No Study Without Struggle by Leigh Patel

Author:Leigh Patel [Patel, Leigh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Creditors create debt to profit from it.

In 2016, eight years after this statement was issued, when only a few initial steps had been taken for the expansion, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in West Harlem was $2,875 per month. In 1990, it was $650 per month. When I was writing one day in a café on 137th Street not too long ago, I was one of two nonwhite people in the crowded space next to a Harlem Children’s Zone school, a charter school in what used to be P.S. 338. The Harlem Children’s Zone is another multi-sited charter school venture that has come to play a profound role in education and property in New York City. Its name adorns many buildings in Harlem, and its wraparound services for Black families, while initially lauded, have come under valid criticism because many students and families are excluded from receiving them. Moreover, the practice of converting public schools into privately owned charter schools has become an investment opportunity for hedge fund managers who have no interest in education itself but are interested in the dividends generated by highly valued property in Manhattan.

The same block where I was writing in a café was a central location for the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. That cultural, artistic, and political movement yielded a bevy of publicly accessible art and social commentary by the likes of James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen, to name just a few of its prominent Black artists and scholars. The nonprofit While We Are Still Here has knitted the oral histories of residents of two specific buildings in Harlem, on Edgecombe Avenue.29 These buildings in the early and mid-twentieth century would come to house Black artists and cultural workers, including Drs. Mamie and Kenneth Clark, whose “doll” study remains a groundbreaking empirical study of children’s early susceptibility to white supremacy. Harlem is a neighborhood made up of many little neighborhoods that have known brilliant Black joy and artistry, the ravages of poverty and drug wars, and, most recently, encroaching gentrification. Gentrification, a contemporary word for erasing to replace, unhouses not just people but also their histories. While no neighborhood or place stands still, neither should we be forgiven the debt of knowing what came before.

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