A Century of Disg(race)

The long leg of Interstate Highway 35 starts in the watery slip of Minnesota’s port city, Duluth, casually treading the country’s conservative corridor through Iowa, Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma until it lands a kick square in the chest of Texas—conveniently ripping the city of Austin in half. The interstate dances through Austin’s rural and urban sister-cities like the concrete shadow of the venomous rattlesnake many of us have come to know it as.

An expensive and rapidly expanding trap in the heart of Texas, the highway has divided the city’s core populations for almost a century. And as it dilates, it shifts the Black and Latinx communities further and further east towards the rising sun. I should know; I’ve been watching a clandestine sundown descend closer and closer to the underfunded, unprotected and unappreciated Black-owned businesses and colorful neighborhoods that make up Austin’s historic east side—what the City Council labeled “The Negro District” in 1928.

Ninety-three years later, in February 2021, the season of love was snuffed out by a snowstorm, the wrath of which Texas had not seen in the entirety of its 176 years, turning every corner of the state into a frozen white hall of soundless terror. Over nine million people, including myself, lost their electricity and water—their warmth. Most of us clung to the corners of our homes, stuffing windows with blankets and scavenging for whatever could be saved from our refrigerators. Most of us, that is. Far too many residents didn’t have the benefit of corners or blankets or refrigerators, and when the state’s independent power grid went down, thousands went without relief. Hundreds died. The historic freeze left thousands of houseless folx vulnerable to the snow, sleet and hail and, in the end, five houseless people had to have both of their feet amputated. Six died due to exposure. The storm, what we can realistically assume is a precursor to the more extreme side-effects of climate change to be witnessed over the next decade, compounded our greatest failing—we are not a society interested in the survival of all.

Several months later as I was preparing this essay, in April 2021, the city of Austin saw three separate yet equally disastrous fires set ablaze at houseless encampments, all within 24 hours. The concentrated flood of kindling took to social media, brushed itself across the pages of the tolerant and intolerant, overtook the borders of Travis Lake and sucked the oxygen out of the white-washed west side of the city. Instead of a call to find adequate housing options for the city’s growing houseless population, the fires—a clearly orchestrated attack on the shelterless—were noted by Governor Gregg Abbot as one of the many reasons why the city should vote in the affirmative for Prop B, “a prohibition on sitting, lying, and camping, and limiting solicitation in public areas.” Who was prohibited from sitting in public...or lying down in public...or camping in the parks...or soliciting help...didn’t need to be clarified. Like the segregationist policies before it—“The Undesirables” were known to all.

The proposition, which failed to provide any alternatives or solutions for finding housing for houseless people, passed with a clear distinction between the voters of the East side of the city and the West. On the surface, the houselessness issue in Austin has nothing to do with race—but to truly understand why Austin is currently faced with this inequitable issue, a look back at its history of poor race relations and its active efforts against equity is in order—starting with the creation and development of the city’s infamous highway, IH-35, in 1945.

When I was in my early twenties, my mother, a nondenominational Christian, found my books on Wicca and Buddhism and asked me to leave her house. A month away from moving into my new apartment and not knowing who to call, I found myself sleeping on a bus stop a block from the apartment complex I would soon call home. It was the first time in my life I understood that the people who I had casually nodded my head to, maybe given a dollar or two to, driven by without acknowledging, and flat out rushed away from—were just people whose luck had run out. Sisters to so-and-so. Somebody’s daddy, in-between places. Folx who had run out of ways to keep a roof over their heads. And sometimes—maybe a lot of the time—it wasn’t their fault. And even if it were, that didn’t change the fact that they were people deserving of respect and uplift. I am disappointed it took my own bus stop bench and pile of plastic grocery store bags to see and understand this.

One by one, dozens of Black people from Austin’s historic east side have found themselves uprooted and forced to relocate, some to Houston or San Antonio, others to the streets and city parks. A dark flood of tangible history, the Black people of this city, a proud and storied congregation of entrepreneurs and educated savants, have slowly escaped into the growing complex of Austin’s industry, fighting their way into the headlines and taking city offices to task for the complicit actions in de-constructing and de-funding the initiatives, schools and programs developed to uplift their diverse communities. This targeted displacement isn’t a coincidence. It is the catalytic outcome of a mandate set not in 2021—but in the decades before many of Austin’s current inhabitants were even born.

A 1917 case, Buchanan v. Warley, saw the Supreme Court pronounce that the racial segregation of neighborhoods is unconstitutional and a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections for freedom of contract. This particular mandate saw pushback from all around the country, but especially in Texas. Hearing the landmark verdict, Austin did not set about integrating the state’s capital. They chose instead to find any route around the edict. They spent years trying to find better and more effective ways to segregate its Black population, moving them away from their growing schools and businesses. They prevailed by establishing the Negro District, red-lining it for years before transforming the segregation line, on the road known as East Avenue, into IH-35 in 1946. The highway, then, set the Black community on a trajectory that leads us to the present moment.

Today, Austin is one of the fastest growing cities in the country thanks to tech pillars like Tesla, Samsung, Apple, Google, and Charles Schwab. Vowing to bring a renewed commerce into the behemoth state, these corporations brought with them millions of young, shiny faces belonging to college-educated elites with a penchant for “authentic tastes” and eclectic music. The once-sacred mantra “Keep Austin Weird” has found its way into five-star hotels, glamorously niche restaurants and invite-only galas.

The east side, which once housed the city’s unwanted Black residents, now boasts dozens of new apartments, condos, stores, restaurants, and art galleries—all of which have priced the original inhabitants out. What this has manifested is a classic study of gentrification—and a growing population of people with nowhere to go.

When the city again voted its way down the segregation line of IH-35 in May 2021, passing Prop B and making houselessness illegal in the city again, it empowered ghost-makers in uniforms—legally weaponized “peace officers”—to attack the people with nothing and nowhere to hide. In the coming months, hundreds of Black people, who now live wherever there’s shade to be found, are expected to be arrested for unlawfully “camping” in public spaces—and then caged and disappeared. Residents of the west side are looking forward to the “clean and gorgeous” streets.

In 2016, the city of Austin finally established an Equity Office, and the people who were the immediate descendants of Austin’s Black east side were encouraged. Surely now city leaders would listen and heed what they had to say. The general consensus was that equity would find its place soon enough. But when the George Floyd protests came to Austin and the community began to call for the defunding of the Austin Police Department—it became obvious that the city’s Equity Office was not expected to have nearly as much sway in the operations of the city as had been suggested. After agreeing to suspend the hiring classes of the Austin Police Department during the evaluation of the department’s ethical practices and training materials in the fall of 2020—the city made a sudden and disingenuous move to approve a new training class of inadequately trained police officers in Spring 2021. A panel convened by the Equity Office determined that without a complete overhaul of the training materials, including but not limited to the re-recording of several troubling de-escalation training videos—one of which featured a police officer attempting to de-escalate an interaction with a Black woman whose upper torso was exposed and left unobscured or edited in the formal tape shared with every training class—future trainees would be unprepared to empathetically and equitably engage community members.

With the announcement of the new training class came more disappointment. Money that was supposed to have been diverted from the police into transformative community programs slowly started to find its way back into the hands of the privileged, in whose hands it had always been.  The astounding early work of the Equity Office, a truly visionary survey intended to evaluate the City’s practices of equity and inclusion, went by the wayside.

This is how we know that the city of Austin is not ready for true equity and the legitimate protection of rights for all: it is not taking the recommendations of the one office created specifically to address these issues. It is, instead, reinforcing the racist segregation—which is as visible as the highway and metaphorically represented by its red-lined municipalities—by cowing to the dictations of a state government that houses its governor in the belly of Austin’s west side. In this way, the May 2021 passing of Proposition B is not a surprise for Black Austinites, housed and houseless. It is a continuation of an almost century-long story about the façade of freedom and equality for all in the capital city of Texas.