Northern Virginia Archive of Black Community Resistance

            Due to the nature of this work, I feel it is necessary to explain my own positionality in relation to the research. As an educated white male, my position is likely to have influenced this project, and my experiences shape the way in which I have approached my research. I have never lived in these communities, my life experiences do not reflect those of a Black community displaced in place, thus, I have relied on the work of many Black scholars, and the voices of the community to guide this work. The language used in the project reflects the limited vocabulary of white spatial imaginaries, and runs the risk of perpetuating the same dangerous rhetoric that has been used to disempower, dismantle, and displace communities like Tinner Hill, Gum Springs, and St. Louis.

“So then – we have to invent new language. We have to question when words like blight, renewal, revitalization, redevelopment and resilient surface to rid non-white bodies of their claims to space, history, labor, love, time, otherness, memory, and beauty.”[1]

Anna Livia Brand in “Say Its Name – Planning Is the White Spatial Imaginary, or Reading McKittrick and Woods as Planning Text”

My work is guided by Brand’s statement, and attempts to be in conversation with this while seeking to be demonstration of how badly a new language is needed. This project aims to follow guiding principles of displacement discourse, and Black feminist literature, while centering the experiences of communities and using their voices as a first step to creating new languages. This is in effort to call out white supremacy, and rename functions that perpetuate harm under new names. This work and this quote have been guiding me through this work and I hope I speak to it well.