throughout, within, and across each of its systems and structures.
I want to specifically highlight policing as its brought us to this current moment, for law enforcement is one of such systems that was founded on exerting racial power, terror, and control of black bodies and our ability to navigate across communities. Recognizing this helps us understand why police brutality so frequently happens in public space. It affirms that police brutality is not simply adjacent to the built environment and nor does it simply happen in the built environment.We have to contend with the fact that racial injustices like police brutality are of and by the built environment.
As creators of the built environment and the experiences within it, we must address our profession’s direct and implicit roles in creating the conditions for racial injustice to prevail.
With recognizing these three mandates, we can expand our understanding of “sick and tired” to identify specific structural, institutional, and political conditions, policies, behaviors, and practices of the built environment that are ripe for change, and our chart might start to look like this:
You can download this blank one to complete this as an exercise for your school, firm, and practices.
On Healing
With recognizing the “sick” and “tired” parts of the built environment, what might healing look like? How might we restore energy?
I believe that healing is a process, a continuous one.
For me, healing is a spiritual process. In my sickness, I have learned that healing is not just about the physical actions we must take. Yes, it is important to bandage a wound, take antibiotics, and refuel with vitamins, exercise, etc. But healing also requires an on-going act of checking internally with myself—my gut—to reorient my mind around what has hurt me.
Healing is, of course, a personal process. When hatred and trauma directly impacts you, it is an individual prerogative to heal. Not doing so can lead toward chronic challenges with both mental and physical illness.
I am reminded of the wisdom of Audre Lorde, which reminds us that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence.” We don’t have to feel shame or guilt for healing, for prioritizing self-care, for centering joy, or for affirming that we are more than our trauma. Instilling these as practice “is self-preservation,” Lorde says, and “that is an act of political warfare.”
And you don’t have to heal alone, for healing is a collective process. As we are experiencing collective trauma right now, it is critical for us to find, build, and cultivate the communities that will refuel our lives with harmony and balance. As designers, this may mean ensuring that the creative communities, networks, and associations we are members of are holding healthy and brave space for collective work. Another civil rights leader pinned the value of this well when he expressed, “When "i" is replaced with "we" even illness becomes wellness.”
But collective healing is also about “shifting the historical patterns and psychologies of living that have harmed our communities” (2) and social well-being, because healing is a cultural process.
In St. Louis, I served from 2015-2019 as a Board Member of Forward through Ferguson, the non-profit organization that was created from the Ferguson Commission report of the same name. Currently, I am a content creator for its upcoming Racial Healing & Justice Fund, which prioritizes a “community designed, community decision-making” process by which to invest in homegrown collective, cultural healing efforts that are working toward racial justice. This infographic shows how it aims to approach this.
Finally, healing is a creative process. I was hesitant to put that “healing is a design process” because emotionally it makes it seems too formulaic, and healing is not that. As well, as we reckon with some of the colonial and supremacist tendencies of design thinking implementation, I don’t want us to assume we can place our healing into a standardized process and pop out with a new “innovation” that will cure all that ails us. I don’t want us to strip the humanity from—or center problematic structures into—our individual or collective healing, because sometimes it’s messy, it’s painful, and healing is not a simple process.
But, we can indeed create spaces, platforms, expressions, and experiences that foster healing for ourselves and in community with others. Three recent efforts come to mind as I consider this.
Black Womxn Flourish
Just this past week, my good friend and communications designer, Denise Shante Brown, launched the Black Womxn Flourish venture in Baltimore, MD, which she has been designing and developing since she was a Masters of Social Design graduate student at MICA. Black Womxn Flourish is a design and wellbeing collective striving for a future where Black womxn are redefining and designing what it means to be well through creative, community-led practices.CLEANSE
A month after the mural of Philadelphia’s staunchly racist Mayor, Frank Rizzo, was removed from the 9th Street Market, my friend Michelle Angela Ortiz and other Philly public artists (Ricardo Rivera, Laura Deutch, Ursula Rucker, Naomieh Jovin, and Kevin Nguyen) came together to visually cleanse the site. With affirmation and welcoming of local residents, their projections of art works helped to “push for new collective histories and continue fighting for anti-racism” in the city.Gun Violence Memorial Project
Created by the architectural team at MASS Design (Boston, MA), the Gun Violence Memorial Project in Chicago set a space last fall for remembrance and healing for individuals impacted by gun violence. The memorial design features “four houses built of 700 glass bricks, each house representing the average number of lives lost due to gun violence each week in America. Families who have lost a loved one due to gun violence contributed remembrance objects within a glass brick, displaying the name, year of birth, and year of death of the person being honored.” ( MASS Design)
In Montgomery, AL, MASS Design also designed The National Memorial for Peace and Justice with the Equal Justice Initiative to create a memorial for those whose lives were lost to lynching. In St. Louis, we will hopefully engage with its “Community Remembrance Project” through community soil collection for sites of lynchings as we join EJI to “truthfully grapple with painful racial history, challenge injustice where it exists, and vow never to repeat the terror and violence of the past.” (Bryan Stephenson)
Designing and creating spaces and platforms for healing shifts us from the constant focus on our trauma and positions us to envision new promises and possibilities for transformation and well-being.
From Sick to Healing, From Tired to Active
As we consider the ways we might address the “tired,” and racially unjust parts of our systems, I do not believe that designing for reform will be our strongest approach for the change. Yes, reform reorganizes, reshapes, and redesigns the nature of the unjust, but it does not necessarily remove the existence of the injustices themselves. Reform also does not necessarily restore or replace the assets and sense of well-being that have been pillaged and extracted from communities that have faced racial injustice. Thus, existing paradigms of reform will not necessarily usher a more radical reimagination for how we move forward.
As well, reform emphasizes incremental change, and like the abolitionists of slavery and Jim Crow, we live in conditions that require us to demand more than the breadcrumbs of what’s possible. People are tired of asking for permission to live, tired of begging for our lives to matter, tired of waiting on broken promises, tired of being at the table with those who block us from change, and tired of following the lead of those who have embodied the mandates of the oppressor.
Design As Protest and Hopes of Healing & Justice
I believe in the possibilities of designing for collective healing and designing for justice.
Last month, I joined architects Bryan C. Lee Jr., Taylor Holloway, and Mike Ford to co-organize Design As Protest following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery.
The design and architectural communities showed up in droves for our initial national calls, with over 3,000 people attempting to join in. Since then, we have had 800 designers commit to take action with us, and we have co-organized 150+ BIPOC designers to help lead the vision of this work across 6 current domains of work:
Direct Action
Field Organizing
Youth Organizing
Storytelling & Documentation
Research & Data
Planning & Policy
All of this work is oriented around nine current Design Justice Demands to our profession:
Cease the design of prisons and police stations.
Design Justice demands we cease our support of the carceral state through the design of prisons, jails, and police stations. All of these spaces inflict harm and extraction on black bodies far beyond that of other communities.
Reinvest in Disinherited Communities
Design Justice demands that our cities and towns reallocate funds supporting police departments and reinvest in the critical needs of disinherited neighborhoods and communities. Anyone who has worked with marginalized communities knows of multiple projects unable to find footing due to the lack of investment and resources. The design profession must be an actor in the visioning of these spaces.End CPTED Tactics
Design Justice demands a cease to all efforts to implement defensible space and (CPTED) crime prevention through environmental design tactics. These efforts often criminalize blackness under the guise of safety, and the breaching of these efforts promotes unwarranted interaction with the police.Emphasis on CPTED tactics centers crime prevention as opposed to community power. Any tactic that seeks to the suspicion that the public on wanted ultimately focuses its sights on black people safety store paramount where our entire profession is Guided by underlined and sometimes our racist Tendencies we have to dismantle the two.Redefine metrics for affordable neighborhoods
Design Justice demands that we cease the use of area mean income to determine “affordability” in our communities and instead root the distribution of state and federal resources in a measure that reflects the extraction of generational wealth and from black communities.
Shift public policies
Design Justice demands we advocate for policies and procedures that support a genuinely accessible public realm free from embedded oppression. In doing so, we must recognize the inherent health, dignity, and necessity afforded to cultural communities able to congregate in public without fear of harassment.Enhance self-determination
Design Justice demands that we ensure communities' self-determination through an established procedure that incorporates community voice in process and community benefits agreements in action for all publicly accountable projects.Reimagine financial model of neighborhood design
Design Justice demands we detangle our contractual relationships with power and capital to better serve neighborhoods and communities from a position of service and not from a place of extraction and labor extraction. Freeing ourselves from the fee for service model and building power through black and brown development of the built environment.Preserve and invest in black cultural spaces
Design Justice demands we invest in and secure the place-keeping of black cultural spaces. In doing so, we must acknowledge the history of spatial removal and cultural erasure that grounds spaces that have been adversely impacted by unjust policies and practices within urban design and planning.Reflect Spatial Injustice in Design Training & Licensing
Design Justice demands we proactively redesign our design training and licensing efforts to reflect the history of spatial injustice and build new measures to ground our work in the service of liberating spaces.
At the heart of these demands is the necessity to:
Challenge the privilege and power structures that use architecture, planning and design as tools of oppression.
Forward the radical vision of racial, social, and cultural reparation through the process and outcomes of design.
When we orient design and racial justice around healing and activism, these mandates require a few shifts in the ways we might operate, and the following seven provide a start for our consideration:
Accountability across the design profession in order to ensure it does not continue to perpetuate the design of violence, bias, racism, and injustice within communities.
This means we have to embrace truth and reconciliation across the field and atone for the injustices that architecture, planning, and design have enabled. And without modeling the toxicity of call-out culture and cancel culture, weCritical learning, unlearning, and reflection
On the Design as Protest website, you can find such resources compiled by Brenda Zhang (Bz’) and other designers. You can also read through a library compiled from the ideas of 700+ designers about how we can collectively take action toward design justice.
Structural, tectonic shifting
Our systems have proven time and time again that they cannot just be improved when they were intended to exclude and inherit violence. I believe in abolition and “not simply as the absence of the state and its violence, but the presence—the infiltration—of the values, practices, relationships and world that we want.” (3)Pressure
We have to transition from from performative allyship to political co-organization and from symbolic gesturing to systemic changemaking. I am reminded of activist “Kayla Reed” whose co-led the success of Closing the Workhouse in St. Louis who reminds us to “Keep the Pressure” for shifting to occur.
Creative Will & Capacity
Shifting leadership leads toward centering those who have so often been marginalized and ignored. This is the part that our field resists the most, because it means that folks who have hoarded power have to get out the way because they are the ones blocking the change and limiting the abilities of their team and the field to progress toward racial justice.
Collective, Harmonious Action
Model better by embodying the behaviors and practices that contribute to well-being. This is how we transform harm. We make the norms of current extractive, exploitative, exclusive, capitalistic cultures disappear.Vision: The Case for Healing
My friend, Zoe Hillemeyer, reminded me during a moment in my health journey that “You can only go as far as your body will take you,” and in applying this to the design profession, I believe we must equip our collective body—our nation, our communities, our profession—to take us to the future that Black, Brown, and Indigenous ancestors—those who endured the gruesome realities of chattel slavery and Jim Crow—dreamed. But we must remember: “daily survival and ongoing crisis management can make it difficult to see beyond the present.” (Howard Thurman)
So this brings me back to our chart. When we take it and think about how “sick and tired” becomes “Healing and Activism,” we see some possibilities of what change might start to look like. These are just a few general ones, so I encourage you to take the blank sheet and apply it to your context—whether that’s your job, school, neighborhood, or city.
Fannie Lou Hamer’s endurance through brutality, harassment, and otherization to still speak was because she was grounded in who she was and whose she was. We have to embody this steadfast energy and conviction for the fight ahead. “The greatest casualty of trauma is not only depression and emotional scars, but also the loss of the ability to dream and imagine another way of living.” As designers, our healing is essential to setting a new vision and reality of what’s possible. Healing is its own form of protest against a nation that preserves through keeping us sick and tired.
Page, Kentake. “Fannie Lou Hamer: Civil Rights Heroine,” Weekly Challenger.
Leonard A. Jason, Olya Glantsman, Jack F. O'Brien, and Kaitlyn N. Ramian. “INTRODUCTION TO THE FIELD OF COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY,” Rebus.
Transform Harm