Oakland, California

This paper challenges dominant geographies of urban theory by conceptualising the dynamics of displacement in Oakland through place‐specific histories of racial/spatial politics. It argues that the repeated transposition of a San Francisco‐based model of “tech gentrification” results in deracinated dispossessions, or accounts of displacement uprooted from grounded histories of racial violence and resistance. It also argues that, while urban scholars acknowledge the role of historical difference in contouring dispossessions in metropolitan versus postcolonial cities, this consideration should be broadened to account for the racial/colonial dimensions of urbanism in the US as well. Treating Oakland as a “crossroads of theory”, this paper joins calls for a deeper engagement between postcolonial urban studies and critical race and ethnic studies from North America. Drawing upon the authors’ activist and empirical work, it contends that “thinking from Oakland” demands a foregrounding of racial capitalism, policing, and refusal.

Upon the US electoral victory of real estate mogul Donald Trump, we at the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) (http://www.antievictionmap.com/)–a data visualization, data analysis, and storytelling collective that documents the dispossession and resistance of San Francisco Bay Area residents within contemporary landscapes of gentrication–have been newly theorizing relationships of power, property, race, and displacement.[1] In this piece we think through what it means that a New York City real estate mogul now is President of the United States. In 1950, Woodie Guthrie wrote a song about Fred, Trump's landlord father, calling him out for racist housing policies. Fred Trump, who had established million-dollar tax-sheltered trusts for each of his children and grandchildren, and who fed Donald hundreds of thousands a year, also left our current president $40 million of his $250 million real estate venture upon his death–a literal passing down of white inheritance through private property (Stein, 2016). Not only has this inheritance fueled Donald's own real estate industry, but it has nanced a campaign that capitalizes upon historic racism, while speculating upon racist futures. To put it simply the President, known for his luxury developments, golf courses, and exploitative housing policies, has made and inherited the capital that nanced his campaign through systems that privilege private property and with it, whiteness. Today, our current president, now sitting in a White House built by slaves, is amassing an army around him determined to maintain the whiteness of private property. As of now, Trump has appointed a Chief Strategist who wishes that only property owners could vote, a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary who overtly opposes fair housing law, a Secretary of Treasury popularly known as the " foreclosure king, " and an oocial senior advisor known for eviction and harassment of New York City tenants. Of course he also supports mass deportations–another form of racialized eviction. How do we think about the ascendancy of Trump's reign, along with his new appointees through a lens critical of racialized and colonial US histories of private property? How might this moment call for an abolitionist rather than simply reformist perspective on private property? Focused on the geographic scope of the San Francisco Bay Area and the analysis produced through the AEMP–an activist data visualization and narrative project that we both work on–this piece theorizes why an abolitionist approach to private property is requisite in contextualizing data and in fueling intersectional movement building. How are both liberal and libertarian policy bandages in the context of Bay Area gentrication insucient in addressing the underlying roots of racialized forms of displacement?