Reclaiming Your Community
Learning from Majora Carter’s Action in the South Bronx and Applying it LocallyBy Jessica Dauphin, Transit Alliance of Middle Tennessee | President & CEO
On March 31, 2022, the Civic Design Center hosted its first Civic Advocates meet-up of 2022 with a virtual Book Club discussing Majora Carter’s freshly released Reclaiming Your Community: You Don’t Have to Move Out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One. Carter was the Design Center’s 2017 Annual Luncheon Keynote Speaker. She returned to Nashville in 2019 for JUMP Nashville’s Christmas Extravaganza and again, virtually, in 2020 as a special guest during our Community-Led Conversations segment of Annual Luncheon. She also participated in a 20 Questions interview on IGTV in 2021 with CEO, Gary Gaston, which you can read about here.
Civic Advocate meet-ups are meant to insight conversation that helps advocates find ways to make an impact in their local neighborhoods and communities. Local Nashville residents and stakeholders were in the virtual room, hearing from Majora Carter herself and actively planning next steps for coalition building.
The Author
Majora Carter is a six-time TED speaker, developer, business owner, advocate, and South Bronx, New York, native. Her message is simple: the best place to live is where you live. She has spent close to two decades sharing her experience and tools to help residents in low-status communities understand that better communities are not somewhere else. Carter contends that the community you grew up in is the best place, and you have a role to play in order to co-create that reality. Her quote, “No one should have to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one,” lives on the walls of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.
The Book
Before the book even begins, Majora Carter defines, “‘Low-status,’ to me, simply illustrates the equality gap in a society without explicitly implicating racism, classicism, or geography. [Low-status communities] are places where inequality is assumed by those who live there and by everyone on the outside looking in.”
Reclaiming Your Community: You Don’t Have to Move Out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One, is an accessible yet powerfully calibrated perspective on the broken systems and cycles that create and sustain low-status neighborhoods, neighborhoods that are largely poor where success for residents from those communities is measured by how far away they get. It’s also part playbook, part memoir, and part dissertation on the value of the narratives we tell ourselves, including the words we use and the actions we take (or don’t).
The playbook is simple: stay where you are and become the change you wish to see in the space. Carter has written a reference book, a motivational read, a starting point, a call to action for some, and a guidepost to measure success for all.
“‘Low-status,’ to me, simply illustrates the equality gap in a society without explicitly implicating racism, classicism, or geography. [Low-status communities] are places where inequality is assumed by those who live there and by everyone on the outside looking in.”
Carter is an urban sherpa. She carefully defines the issues creating and maintaining low expectations and helplessness in low-status communities. Her descriptions and stories illustrate the deeper roots of low-status communities, including white supremacy, capitalism, reinforced inferiority complex, and brain drain, to name a few. Carter then expertly draws our attention to actions to take in order to disrupt the status quo and begin building, re-building, communities from within leveraging the talent, cultures, languages, and vibrancy of the existing community.
She encourages those in, or from, low-status communities to strengthen their work of building their communities from the inside to preserve and grow their own culture, talent, beauty, aesthetics, creativity, and more. The ultimate rebellion is to reject the narrative handed down to you and write a narrative where you and your neighbors are the brilliant designers of your own destiny, design, and development of your space. It’s a solid handbook on how to take action that’s also inspirational and motivational.
The Conversation
It’s about the narrative of low-status communities and what it means to live and, ultimately, leave them. Low status connotes systemic issues, not an issue created by the community. Carter admits that she made up the terms she uses to help her frame her work more clearly. She also uses project-based development instead of advocacy-based. Because, as she notes, advocacy-based projects are focused on programs and policies while project-based developments, a complement to advocacy-based work, show action and ask neighbors to become active. It gives residents something to experience and potentially influences them to continue to work to improve their surroundings.
During the virtual meeting, she mentions that often low-status communities are desensitized to their surroundings. Read Chapter 4, “When Everything Tells You the Same Thing, You’ll Probably Believe It,” and the roots of the self-enforced inferiority complex become clear. It’s also clear that the term low-status community needed to be birthed so that others from outside the community could see the harm perpetrated by language and the not-so-subtle ‘otherness’ implied by terms and statements like ‘underserved,’ ‘poor,’ and ‘He’s such a smart boy, glad he made it out [of that neighborhood].’ As though creativity and intelligence are too good for a ‘poor’ neighborhood.
She discusses the value of showing communities they are worth it and those nice things can happen in their communities. Along with the helplessness and inferior narrative comes the assumption that if something new and upscale (re: ‘good’ or ‘nice’) comes along that the neighborhood is gentrifying. That the new nice thing couldn’t possibly be by the community for the community.
What I took away from the Book Club was her authenticity and genuine motivation to show low-status neighborhoods that they can have nice things and they can create them. If Carter were a character, we would talk at length about her arc and how she perseveres. She didn’t start out knowing or having all the answers. She started out with a deeply held belief that her success shouldn’t be measured by how far away from the South Bronx she could get. She just let that authentic principle guide her work. She had success. She made mistakes. She has changed over time, but her guiding principles remain the same. What a true, live heroine. She’s the heroine of her neighborhood and hopefully the spark that drives progressive change that benefits the existing community in many other neighborhoods.
As a community organizer and civic educator, I take this call-to-action very seriously. We cannot keep going about our business in building and re-building cities the way we always have. Why? Because it is singularly focused on benefitting one type of person in one type of way. Carter’s work is a beacon of light to change the way we all see and define communities and how we develop/re-develop them. It’s time to center the existing communities. Give them access to the information and tools they need so they understand the power and assets they possess. In turn, allow them to invest in their communities and support and retain the talent they are already creating.
The Civic Design Center has been working in this space for decades.
What’s Next for Nashville?
Thank you to the Civic Design Center for bringing this conversation to Nashvillians. This conversation proves, once again, that how we design our surroundings then becomes who we are and how we define ourselves, our capabilities, and our destiny.
It cannot be overstated how critical discussions like this are to Nashville today. As our city grows and more people move here to find their successes, it’s more important than ever to protect the richness of diversity of our communities because that is what has created the Nashville we all love so much. It’s bad policy and an even worse strategy to ignore Nashville’s own low-status communities and/or push them further away from the core of our city.
In a region where over half of its households are cost-burdened with housing and transportation, the expectation that cheaper housing further from the core and all its services (like transit) is misleading at best and, if I’m honest, it’s a myth. There is a grand opportunity here to work with communities to preserve the best of them while re-building the rest exactly where they are. Using this book as a starting point and guide could help us bring about more positive social change and manifest the neighborhood self-development required to invigorate these communities.
Other attendees for the book club wanted to discuss the biggest challenge for Nashville in their minds—how do we help property owners who have owned their properties for so long but haven’t necessarily had the capital or the resources to update them? How can we support those folks to revitalize their own communities from within?
Carter explained that by the time community members see gentrification happening, it’s almost too late. We need to make sure people see the value in their communities long before they are approached by predatory speculators.
Design Center’s Board Chair, Tifinie Capehart reflects, “Community development is an action.” It is going to take action to get the mentorship from investors and developers to do the things to make redevelopment happen from within. One resource that was discussed was the creation of a development bootcamp with property owners and other stakeholders in Nashville’s low-status neighborhoods. This is just one way of many to give people the power and knowledge to create change from within.
The work ahead involves more community building. Carter is asking us to break the cycles and systems that keep neighborhoods low-status, poor, dependent, disenfranchised, and constantly sending their best and brightest elsewhere.
The work ahead involves more action, so let’s keep it up.