Mesfin is one of a growing list of local activists who are trying to bring attention to the idea unbuilding racism, or highlighting disparity and injustices that have shaped the built environment. This idea has been growing in popularity. Increased traction throughout the countryIt is manifested in unique ways in Washtenaw County.
Deborah Meadows (program chair of the Ann Arbor Human Rights Commission), says, “Ann Arbor didn’t have overt Jim Crowism unlike the South.” African American Cultural and Historical Museum in Washtenaw County (AACHM). “There were no water fountains or restrooms that were labelled ‘white only’ or ‘black only. However, there were covert racial acts like a wolf dressed in sheep’s wool.
Meadow points to University of Michigan ResearchIt is documenting local racialized residential deeds. It applauds both “Black citizens and scholars who are uncovering this truth and searching for opportunities for education, discussion, and working towards change.”
She says that some people may believe that learning from the past is the best way to grow.
Redlining without racism
Jessica A.S. Letaw states that Ann Arbor residents can’t have an honest conversation about justice unless they have a better understanding and appreciation of what needs to restored and transformed. Letaw is a board member of Ann Arbor’s Downtown Development AuthorityCo-host of the podcast: Ann Arbor AFFounder of Building Matters, an architecture and urban planning nonprofit designed to raise Ann Arbor’s literacy around the built environment.
“Unbuilding racism, however it is defined, is sticky. Buildings can be very sticky. They are difficult to build. They take time, money, involve a lot of people, and they tend to stick around for quite a while,” she says. “So when we quantify things through our values, planning and community efforts, we can stay with them for a very long period of time.”
Letaw says the first step is understanding that we have built racism physically into our environment, often through individual buildings – on purpose and over a long time.
“Every time that we build upon an intentionally harmful status-quo, we do it again.” She says that understanding this reality is the best place to begin. “We have segregated our nation racially, economically, for most of its history. Ann Arbor is a good place to start to see this.
Ann Arbor didn’t have an a Redline mapThe, which was created by the U.S. government in the ’30s to identify communities of color as potentially risky for lenders. Ann Arbor fell below that threshold in those maps. Letaw argues that this doesn’t necessarily mean that Ann Arbor has been “on top of history.”
“[People think]We don’t have any redline maps because we’re good people of color. She says we don’t need one because we are too small.” “Ann Arbor found other means to enact racial separations that didn’t depend on a redline chart.”
Letaw explains how this was achieved through racially restrictive covenants and selective showings by realtors. She also explains how selective lending was used to keep people of color from certain areas.
She says, “It happened in all those de facto ways, much smaller, but with exactly the same racial consequences.”
Ann Arbor’s Black History
AACHM’s efforts in preserving and sharing local African-American history are among the many. Walking tour and mapAnn Arbor’s historically Black communities. The map was created in collaboration avec the Ann Arbor District LibraryIt is part of the Living Oral History Project. It also includes former community centers and businesses in the Summit Street, Water Hill, Kerrytown neighborhoods. The map and tour highlight the places where Black families lived and worked, worshipped, and owned businesses.
Meadows says that new residents might not know that their homes used to be inhabited by African American families. “And those families, in their recent past, may have not been able to select where they want to reside due to housing and lending policies that restricted African Americans to these areas.”
Letaw today sees many places that are notable (and that are on the AACHM walking tour map) for their example of injustice in the built world. One is the dark brown building that was once the Dunbar Community Center at Fourth Avenue & Kingsley Street. Although it looks like a home, the building was once used for law offices. It is now a co-working space.
Letaw explains that it was where Black teenagers and kids went after school to do homework, socialize, and dance with one another on weekends. “Fast forward, and although there are people of color there for certain it’s also a white-owned coworking space occupied primarily white people.”
Community High School is located just north of the Ann Arbor Farmers Market parking area. It was formerly Jones Elementary School. This school was one of two Ann Arbor elementary schools that were predominantly Black until 1965. In the wake the Supreme Court’s rulings, it was then that Community High School was built. Brown v. Board of EducationAnn Arbor Board of Education decided to close the school after it was found out that it was segregated. It was hoped that it would become an integrated high school when it reopened in 1968.
Letaw says, “But what actually happened, and what remains true is that it’s a majority-white high school, and it’s still quite economically and racially segregated.” “We had a community with a Black elementary, a Black youth centre, and Black-owned businesses. Most of the homes in the community were Black-owned. Today, who lives there and feels at home there is completely different than it was years ago.
A better future starts with looking back
Linette Lao, a Ypsilanti resident and writer, says that one of the first steps to unbuilding racism is to critically examine a community’s past. Last year, Lao was featured in a virtual panel discussionAnn Arbor nonprofit: Unbuilding Racism Nonprofit Enterprise at Work(NEW) “Centering Justice” discussion series. Lao says that the event allowed her to “grow an individual understanding of place, space and belonging, and how it is always possible to be in dialogue both with the land and the people who have gone before us.”
Lao, a Ypsilanti resident who has been living in the area for almost 30 years, spoke about a magazine she and Matt Siegfried, a local historian and educator, are creating about Ypsilanti’s early Chinese immigrants. One of the central elements of the “zine,” is a look into the first Chinese laundry in Ypsilanti. It was destroyed by the 1893 cyclone. Lao was shown an old photo of the damaged shop a few years ago. It affected her to see the photo through the lense of the devastation inflicted on a business, especially one belonging to an immigrant. She claims that the photo was alive because of the promise of untold stories.
“For a time, I didn’t notice that it was a photograph of a Chinese laundry. But then I realized that it was correct at the end. Riverside Arts Center – and I was even on the board of Riverside Arts Center,” she says. “That building is so familiar and I never thought about the early Asian immigrants who came to Washtenaw County. It was so close and yet so far apart, only 130 years apart.
She shared that laundromats were not a common occupation for white people in the past because they were considered dangerous.
“White people were reluctant to take on the risk so these shops were usually owned by Chinese men until machines became available. It was easier work and more money,” Lao says. It’s important to be able to look back and see where you came from. You have to be a curious citizen to see the past and build a future that is real, solid and allows our community’s to move forward.
The unbuilding process
Mesfin Johnson is just one of many Washtenaw County leaders that have been working hard to build a better future and eradicate racism. She said that Ann Arbor’s “reprehensible” exclusion of Black and brown residents is something she will continue to expose.
She says, “The truth is that ours are a white bedroom community that espouses progressive change ideals but rarely lives up to them.” Are we committed to progressive ideals in words or in deeds? There is a gap between who we say and who we actually are.
Mesfin Johnson has many hats, including CEO of NEW. There she aims to implement principles for unbuilding racism as NEW redesigns their headquarters. NEW has hired Deanna van Buren, an architect, urban planner, and founder of Oakland-based architecture and real property development nonprofit. Designing Justice + Designing SpacesAs its architect partner in the project,,
The building that houses NEW was once an abandoned junkyard. Local philanthropists transformed it into an arts incubator. Artrain, anchor tenant and nonprofit, believed that the arts should be accessible to all people. Artrain placed art on trains and transported them to rural communities. Mesfin Johnson has a deep responsibility for stewarding Artrain’s visionary legacy. New’s organizational DNA, and physical building space, are committed to inclusion and accessibility.
Mesfin Joseph says, “I want redevelop our space to welcome not only established organisations, but also future world-makers, artists and activists, and elders.” “I want to explicitly and intentionally honor the land and its past and make this space affordable, accessible, and environmentally conscious, so that we can live into the inherited responsibility of our Native brothers.”
Unbuilding racism for her is about repairing the damage that edifices have caused to marginalized people in Washtenaw county. Her intention is to create a space that accelerates the community’s transformation, and with the community. She encourages residents and businesses to write to their county commissioners and ask for money from the American Recovery Plan Act (ARPA).
Justin Hodge is the county commissioner for District 5. He encourages communication and stresses that it’s important for people to speak to their elected officials. He says that one way movement can happen is if the county government works in partnership with other local municipal governments – who also received ARPA dollars.
“We must work towards getting these governments to make racial equity a priority and encourage them to spend funds towards it. He said that the county has a good racial equity officer and encourages other local governments to work with them. “While the county doesn’t have the resources to do everything, it could use partnerships and take on targeted initiatives.
Hodge supports the Community Priority Fund, an ARPA funding package that will be considered by the county Board of Commissioners in the future. He said that the fund will be used to provide funds for nonprofits and organizations in the 48197-48198 zip codes, which are where most of the county’s residents of colour live.
He says, “I’m really thinking about how we can structure that to support economic mobility. I think there’s scope for building up Black businesses as well as addressing racial justice there.”
It will take more than money and a review of the structures in our environment to unbuild racism. It will also require a review of our internal architectures. Mesfin Johnson is one of the few who has doubts about the willingness to accept those who fall under the “moderate white liberal” category.
“We’re the Eighth most economically segregated“We have the worst county in the country and that economic segregation is clear in housing and where people reside,” she said. “We have concentrated poverty in the east side” of the county. In Ann Arbor, people are priced out of Ann Arbor. This has led to more middle-class whites moving into Ypsilanti. Other people are being pushed to the margins.
Letaw also has strong opinions about the future. He feels that some members of the community need to be more “aware of our whiteness” so that they can understand how we show up in conversations and relationships with expectations of privilege.
She believes the Ann Arbor community is doing better at identifying disparities, understanding intersecting identities, and working towards that goal. However, there is still much to be done.
Letaw says, “We need to examine who we really are and understand what history we are fighting with.” “When we can do that with humility, compassion for everyone in our country, that’s when a great conversation can take place and transformative visions can be realized.”
Jaishree Dhepaul-Bruder, a freelance writer and editor, is currently based at Ann Arbor. She can be reached by email at [email protected].
All photos by Doug Coombe.