IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 7 ENGLISH | Page 70

rest of East Liberty in the 1950s to make
it more amenable to suburban white
shoppers and commuters. In another
development it was meant to change the
residents’ demographic. African Americans were being displaced by contemporary policies and practices of gentrification, under the name of “economic development” and “opportunity.” It is a
reversal that is irreversible, of the White
Flight of my parents’ generations, where
white people are no longer scrambling to
live far away from the city, but actually
wanting to be close to the city in order to
obtain the best living spaces, houses,
luxury apartments, and claiming the
right to be there. I was heartened recently by the actions and social media promotion of the community movement
called #BlackHomesMatter. Struggling
off and on throughout my life with depression, the learning I was doing on my
own with research from the back shelves
of the library and by finding radical,
often blocked for content, websites on
antiracism, I felt my mental health and
my emotions becoming tangled as I tried
to journey away from implicit bias, unintentional prejudice, and straight up racist
behaviors, assumptions, and complicity.
I was able to literally take heart from the
work, gathering, community, and support, of a group called WHAT'S UP
Pittsburgh. I began participating in a
study group run by white people targeting other white people to begin and develop their practice of learning real history and unlearning racism, and also
learning howracism is really White Supremacy, which involves a myriad of

other forms of oppression suchas imperialism, gender based violence, homophobia and transphobia, ableism,
classism, and the violence imparted by
militarism and materialistic capital ism.
Learning to understand White Supremacy as more complicated and insidious
than obvious racist actions of individual
white people against Black people, but
as a system, growing like weeds ready to
strangle, or poison traveling throughout
our bodily system. I have attempted to
read works by authors who are People of
Color and of Indigenous heritage who
speak from their perspective and give
voice of their ancestors, of the realities
of how this United States America really
came to be what it is now. The genocide
of Native Americans, biological warfare
that was first implemented in Pittsburgh
in fact, by giving smallpox infected
blanket from the Fort’s military hospitals
during the multiple battles between Anglo and French settlers and the Native
American people, including the indigenous Haudenosaunee people, who inhabited the forests and valleys surrounding
the three rivers of Pittsburgh. From oral
stories I relearned how the city's department stores were segregated, and how
Black Pittsburghers had to rally and risk
demonstrating downtown for the right to
work where they shopped. Not only
drugstores, but public utility companies
had been refusing to hire nonwhites
through the 70s. I learned and contextualized how the deindustrialization of the
region impacted Black men and women,
and Black children disproportionately.
The statistics on health disparities for

70