A Building Collapses in Harlem...

This post is helping me to process some of my first reactions to the Harlem building collapse that occurred last week and the media coverage following it. After only finding formal press coverage of the issue while Googling, I would like to be in dialogue with people who are actually on the ground and working on this particular issue -- please email me or Tweet @thecowation with your thoughts.

  
The first thought I had was: "How dare they?"

There was an explosion in Harlem, the news alert said. Two buildings collapsed. After a while, I turned off the TV and closed the open tabs filled with articles. They all said the same thing. They lamented; they listed the dead.

How dare they portray this as a casual accident, an unexplained tragedy -- a backward glance and then, boom? Anyone you ask could tell you those apartments have been crumbling for years. No landlord in sight, no incentive to be.

One life lost unfurls into three. Then six. Then eight. For every life that is extinguished, five are impacted by life-changing injuries, mental and physical. Maybe more. Yes more, endless more.

The injured are always shuffled to the end of the sentence, always the follow-up. But they remain present, devoid of context after the news cycle has run its course. In ICUs and family homes, unable to get insurance or with insurance that will not cover their care, they survive. Some will end up on subway trains begging, while other riders turn down their heads. Long after the initial event, these people will continue to navigate a world not designed for them.

My best layperson theory about the housing situation in NYC is that it's a ticking time bomb -- the buildings are old and there isn't much incentive to renovate unless you're knocking them down to build condos (read: gentrification). There are few city interventions for communities that aren't cared about, and when there are they always come after they're needed. After the crisis.

How do you mourn when your everyday life is a crisis? This is the same question I asked after the Rana building collapse in Bangladesh, where the death tolls were in the thousands. I continue to ask them now as the bodies are carefully dug out of the rubble in Harlem and the area becomes just another hole in the ground. Who lives on? Who benefits from their misfortune? And how, as onlookers, do we do anything at all?

I am wrestling with these unanswered questions. I have looked back at my social justice influences -- interviews and articles by Mia Mingus for disability justice in particular. Taking a workshop with her a few years ago completely changed my understanding of how social justice work can be connected with healing. As she mentions: we should center disability justice because we all have the potential to become disabled, whether or not we began that way. With that in mind, the question becomes "How do we change this?" Healing work should not only be responsive after a tragedy occurs; it should focus on preventing violence and creating accessible services for those who experience it.

So how dare they? How dare they separate this violent incident from all of the structural violence that led up to it? Its causes are echoed in a laundry list of ways that the system has failed us -- lack of adequate housing, lack of resources for homeless people, and lack of mental and physical healthcare. Not to mention how the myth of U.S. superiority hides its connection to broken infrastructures abroad.

Very few sources connect us with these answers; now, we must write our own.

Songs On Repeat

This place has gotten so comfortable that I'm playing music over and over again in my head and singing it out loud at random intervals. I think I've become slightly creepy.
I know that I always take the time to tout the merits of being here, but I've just realized that there is always something to do here - and to a person who has to be chronically busy, that's a good thing.
Anyway, enough about the merits of Barnard, I am going to write a series of Snapshots of New York in order to profess my happenings here in easily digestible bites. Yeah, that's my inner newscaster.
1. My all-time favorite. We were buying dresses at a local stand and there was a Muslim black woman speaking with a black man; she was outfitted in traditional garb but her voice was definitely characteristic of the American black person. They were discussing women's rights - peacefully! I always hear things about conflict between people: Christians don't understand Muslims, they are automatically targeting each other's faults, making everything seem horrible when it's just different... But they were just talking about how people don't understand that women choose to be under the hijab and that there is respect, not oppression, in that culture. It just made me smile and feel as if there is hope for the world.
2. When we were lost in Harlem (or Washington Heights - we got on a train and went uptown and I don't know from there) it was very scary and there were mobs of shady people and trash [a real 'experience' from a suburban girl who hasn't really met the inner-city (thank God for brown skin!)] However, amidst it all, as Amy and I were walking down we overheard a conversation with a guy and his daughter. He was telling her a story about autistic children and how they have problems; the girl was very small, and so she asked questions. He said that there were people in the world who just didn't give up on them and they improved: his last line was "Don't ever give up on anybody."
3. Walking around Time Square, there are throngs of people. Hawkers selling things on the street, vendors selling halal hot dogs and other tidbits for reasonable prices, Indian-run souvenir shops with long lines of tourists. I think that the bright lights get to you sometimes; you watch up and not down and that's where you get your purse stolen. But I think that the nightlife is what really appeals to me - a short subway ride away there is an all-night party and no one can stop it.
4. These same subway rides, every once in a while, produce something else entirely. From the most innocuous (such as a man singing gospel songs in order to gain a little spare cash) to the most saddening (a one-eyed beggar who could barely speak asking for donations), it is always a different ride. There were kids selling candy for a dollar each so that they could get some money; there were pierced people and cut people just laughing along as they rode downtown... Our friend even got trapped outside the train as we laughed and waited for him at the next stop. It really is a 'snapshot' to take any subway train.

Now that I've gone on way too long, I just wanted to note that there is something different everywhere you turn. No matter where you're going or what you're doing, it's the experience that you're living for - and there's an experience every minute.
We are going to jam-pack our last two weeks here.

Read more posts about my awesome Barnard pre-college experience.
You may also be interested in reading about what happened when I started attending Barnard for college.