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Rooted & Rising: Richmond Thrives With BLK RVA

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“It’s more than just what’s in your history books.” BLK RVA showcases the booming black cultural scene that’s made Richmond what it is today. 

In the last 10 years, Richmond has exploded as a creative hub — in a good way. As someone who was born and raised here, I understand the potential culture this city has to offer, and recently it has acted on that potential. Now more than ever, creative spaces are being opened, small festivals are spread out across the city throughout the year, and even small indie and underground artists are gaining an increase in recognition.

But as natives, this is something we’re all used to; we’re almost unbothered by some of these things, because they happen so often. Yet as we reach 2020, the city has grown into a creative hub not many would have believed possible looking back on it years ago. It’s not the largest hub there is, but it’s definitely there — and it’s definitely working. 

Photo via BLKRVA

Inside of the gears of the City of Richmond, the black community has been working tirelessly to bring more attention to the cultural efforts they’ve produced in our home. What they’ve produced is nothing short of amazing, and it’s been influential to the culture of the entire River City. 

The black community has helped complete an unfinished circle in the perfect Virginia experience: one that many people who call themselves Virginians have never truly seen before. Luckily for them, a platform that emphasizes this black Richmond experience is here, and sits at our fingertips at this very moment. 

BLKRVA is a platform that highlights black spaces and black faces. It showcases Richmond to travelers from all around the world, working to spread the history and culture of the city to the extent that it deserves. 

Its central base is a tourism website, which features a plethora of black-owned businesses, events, and artists — ultimately it’s everything you’d want to see in Richmond, that you’d never know is right around the corner. 

“We’re the only ones in the Commonwealth to do something like this, and I believe we’re the second in the nation, behind Philadelphia,” said Amy Wentz, Member of BLKRVA Action Team. 

Photo via BLKRVA

Because of our city’s history with slavery and as the capital of the Confederacy, outsiders may have cringed at the thought of visiting Richmond. But with the light in our dark history, we’ve grown with the past, and Richmond is more now than just a scarred city. Much of that is thanks to the very people who were scarred by that history. 

While the black experience is not all there is in Richmond, it’s a major part of the overall Virginia experience. BLKRVA has given this experience a louder voice, telling the public, “It’s more than just what’s in your history books, and you’ll never know until you see it.” 

Their key tagline, “Rooted & Rising,” serves as both a reminder and realization: a reminder of their rich history in the state of Virginia, but also a “call to action,” rising against the negative connotations that come with it. 

Richmond is a hot spot in commemorating the history of America, and with that comes a commemoration of enslaved Africans. Over time, they helped advance Richmond into what it is today, despite the hardships they faced in their lives. 

Though the BLKRVA campaign was only launched earlier this summer, the organizers have been working behind the scenes on this plan for years. They have seen success working with larger black-owned events, such as the Afrikana Film Festival and The Black Restaurant Experience, which brought crowds of people nationwide to see the new cultural perspective Richmond has to offer. As time went on, the members of the campaign noticed a surging trend in foreign visitors coming to appreciate the efforts of black Richmond culture. This led them to reformat their work, bringing a focus to black-owned businesses that are staples of the city. 

Photo via BLKRVA

From there, the BLKRVA campaign was created with Richmond Region Tourism as a one-stop-shop, categorizing all the different black Richmond events for visitors and residents alike. 

Their listings include well over 100 restaurants, attractions, and events that take place across the city throughout the year. Listings include Addis Ethiopian, the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, Big Herm’s Kitchen, Treat Shop RVA, C’est Le Vin Art & Wine Gallery, the Hippodrome Theater, Elegba Folklore Society’s Cultural Center, Sheep Hill Bistro, and many more.

Along with highlighting these black spaces in Richmond, BLKRVA also tells the stories of black citizens in the city, focusing on black creatives and writers. With this platform, creatives can explain their day-to-day activities to tell the story of a day in the life of a black Richmonder. Their interviews and features put the spotlight on public figures like Mecca Williams, Nadira Chase, Nickelus F, and Samantha Willis. 

Photo via BLKRVA

“If you want to be as a local would be, these interviews will give you everything you need,” said Wentz. 

It’s not often that people like this are given a voice, which makes their recommendations even more special than before. Ultimately, it fills the visiting experience for those who want to see our city from a different perspective. 

“It’s time for us to start celebrating and uplifting the black experience here; because of the easier access to travelling now, it’s up to us to change that connotation about Virginia,” Wentz said. “And it starts with things like this.”

PHOTO: BLKRVA

A decade ago, Wentz started “BlackRVA” single-handedly, as the original plan for showcasing black events and black-owned business in Richmond. With the help of her action team, she was able to manifest BLKRVA into the large, influential position it’s in today. 

“When I first started it, I had so much going on. I could hardly manage it how it should be… how it is now,” said Wentz. “So I’m very grateful to be able to work with so many different creatives, and bring out the true potential that BLKRVA had to offer.” 

As BlackRVA grew into BLKRVA, a Richmond Region Tourism platform, the potential to highlight the black culture scene in Richmond has grown along with it. They’ve expanded their coverage beyond the Greater Richmond area, and further into surrounding counties like Hanover, New Kent, Henrico, and Chesterfield.

Because of the innovative boom in the city, a new atmosphere has grown. It has allowed BLKRVA to flourish and prosper into successful platform — from one woman’s idea to the powerhouse of a team it is today, time has treated BLKRVA well, and given the team the tools they needed to build the organization up. 

“It feels great to know that these places are trusting us with what we do, because it’s never been done before. If we don’t make these places noticeable, they may never get the recognition they deserve,” said Wentz. “It’s one thing to do your own advertising, but to work with a cohesive brand and a team of other businesses just makes the impact more effective.” 

If you want to get involved with BLKRVA, check out their website to become a part of their upcoming events in the 2019 season, or message them to talk about volunteer or donation opportunities. 

Whenever you’re thinking about how to change your Richmond experience, I’d advise paying BLKRVA’s website, at visitblkrva.com, a visit. You may find exactly what you’re looking for. 

Top Image via BLKRVA

Opinion: Worry About Police, Not Just Protestors

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I’m teaching a class in Social Movements this semester. This has proven to be good timing, in the sense that neo-Nazis were just running amok down the street in Charlottesville – how helpful! (Uh, actually no. Murdering Nazis are never “good;” let’s just say it’s been instructive.) On the first day of class we talked a little about what had happened over the summer, and I wanted students to notice something that had surprised me.

The C’ville rally was violent, for sure. But the surprise? It wasn’t the police who were violent.

Empirically speaking, it is in fact the police who most often cause violence during protests. Mainstream media accounts of social movements almost always miss this point; reporters and editors tell the story of how protests “became violent,” or even apply the “violent” label to the protesters themselves. But it is almost always law enforcement that is the source of violence. Bull Connor, the head of law enforcement in Birmingham during the early 1960s, is often held up as an example of police forces driven to brutal repression by a twisted individual. But Connor represents the norm, not an outlier.

This probably shouldn’t be all that surprising. Police departments, as institutions, are organized to maintain order. (British Law Professor Robert Reiner, among others, has argued that modern police departments actually developed in the 19th and 20th century in response to protest politics.) Law enforcement and state authorities are not interested in democratic participation, and often directly oppose such participation if they perceive it as involving rule-breaking.

But this is what social movement activism is, by its very nature, about. Movements seek to obtain political goals by disrupting the normal flow of business. From strikes or boycotts to marches and “occupation” of public or private spaces, movement actors are trying to draw attention from the public and provoke action from authorities. They do this by breaking the rules of “normal politics” -– most people don’t spend their Tuesdays walking down public streets banging drums and waving banners -– and sometimes by breaking laws.

In general, authorities respond to such political disruption in two ways. The first is “co-optation” – they try to acknowledge and blunt movement energy. They invite movement actors to meetings, or even incorporate movement leaders into institutional structures like committees or commissions. (That’s the “co-opt” part.) Activists may feel like they have a voice and can now change things. And hey: sometimes they do! But movement action dissipates.

The other response — and one that is much more immediate in its simplicity — is repression, often through the use of express brutality and violence. This kind of response is pretty obvious in more restrictive regimes: the tanks in China’s Tiananmen Square, security forces likely setting fires in activist camps in Myanmar. But it’s a pretty standard response domestically as well. From early labor activists killed by bullets from national guardsmen, to civil rights protestors in the 1960s being attacked by dogs, to today’s Dakota pipeline protestors being blasted by water cannons in freezing temperatures, there’s a long history of state violence in response to movement activism.

And so it was strange for me to view the eyewitness accounts from C’Ville, where it turns out most of the violence occurred in front of police, but was not perpetrated by the officers themselves. Instead, the police seemed focused on staying as far above the fray as possible, to the detriment of some who were brutally assaulted. It might have required a protest in a famously progressive city, but for once we saw political activists suffer from not enough police action.

Here in Richmond, the C’ville experiences are very much on people’s minds as a confederate rally is planned for the Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue this weekend. It’s unclear to me how many Confederates may actually appear; the police seem to be going by the claims of the organizers, who appear to be a trio of self-aggrandizing merchandise vendors more than anything else. But who knows? Based on my own experience taking on the Confederacy, I know there’s an active network of Lost Cause advocates and deluded amateur historians who are ready and willing to defend “states’ rights,” at least online. Maybe some of them, or (worse) the white supremacist groups stirred up by C’ville, may decide to tag along. And many reports indicate counter-protestors from Black Lives Matter and other groups will appear to challenge the Confederates.

No matter who shows up, it is clear that RVA Police Chief Alfred Durham has learned at least one lesson from C’Ville: the police are not going to stand down. In press releases and a series of community meetings this week, the Chief and his officers have stressed a zero tolerance for any threatening behavior. (Of course, thanks to VA’s generous open-carry laws, rally attendees are not allowed to bring bats or nunchucks but are welcome to bring their assault rifles.)

On one hand, Durham’s approach is a good thing: the RVA police won’t stand idly by while neo-Nazis fire into crowds or beat a counter-protestor with metal bars. But as a scholar of social movements, I can’t help but be worried about an increased police presence. More authorities don’t always mean more safety. In fact, over the history of movement politics, it means the exact opposite. We’ll see this weekend.

But just a word of warning: if you brave Monument Avenue, don’t just keep an eye out for protestors.

*This article was originally published in RVA Politics and can be found here. 

 

Cover photo by Voice of Detroit

Opinion: Removing Confederate statues is Richmond’s easy way out

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After the violence and hatred that ravaged Charlottesville, Richmonders could be excused for thinking the swift removal of our city’s prominent Confederate statues along Monument Avenue may be the best way to prevent further chaos and bloodshed. However, such an approach woefully neglects Richmond’s unique moral obligation to contend with its legacy of racism as the former capital of the Confederacy.

Other cities may follow Baltimore’s lead and tear down their statues in the night, but for Richmond to do so would deprive its citizens—and our country as a whole—of an ideal opportunity to confront head-on the prejudice of the past that continues to plague us.

The growing demands for the statues’ rapid removal are the result of our state and city being swept up in an overheating national dialogue on diversity and white nationalism. Yet Monument Avenue is a local landmark that deserves the careful consideration of and input from our community. Richmond should strive to be a model of racial reconciliation and tackle our Confederate heritage in a transparent, public, and comprehensive manner rather than let the toxic national dialogue dictate a hasty response.

Simply tearing down a handful of statues is too easy of a fix to an extremely complex problem, and such an action would rob us of a vital educational tool through which to have a necessary, but difficult conversation about the history of racism in Richmond and Virginia. We are a state which chose “massive resistance” over integration and shut down our public schools in 1958 and 1959 rather than allow white and black children to learn together. Richmond’s segregated neighborhoods provide a perfect picture of the pernicious effects of redlining—the practice of disqualifying minority areas from receiving home loans.

The University of Virginia in Charlottesville was once a pioneer of eugenics—the “science” made notorious by the Nazis, which sought to improve populations through controlled breeding and forced sterilization. In fact, Virginia did not repeal its forced sterilization law, which disproportionately affected blacks, until 1974. Removing statues alone won’t remove the lasting legacy of white supremacy in Virginia.

To overcome our dark past we must flesh out our history, not erase it.

Removing the statues by tucking them away in a museum makes it all too easy for us to forget the sins of the past and their continued impact today. Instead, we must alter the sites’ official information and place these statues in the context of their creation: the post-Reconstruction era when membership of the Ku Klux Klan exceeded four million and white nationalists reclaimed state governments from federal oversight. The final statue on Monument Avenue was completed in 1929, sixty-four years after the fall of the Confederacy; the statues are less about the people they memorialize than those who erected them. Installed to re-establish white supremacy in Virginia, the statues represent a glaring display of white dominance over the capital that must be dramatically altered in order to reclaim it as a space for all Richmonders.

In the modern era, to heal society after civil war and genocide—and slavery was nothing less than a slow genocide—typically a truth and reconciliation process must take place, something our country has never truly attempted. Richmond bravely undertook such an effort in 1996 with the installation of a statue of Arthur Ashe, a local tennis hero and symbol of black achievement, to cap off the five Confederates. We should continue that work and expand the figures ensconced on Monument Avenue. Dialogue with the community should help decide which Virginians to include, ranging from prominent civil rights activists and lynching victims, to abolitionists, to slave rebellion leaders.

As the evolving discourse around white nationalism and the legacy of the Confederacy transforms the statues from symbols of black oppression to emblems of white guilt, people are becoming ever more comfortable with simply removing them. Anti-racism activists shouldn’t fight to remove the statues just as their symbolic power is beginning to make people uncomfortable about the legacy of racism. They should instead harness their prominence to drive conversations on outstanding racial issues from affirmative action and inequities in education to justice reform and reparations.

We must never forget that there was a time in our history when white men would rather die than see black people set free. Like the concentration camps of the Nazis, these statues must be preserved as the odious symbols of hate that they are, and put to use to educate society against the evils of tribalism and prejudice.