Anti-Racist Critical Design

Critical Design Lab Statement on Design Commitments to Abolishing White Supremacy

Google Doc Plain Language Version

Say their names:

• George Floyd
• Breonna Taylor
• Ahmaud Arbery
• Sean Reed
• Tony McDade
• Yassin Mohammad
• Regis Korchinski-Paquet
• Eisha Hudson
• Jason Collins
• D’Andre Campbell
• Tanisha Anderson
• Natasha McKenna
• Sandra Bland
• Trayvon Martin
• Eric Garner
• Michael Brown

All other Black and Indigenous people, named and unnamed, whose lives have been taken by white supremacy. And those renamed, assimilated, erased from history, and buried in unmarked graves.

The Critical Design Lab, a collective of non-Black people of color and white disabled designers, scholars, and activists, offers solidarity with Black Lives Matter. We commit our labor toward abolishing white supremacy and police brutality, particularly against Black and Indigenous people. Ibram X. Kendi writes,

Will we fight for black people to live? History is calling the future from the streets of protest. What choice will we make? What world will we create? What will we be? There are only two choices: racist or anti-racist.

We understand these provocations as social decisions, but even more significantly as design decisions, as calls for making choices to create and work differently. As world-builders, our only possible choice is to create anti-racist worlds.

We offer the following commitments toward anti-racist critical design praxis:  

1. We affirm the value of human life over property. The built environment is a site of violence: buildings representing the State and Capital, buildings housing racist organizations, statues commemorating white supremacists, segregated cities, toxic buildings and landscapes, and occupied ancestral lands shape our material world. These spatial representations of anti-Black racism and settler colonialism also materialize differential access to the length and perceived value of life. As we have witnessed, questions of who lives and dies from COVID-19 reflect hierarchies of valued life that were designed by slavery, colonialism, and eugenics, that live on in systems of medical apartheid, and that find manifestation in ableist calculations of productive and valued life. Thus, built environments have agency: they produce effects both with and without intention. In discussions of the destruction of property, we ought to remember that buildings and other designed things are meaning-making devices that both reflect and signal racism. Even when their effects appear unintentional, however, they often come together through explicit (and elided) racist policies.
2. We affirm the value of direct action as a design tactic. Built environments are strategic sites of design intervention. Tactics of direct action as design can be found throughout the history of Black liberation movements, such as in sit-ins that put bodies on the line for justice. These tactics are also found in the design of mutual aid projects that intervene into conditions of geographic isolation and material deprivation, such as the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children programs. Inspired by these tactics, direct action as liberatory design has also been a cornerstone of disability activism, manifested in large public demonstrations where bodies come into conflict with inaccessible built environments, sometimes with sledgehammers or assistive devices. This legacy of protest as design and world-building recognizes the non-innocence of built structures: that in them, we find both oppression and opportunities for symbolic and material liberation.
3. We call in disabled people, especially non-Black disabled people, to center the fight against white supremacy in disability politics. We highlight the leadership of Black disability and Deaf activists including T.L. Lewis, Leroy Moore, Dustin Gibson, the National Black Disability Coalition, the Harriet Tubman Collective, Vilissa Thompson, and many others to show the pervasive co-constitution of anti-Black and anti-disability violence.
4. We name racist police brutality as a form of state-sponsored eugenics. Eugenics is not only a historical phenomenon focused on sterilization. It is a design practice and a logic running through the legacies of slavery and slave patrols, in the violence of disability institutionalization, and within the current prison-industrial complex. Eugenic logics enable the police to justify brutality by citing victims’ disabilities and underlying conditions. We commit to anti-eugenic design, which we define as design that replaces racist and ableist carceral logics with structures in which the most presently-marginalized and devalued people can thrive.  As feminist environmental activist Starhawk writes, “Perhaps it is time for all of us to reconsider our loyalties, to consider what might further human survival. Our work is not just sawing the legs off the ladders, but building the structures that can replace them.” What worlds could we build if we defunded the police and divested from prisons and institutions such as nursing homes? What lives would find support, care, sustenance, and collective assignments of value?
5. We call in the legacies of disabled world-building to imagine new infrastructures and ways of living. Just as we have critiqued approaches to design that focus on “fixing”  disabled bodies, rather than the ableist society, we advocate against design projects that capitalize upon or behave entrepreneurially toward our present crisis. Rather than foster solutions grounded in solidarity and systemic changes, the turn to design-a-thons, grant proposals, or branding campaigns is often depoliticizing. In all actions, we ask whether the intended outcome is liberatory, or if it simply reaffirms existing power structures and relations.
6. We call in our community of designers, activists, researchers, educators, architects, and urban planners to recognize that the built and social worlds we produce together each day are non-innocent, inseparable from white supremacy. Angela Davis writes, “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.” Agitating against anti-Blackness in built environments, in policies, and in the actions of the State are all design imperatives--commitments with which designers must concern themselves in response to what Kendi calls, the “American nightmare.” If the American nightmare, also known as the so-called “American Dream,” materialized through stolen land, racial segregation, white flight, an expanding prison-industrial complex, and a highly-funded police state, then designing against this nightmare requires explicit commitments to anti-racism. Thus, we call in particular on non-Black and non-Indigenous world-makers to take seriously the task of designing worlds that follow Black and Indigenous leadership, that refuse reliance on State violence, that repudiate the tactics of policing, that center social supports and solidarities, and that foster mutual aid.  
7. We call in our community of university-affiliated workers to reckon with the role of slavery in building our institutions on colonized land. We must also name the present-day role of our institutions in perpetuating gentrification. We must acknowledge the impact that campus re-openings may have on our surrounding communities of color, particularly Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and immigrant communities. In our workplaces, we must name and fight against the racial and economic stratifications that pervade decisions about campus re-openings (particularly regarding which staff are expected to put their lives on the line and toward what ends). We must recognize that the systems that economize life, that declare white and abled lives as most worthy of continuing, are also those that declare Black life, Indigenous life, and disabled life as expendable.
8. We commit to working in the tradition of mutual aid and solidarity, of orienting critical design as a way to build communities that show up for each other. May the grief, anger, and mobilizations of the present moment recommit us to placing anti-racism at the center of our anti-ableist design and research practice. As a collective, we acknowledge our complicity with and commitment to abolishing white supremacy and settler colonialism. We commit to strategizing specific ways for our present and future design projects to center anti-racism. In the coming months and years, we commit to developing explicit protocols for aligning our projects with our commitments to abolition, redistribution, and solidarity with Black and Indigenous people.

If these words resonate with you, we invite you to contact us at criticaldesignlab@gmail.com to sign on, endorse, and commit to anti-racist critical design.

Signed,

Members of the Critical Design Lab*

As a collective dispersed across continents, we work and live on the occupied homelands of the Cree, Blackfoot, Nakota Sioux, Iroquios, Dene, Saulteaux, Métis, Tsalaguwetiyi, Chickasaw, Shawnee, Lenape, Canarsie, Huron-Wendat, Seneca, Mohican, Kumeyaay, Chochenyo, Ohlone, and Ramaytush people. We acknowledge the violent histories of genocide and forced removal from these lands, and honor and respect the many Indigenous peoples still connected to them.

*We are signing as a collective to avoid asking visa holders, whose information may be collected as evidence against future decisions about immigration status, to choose whether to sign this letter.

Signing on in solidarity:

• John Schettino
• Atta Zahedi
• Laura Forlano
• Sally Cloke
• Elizabeth Chin
• Casey Boyle
• Georgina Voss
• Shannon Mattern
• Adrian Demleitner Polonyi
• Max Masure
• Arden Stern (writing from the occupied land of the Gabrielino/Tongva Nation)
• Faye Ginsberg
• Mara Mills
• Emily Lim Rogers
• Rayna Rapp
• NYU Center for Disability Studies
• Jeff Kasper
• Sara Hendren
• Cait Carlson
• Shani Jayant
• Dubravka Sekulić
• Jen Leonard
• Ana Maria León
• Lisa Brawley
• Bess Williamson
• Justin Fowler
• Billy Flemming
• Eliza Chandler
• Libbie Rifkin
• Lauren Williams
• Shannon Finnegan
• Jennifer Rittner
• Margaret Price
• Phil van Allen
• Anne McGuire
• Jennifer Kaufman-Buhler
• Godiva Veliganilao Reisenbichler
• Jacob Radar
• Max Stearnes
• Cameron French
• Catherine Baun
• Stephanie Cedeño
• Erika Barbosa
• Michael Milano
• Ivo D Gasparotto
• Salvador Orara
• Stacey A.  Seronick
• erika harano
• Geoff Kaplan
• Ryan Westphal
• Anjali Nair
• Elizabeth Patitsas
• Michael Trigilio
• Joe Potts
• Nicci Yin
• Anna Lathrop
• Jason Wong
• Sarah Teasley
• Designmatters at ArtCenter Team
• Sherry Hoffman
• Jennifer May
• Garret Scullin
• Kimberly Velazco
• Jacob Moore
• Anthony Jay Ptak
• Jackson Rollings
• Emily Watlington
• John Britton
• Oregon State University OSU Disability Network
• Jane Pirone
• Benjamin Jackson
• Lisa Guenther
• Amy Hurst
• Alicia Navarrette