We all know the rent is too damn high, and everything, from getting our hair done to eating our soul foods from across the African Diaspora, is increasingly out of reach and touch, despite being practices our ancestors perfected. And let's not even get started with being surveilled, policed, incarcerated, denied, and killed just for who we are as Black folks.
But Kristen Jeffers doesn't believe gentrification is inevitable, and they're done with taking gentrification on the nose.
After years of trying to convince their urbanist colleagues to reform their publications, organizations, local governments, community groups, and even their own attitudes around cultural diversity, equity, inclusion, and the ills of gentrification, they stepped away from the global urbanism scene for a while, wrote a manifesto and started to test out how to live as much of their lives as they could, while preserving energy to clapback just in time.
Or maybe never, because as a Black autistic nonbinary person who has been socialized and perceived as a woman their entire lives, rest is resistance (Thanks Nap Bishop and Nap Ministry).
This workbook is the result of that necessary pause. It's here for you as a fellow sista-sibling to learn how to embody rest as resistance, even if the rent is coming due. It's built around their Defying Gentrification Manifesto mantra: "I can have faith, I can engage in cultivation and creativity and self-care, but I need community care, access, infrastructure, and convenience to defy gentrification."
Interactive, with workbook pages and stories from their years in urbanism, there's something for everyone, but this one is especially for their sistas and siblings, because intersectionality is real and so is misogynoir, and if that was stopped, the entire world would stop being trash.
Kristen Jeffers (she/they) is the creator and managing editor of The Black Urbanist and Kristpattern multimedia platforms, which strive to bring a Black queer feminist dynamically disabled perspective to the greater urbanist sphere through a newsletter, workbook and podcast on Defying Gentrification, and facilitating crochet and other needlecraft workshops and spaces. She’s held a variety of communication and public affairs positions over the last decade and a half and is one of Planetizen’s 2023 100 Most Influential Contemporary Urbanists. Most recently, they were the contributing editor for Greater Greater Washington and have been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Streetsblog the Commercial Appeal, and on NPR affiliates, WAMU, WUNC and KCUR, along with bylines in House Beautiful, Sierra Magazine, Streetsblog, Next City, and Grist. They live in Washington, DC with their wife Les Henderson and was born and raised in Greensboro, NC.
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