Accountability

This project is accountable to the people directly affected by the ongoing legacy of racially restrictive housing covenants. Racial covenants are a window into how capitalist markets create and maintain racial inequality by design in the US and globally. Covenants also reveal ways to organize, disrupt, and offer a vision of a better society.

Community Goals

The website and project are independent and not tied to any university. Elite universities often use their power and resources to insert themselves into grassroots work or take ideas from underfunded community organizers. Some university partnerships superficially include community members without real decision-making power or align with only certain voices, avoiding deeper questions of ideology and power. Our goal is to take resources away from the university toward the community. We take direction from Walter Rodney’s concept of a “guerrilla intellectual.”

Labor

This project recognizes many forms of labor and contribution, including moral support, education and experience that inform the knowledge people bring, and work that does not easily reduce to quantifiable forms or traditional wage labor. We reject labor practices that demand unpaid work of students and interns or extract time and knowledge from people in the surrounding community. The project will thoroughly vet any collaborating organizations and their funding sources. The need to sustain funding from donors, grants, foundations, or the state can compromise the integrity of an organization’s politics and co-opt its message.

Data

Data – how, from whom, and for whom it is collected – is inherently political and mediated through uneven power relations in society. The physical infrastructures of the internet in the US are on the stolen lands of Indigenous nations. Super-exploited workers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America mine metals and minerals for computer chips. Tech companies enjoy close relationships with the CIA, FBI, NSA, and US State Department. In the present society, free public data will always be more accessible to capital and the state. The goal is to wield data from the ground up.

Ideology/Politics

This project is not apolitical. ​​We want to investigate how US real estate markets are interlinked with racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and US imperialism. Whiteness, male chauvinism, queer and trans antagonism, and ableism manifest within spaces of organizing and education. The university and other social institutions also create power dynamics among professors, graduate students, undergraduates, and people outside the academy. White people, cis-men, and able-bodied people must acknowledge, and work to unlearn, how we carry our entitlement into these spaces.

Footnotes

Rodney, Walter. 1969. The Groundings With My Brothers. London: Verso.