DJFerman-Leon

TA Vol. 34 No. 1 is now available! Read Christen A. Smith and Ryan Cecil Jobson’s full editorial by following the link in our bio!

The second lung of the world is on fire. I met with a frontline organizer from the Congo yesterday, and I’m still shaking. We need to talk more about what’s happening in the Congolese forests.

The Dismantling of Black Studies thenation.com/article/societ…

@AkiraDrake 🔥🔥 appreciate u!

🥳 my new article on financialization and spatialized anti-Blackness just dropped in the new issue of Transforming Anthro! big shoutout to the editors and anonymous reviewers 🙏🏽

“Struggling through the work is extremely important—more important to me than publishing it.” —Toni Morrison buff.ly/cW7gE3N

That is obscenely expensive. Comparable to the cost of Yankee stadium, which of course was built in the most expensive city in america. And the only reason it's so expensive is because taxpayers are footing the bill.

“If the condemned of the earth do not understand their pasts and know the responsibilities that lie upon them in the future, all on the earth will be condemned. That is the kind of world we live in.” C. L. R James - From Dubois to Fanon

Historicizing and Living Everyday Black Studies: Preserving Histories and Charting Futures brynmawr.edu/inside/latest/…

Congratulations to CRE² postdoctoral fellow Sophia Monegro whose article has won the African American Intellectual History Society’s 2026 Maria Stewart Article Prize for the best journal article published in Global Black Thought. aaihs.org/2026-aaihs-awa…

Great conversation with Willie J. Wright, in conversation about urban studies, Black geographies, and Black Studies as life studies. Listen here or on most streams: go.umd.edu/WillieJWright

Apologies to All the People in Lebanon June Jordan 1982 blackagendareport.com/poem-apologies…

New article alert! Check out Matthew C. Reilly's "An Archaeology of Return: Implications for African Diasporic Archaeologies." #Anthropology #Archaeology doi.org/10.1111/aman.7…

Petition to change "et al." to "and gang" in academia

How Raoul Peck Became a Cinematic Griot | Lovia Gyarkye The Haitian filmmaker has spent 40 years using the archives to combat historical erasure and to highlight the people’s version of the past. hammerandhope.org/article/orwell… | @HammerandHope

The Erasure of Black Studies | Jafari S. Allen A report from the undoing of a field chronicle.com/article/the-er… | @chronicle

This man is proposing to do with the sum total of published human knowledge what capitalism does with everything: steal it and then build enclosures around it for profit.

Opinion | The Erasure of Black Studies by Jafari Sinclaire Allen: chronicle.com/article/the-er…

My apartment was $1300 in 2021. That same apartment is now $2350… shit don’t got nothing to do with budgeting if we being honest.

@JazHays @2024dion I wonder how much the city loses annually from property tax abatements? I wanna say KCPS calculated approx. $50M back in 2018/19. The city won't get rid of all those incentive programs, but it seems like this would be a good way to recover rev. in the absence of the earnings tax

@2024dion We don't really have the option to raise other forms of taxation to offset it without cooperation with the state legislature, which is never gonna happen. So the election in April is basically a decision between committing financial suicide or not

The central cities of post-urban regions are in a tough fiscal position that's only gotten worse since covid. The old bargain -- that white collar office space concentrated in the CBD would pick up the tab left by the suburbanization induced hollowing out of the city's residential tax base -- has been breaking down for decades but accelerated after 2020. White collar work is increasingly moving to the favored quarter suburbs where white collar workers live, spurred on by attempts to wring more money out of them in the central city (KC's earning tax is a great example). This leaves the central cities with a shrinking tax base to pay for the social services for the impoverished neighborhoods that concentrated in them when their regions suburbanized, and face legacy pension, debt, and infrastructure (roads, transit, etc that were set up for a region of a different shape) costs, while in many cases picking up the tab for heart-of-the-region amenities (like stadiums and convention centers) that are a fiscal net-negative but are justified by broader regional ecdev impact. Their way out seems to be at least partially be through population growth, and there they have the advantage of hosting the sexy, dense, 'authentic' neighborhoods that young people want to live in. Many have subtly rejiggered the school system enough to retain those young gentrifiers as they age into parenthood. But even still, those office building property and income tax receipts (for cities with an income tax) are quite hard to live without. The KC earnings tax trap is illustrative of this.