Be Black, Be Bold, Be Innovative, Show the World Equitable Geo. We're coming together as a collective to celebrate people of African descent, the diaspora, and talking about geospatial equity and justice. You're listening to The North Star Gaze, a podcast with intimate stories from geoluminaries. So you're at Northstar GIS's annual conference, second time in person at Howard University. And this year's theme is Art, Afrofuturism and Geography, Designing an Equitable and Feminist Future. We take our theme from, an organization whose name I should know. Ashla, I want to say they set the theme for Black History Month and have probably since it was Black History Week and we try to adapt that theme, in alignment with our mission and sometimes it's a little more challenging, but this time it was pretty easy., when we think about what our work is, it is really about bringing communities into focus. And focusing this year on designing an equitable and feminist future also meant bringing black women into focus. Our team is 100 percent black women and then me. We don't get this work done without the power, the vision, the passion of black women. And the same can be said for so many things in the world. And when we think about these unique lenses that we can use to see the world, how we can bring our unique voices together, from the perspective of art, whether in literature, podcasts, photography, film. When we think about geography as a powerful lens for dissecting the world and all its complexities and making it make sense in a different kind of way, and when we think about Afrofuturism, that is often projected in some far flung, in the future society, but perhaps it's right now, perhaps it's The kind of work that Tara Roberts is doing that folks are doing all around us using technology like GIS and AI and geo AI to make a difference, to understand our communities better. And it's a way for us to say who we are to think about who we are and to bring that into focus through technology, through GIS and geography. And for those who don't know who we are, again, we are the North Star of GIS. And we take our roots from, fundamental leaders like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. When I realized that We needed to organize something that was really significant that would possibly become a movement At first across the GIS community and then later recognizing GIS as a way of scaling up and scaling out geography and geographic approaches and so more broadly into geography. I did some research. I wanted to know what black men and women have done in the past to lead and drive change and progress for others who look like them. And really quickly, these two people came to the surface. So I spent a lot of time thinking about, how Harriet moved and how, Frederick Douglass moved. And how maybe therefore I should move and how I should work in concert with others. A lot of the work that Frederick Douglass did was in conjunction with women. And Harriet never left anybody behind, right? So I wanted that to be a part of the spirit of North Star. We look to foundational principles to guide us to set the stage and tone for how we operate, how we move through our work. And Ubuntu came to the surface. This sense of belonging with every aspect of humanity, this interconnectedness, across people. I am because you are because we are, that sort of philosophy seemed important. In setting up what we were going to do next. We also looked to Pan African approaches like the seven principles of Kwanzaa and tried to incorporate those thoughts into the way that we frame and do things. And I find myself revisiting these concepts frequently. Now, before we became a non profit, the notion of cooperative economics seemed ah, maybe we can't, quite do that. But Pretty much right away, organizations either led by black folks who were one of few entrepreneurs in the GIS space, or led by folks who had an interest in what we were trying to accomplish, were throwing money at us so that we could host Esri UC. I feel like Garamay was a part of some of that energy earlier on. And, we knew that by being united, we could accomplish many things by defining and determining our own destiny, which way we wanted to go, we could do great things. And when I think about that in particular and I've been having this conversation for a while, very often civil rights movements have actually taken their lead from the framing that That white supremacist lenses have given them. If you look at some of the most powerful talks by James Baldwin and others across the civil rights movement, you'll hear them mirroring the language of the interviewers who are asking them questions. The interviewers are asking about if the white man has this, what of the black man? And before you know it, the conversation is talking about the black man. In relation to the white man and the negro as man in relation to the white man. But what about women and other people who don't identify with the binary gender? So we're determining ourselves and we're telling our own stories. It's always been important for us to engage community and get thought partners into conversation with us so we can understand what your stories are, what your issues and challenges are, through our own unique lenses. We work together. That the team around us trying to pull things off. There's folks who couldn't make it here today who are always a part of what we're doing. We have this shared purpose of elevating black representation across geography related fields and bringing a focus on racial justice to the work of geographers and G. I. S. Professionals. I'm sure many of you have been in conversations about issues related to health, or education, or economics, urban planning, you name it, and very often people make it uncomfortable to ask a question like what about those communities that look a little different from the others? Are all the stories the same? Is all the data the same? We found, in our founding, when, I'm looking at the audience, I'm trying to figure out how much of this you've all heard before, but, I'll share this story, just in case. The moment when I knew I had to do something, I didn't know what the something it may have been a day or two after, Philando Castile was killed. I seen that hashtag trend and I knew what it was and so I just got off my phone and I'm on a computer I know what it is, I get off my computer, I get home, it's on the TV, I get off the TV, I just didn't have energy for another one. And then I'm going to work the next morning and I turn on the radio, I don't even turn on the radio in the car anymore, but I had the radio on the car. And they're talking about it. And I was like, Clinton, you have exercised a privilege that this person's family probably could not. When I got to the office, I said, I'll just, I'll close my door, I'll watch this video. And then I'll try to move forward with my day. So I did that. I'm watching the video. I don't know how familiar you all are with it. But there's a point where the little girl is in the backseat and her mother is Just tore up. The person she loves has just been shot and is dying next to her and her daughter says something like That's all right, mom it's gonna be okay like her daughter is having to suddenly be an adult in that moment and console her mom and That broke me. I was in tears in the office and then I saw over the email came. Hey everybody It's cake day come celebrate birthdays in a break room like they were the other people at the office were having the best day ever and was I 100 percent of the black staff? I surely was in that office. Was I 100 percent of the people of color in that office? I surely was. So I could see how they were living a completely different life at the same time, in parallel to the life that we were living. But I remember that a black woman recruited me. So I reached out to her. And, she said she was feeling the same kinds of things. And that I might find others who were feeling similar things. So I started I will say this with no shame, look at whatever it was, like Skype, I don't know it wasn't Teams yet. Looking at profiles of people in the company to see if anybody might identify as black. And just reach out to them, check in on them, see how, introduce myself, get to know about them. And in those conversations, I learned that other people were having similar situations. They were also experiencing a wide range of bias, exclusion, and underrepresentation in the spaces that they were in. And there was another common pattern. They would find themselves in conversations with customers who would say things like, Yeah, I got a lot of money to spend on equity. We have a lot of equity concerns. I always talk about this one customer who I thought was writing a commercial for GIS technology. They said we're relatively new to this organization. It was a local government and we know that our policies are creating racial disparities in different neighborhoods and geospatial data. Can you help us use geospatial data and maps to figure out which of our policies harm which communities of color and which neighborhoods, like they understood. And by and large, in those conversations, every GIS person outside of myself would talk about something else, look at their shoes, change the subject, start navigating towards other areas of business, whether that was, people working on my team or people working within the organization. And of course, in GIS school just like in any other discipline, they're not teaching you to do racial justice in the context of your work. They may be teaching you to do social justice off to the side of your work, possibly as something you might be interested in adding on. But the idea that government policies and practices could somehow have something to do with racism. Make sense to people. Isn't that something in your head heart mind? The idea that maps could have anything to do with that didn't make sense to a lot of folks. So we knew we also had to do something about that. We got really creative. We came up with frameworks and approaches, some of which some companies have started to adopt or have long adopted in in some cases, some of which we've promoted through the state of Washington with their pro equity, anti racism initiative that was statewide. And we've always had faith that we can get there. And we all know by and large, who is seen as making the maps and who's making those decisions. And as I said, very often they treat conversations about race and racism as if it is off to the edge of the map, that area that says beyond here there be dragons. But the reality is talking about race and racial equity in the context of maps should not be new, but we should be doing it in a positive way, in a way that elevates and amplifies the challenges and opportunities across our communities. And I'm just going to talk a little bit, about how maps and racial injustice come together and why they matter. So in the 1400s, the Portuguese began to map Africa and kidnap people and force them to serve in Europe and later in the Americas. And by the end of the 1500s, the triangular trade was well mapped and well established. And over the course of 350 years, at least 12. 5 million people were forcibly removed from their communities, violently subjected to slavery and compressed into a singular colonial identity that we now call black. That's 12. 5 million people, y'all. That's more than the population of Portugal, one of many European countries that were once global leaders in the trade of enslaved people, reaping great wealth at the cost of human lives. And while many Americans visit Europe to explore its rich history and connect with their roots, so do I. As a descendant of Africans disconnected from our roots through the Middle Passage, I visit Europe to learn more about the histories of black people from organizations working to preserve and share those stories. In Germany, I wanted to know about the Berlin Conference of 1884. At this conference, Europeans in the U. S. accelerated colonization by using a map to divide Africa, its resources, and its people. And from the 1400s through most of the 1800s, colonizers wanted to funnel Africa's value into their empires, and they didn't say, change takes time, it'll happen, nope, they used maps to plot their actions. So shouldn't we use digital maps to accelerate plans for a just and equitable future? In 1934, midway through the Great Migration, as it turns out, my grandparents childhoods. The government spread redlining practices in over 200 cities across the country. These federally directed policies used racist maps to systematize segregation. Many of these cities were places where black families sought opportunity and refuge from Jim Crow segregation. My mother was born in 1951 and she grew up in a redline neighborhood that I spent my early childhood in. The limited resources they provided and the limited opportunities that were there, textbooks that were often out of date. The library was very far to walk to and very often had nothing, that I needed to study. And the taxis, and police vehicles, decided that it was an off limits neighborhood. It all made sense in the context with redlining in mind. Because in 1938, homeownership in our neighborhood was limited to white people. And it seemed that hasn't changed the entire time I was growing up there. And honestly, it hasn't changed much, even to this day. Now, my mother was born in 1951 and grew up in that neighborhood and these are the things that were important. This was the state of the art as it relates to data and geography. This was their GIS. There were the maps of the locations, breaking down communities, and then the documents that defined what the world could look like. And I see lots of research exploring whether or not redlining was racist. And I don't have time to go through all the details here, but the FHA underwriting manual from 1938 documents very clearly what the intentions were. The intentions were to help augment and expand segregation and other segregationist practices like racial covenants. And they understood that the borrower would derive a measure of prestige from home ownership that often enhanced their position. And the position of their family in both business and social worlds and they had lots of ways of manipulating people and encouraging them not to integrate communities. And if you were to, as a non Negro family, move into a Negro community, you would be punished with a lower, assessment for your property. The data that was important included what percent was Negro. This is a call out feature. It wasn't one of many variables to consider. It was of primary importance. They also wanted to know who was infiltrating. Sometimes they would double up. They wanted to know the percentage of quote unquote Negroes and then identified them As infiltrating relief families, folks who were getting, early stages of social welfare. They wanted to know who these people were as a part of the data that they were collecting about communities. Now, today, during disasters, maps and geography help us allocate much needed resources, mitigate harm and prepare our communities for future challenges. But what about COVID 19? In DC, the deaths of black people represented 72 percent of all deaths, even though black people only represented 45 percent of the population. What about the next event? What about the next crisis? We need our perspectives in the room. We need people willing to, when they get a seat at the table, do what the young woman was talking about. Take that position, bring their perspective to the table and try to advance. And very often, even when that is the case, when people step forward, it's difficult to hold that position and hold space at the table. And so this is why we exist. We recognize that this work is important. And people will say to us all the time, it's not a sprint. It's a marathon. Change takes time, they'll say. But whether it's a sprint or a marathon, it's a race and it's racing against injustice. So we have to run as if we really want to win. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more about Northstar of GIS, check us out on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube at GIS Northstar. We want to thank our sponsors of the 2024 Homecoming event, our institutional partner, ReGrid, and our sponsors, New Light Technology, AfriTech, and Black at Work. We'd like to thank our keynotes, Tara Roberts, Linda Harris, Dr. Paulette Hines Brown, and Vernice Miller Travis. We'd like to thank Howard University and the staff at the Interdisciplinary Building and Photography by Imagery by Chioma. We also want to thank our guests for trusting us with their stories. Tara, Linda, Paulette, Christian, Abraham, Jason, Vernice, Stella, Beye, Karen. Nikki, George, Frank, Labdi, Toussaint, Victoria, and the HBCU Environmental Justice Technical Team. And finally, thank you to the North Star team and our wonderful volunteers. We are your hosts of the Season 2 of the North Staggers Podcast, which is based on the 2024 Homecoming Conference event. thanks for listening to the North Star Gaze, intimate stories from geoluminaries. If you're inspired to advance racial justice in geofields, please share this podcast with other listeners in your community. The intro and outro are produced by Organized Sound Productions with original music created by Kid Bodega. The North Star Gaze is produced in large part by donations and sponsorship. To learn more about North Star GIS, Check us out at north star of gis.org and on Facebook or Instagram at GIS North Star. If you'd like to support this podcast and North Star of gis, consider donating at North star of gis.org/donate or to sponsor this podcast, email podcast at north star of gis.org. You've been listening to the North Star Gaze.