Black Lives Matter and Music by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253038432
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Figure 3.3 A line of SLABs at the Houston SLAB Parade and Family Festival. October 20, 2013. Photo by author.

The SLAB community also helped bring a sense of authenticity to the event. They were instrumental in shaping the event into something that would have much meaning and value for participants. Our goal was not to simply translate or sanitize the culture for outsiders. Rather, we wanted to recognize and celebrate SLAB as a culturally important vernacular art form and practice, while also offering the audience an educational, enriching, and stimulating look into the practice. The event location, MacGregor Park, reflects our goals. MacGregor Park rests at the northern border of the predominantly African American neighborhood of South Park, a longtime hotbed of SLAB activity. From the 1980s to now, it has been normal to see informal SLAB processionals traverse neighborhood streets, most notably Martin Luther King Blvd. MacGregor Park is a popular SLAB gathering place. It is a large park with giant parking lots, making it a prime spot to display SLABs while socializing. We considered other locations, most notably Discovery Green Park in downtown Houston, but felt that centering the event at MacGregor Park would be much truer to SLAB culture. In addition, we felt that holding the event in South Park would, at least for a moment, disrupt the de facto segregation that spatially divides the city. We hoped to bring a cross-section of Houstonians into the mainly black South Park in order to celebrate a distinctly black art form.

The planning committee included a cross-section of Houston-based individuals and institutions. However, the parade did not garner the support of all Houstonians. The parade received some significant pushback from residents of the upper middle-class African American neighborhood that occupies MacGregor Park’s western border. Revealing the class politics at play in African American communities, members of this community did not see the social value in the event and did not want their neighborhood to be associated with what they deemed to be an illicit practice. Further, playing into unfortunate stereotypes, they worried that the event would bring violence into the area. We were able to calm some of their concerns through a series of meetings at the area sheriff’s office, where we discussed the importance of the event, logistics, and our security plan. Support from the sheriff as well as Houston City Council District D, who eventually became a cosponsor, helped that particular community feel more at ease with the event.

In the wake of the SLAB parade, SLAB has taken on a larger space in Houston’s cultural landscape. In late 2013, Houston-born pop superstar Beyoncé featured SLABs and footage from the SLAB parade in the music video for the song “No Angel” from her eponymous 2013 visual album. In 2015, the Travel Channel’s Booze Traveler, an alcoholic beverage-focused travel show, featured SLAB culture in its segment about Houston. The show host, Jack Maxwell, rode in a SLAB belonging to Houstonian and longtime SLAB rider P Izm during his tour of Houston.

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