Clinton Johnson - Closing Us Out, Charting the Future of Innovation

In this closing keynote episode of NorthStar GAZE, Clinton Johnson reflects on the transformative potential of GIS in addressing justice and equity while exploring the unique power of Black geographies. Highlighting the intersections of innovation, storytelling, and community empowerment, Clinton emphasizes the importance of reimagining the future through geospatial work that centers marginalized voices. This inspiring conversation invites listeners to consider how GIS can be used as a tool for progressive change, cultural preservation, and creating equitable futures. Tune in for a thought-provoking finale to Season 2!

Transcript

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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. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. I'm going to, try to respectfully close, so folks can get on with the rest of their lives. I really appreciate everyone for having taken the time to be here. I'm going to try to do some kind of a rapid overture of the experience. As much as I can, so we've been talking all year, really, about designing an equitable and feminist future through these intersecting lenses of art, Afrofuturism and geography, thinking of art as the ways in which we can bring our unique voices to bear, geography is a powerful lens to allow us to break down the many layers of what we experience and what communities experience and bring them together in an interesting way. And Afrofuturism is a bold vision of, where we should be moving towards. Our organization got its roots, its foundation, took its inspiration from figures like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman. This is why North Star is the name that we chose. We root ourselves at a foundation of Ubuntu and the seven principles of Kwanzaa. And try to really bring life into them through the work that we do. Because we recognize that very often it's people who don't look like us who are mapping our future. And in and across the spaces where we all work, topics of race and racism are treated as if they are in that realm, beyond which here there be dragons when we know that we need to bring attention to these conversations in the same way. That maps were used to carve out our carve up our communities and decide where to put harms and where to put benefits again. This moment in time, that, forged us into, an identity that, many of us collectively think of as black, this middle passage, is in and of itself an example of colonial powers mapping the planet to use those maps for the purpose of doing harm to some to their own benefit. Always like to take some historic figure and for a moment I was inspired to do some of my slides about Lincoln, but I'm just going to stick to the program and instead talk about Benjamin Franklin real quick and his thoughts on white people, aliens and immigration. What did Ben think in 1751? What was he thinking about? Let's see. He wrote this paper about immigration because he was concerned about what the colonies that we were, that they were starting to call America was starting to look like. And he put on paper that the number of purely white people in the world is proportionally very small. And he could wish that their numbers were increased. And while we are, as I might call it, scouring our planet by clearing America of woods, and so making this side of the globe reflect a brighter light in the eyes of the inhabitants of Mars and Venus, why should we, in the sight of superior beings, darken its people? This guy thought that, really cool. He believed there might be aliens on Mars and Venus. That's cool. They made us progressive that time. But he thought that they would be looking at Earth and thinking, Why isn't that continent white enough? This was a thing that he, that was so important to him, that he thought it might be important to these superior beings. This is classic white supremacy, the belief that white people constitute a superior race and should therefore dominate society, typically to the exclusion or detriment of other racial and ethnic groups. He went on to say, why increase the sons of Africa by planting them in America where we have so fair an opportunity by excluding all blacks and Tawnees. of increasing the lovely white and red. There's a lot going on here. Who are these tawnies? The reds are lovely. My race is a social construct. What does that mean? At the intersection of time and place and culture, the classifications of humanity and who is within that classification and who is beneath it. Change all the time. I don't know if I'll go into who these Tawnys are, but I'll tell you. Well, they were the people who were not Saxon, the people who were not British. So that's only some portion of Germans who could classify at this time as being white. And everybody else in Europe was thought of with some other color in some spectrum of racial color. And at this time, the Native Americans and, the folks who we were thinking of as Native Americans were being embraced as, as noble. Their legal system are in many ways, the legal systems are in many ways at the roots of American legal systems. There were many colonists. Who were immigrating into native communities because they valued and appreciated their lifestyle. And at some point around this period, we, things start to pivot. Because they're starting to lose these, their, some of their colonial forces to immigration into native populations. Let's see what else we have here. I don't even necessarily remember, what I want to say next. But perhaps, ah, this is the part. But perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my country. For such is, for such kind of partiality is natural to mankind. He believed that it's just normal to prefer people of your complexion. He assumed, therefore, one would imagine, that everybody was some kind of a supremacist as it related to their own complexion. And so what does that mean, he thought, of the aliens? He must have thought even the aliens were white if they were superior beings. Now, quick question, because we like to keep it interactive. How many people knew any of this? There's a lot of books that are interesting to read. Yep. Washington and other people. I would suggest everyone look at the Lincoln Douglas debate. Sometimes we say the Lincoln Douglas debates and it is just a label for a critical conversation about race. Lincoln, would have lost his run for the office of presidency. If he didn't make it clear, not only did he have no thought in his mind that black people could ever be equal to whites. He also thought that white people should always be superior. He had no intention that black people should ever get the right to vote. But somehow he thought that the inalienable rights that the Constitution provided should not be withheld from the black man. And in the same way they wouldn't, they shouldn't be withheld from the white man. Now all that narrative was man oriented. He wasn't talking about women except in so much as to say that, he neither wanted a black woman for a slave or his wife and had never wanted them as such and could just leave them alone. These are things that, that Lincoln said and we think about him, through the lens that people want us to think about him. So I spend some time, from time to time visiting Europe to learn about the histories and cultures of black people. Because in many ways, blackness was triggered, if not defined by Europeans decision that this is an easy way to classify some people as other and beneath us, that we can get our whole communities rallied around. So there's organizations like the OGC network that, in some ways I see as a potential sister organization to Northstar and their work is largely around helping, organizations like ours, do their work, across the black diaspora in a more deeply connected way. There's NINSEI, the National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its legacy. And, they told me that some of their founders had participated in a ceremony commemorating the 160th anniversary of the Dutch abolition of slavery in 2023. And at that ceremony, the Dutch king apologized for the Dutch involvement in slavery and its lingering impacts. Now, I don't know if you all knew this, but the Dutch were, five small provinces that had a plan. They thought if they came together, they could create a company that would monopolize the slave trade. Yep, and they, so they charted the oceans to kidnap, store, and ship over half a million people as property. And I wondered if the Dutch king, had really thought about the, not just the people who they, snatched from the, their homes. But the people who were then scattered across the globe as he was making that apology. It's over half a million people. We talked yesterday, I talked yesterday briefly about this moment in time when the United States and European countries got together. This is a sketch of the conversation in the room, but what people knew was there was a large map of Africa up on the wall. And a lot of white gentlemen were sitting around making decisions about Who could get which, which places because each place had a value. Either in the minerals, the materials, the wood, or in the people as property, not just to harness their physical labor, but their skills as well. There are maps of Africa that are carved up in relation to the skill sets and knowledge and spaces that were created by European colonial forces, and complementary to those maps would be signs declaring the sale of people as property, not simply based on their identity, their size, their gender, but on their skill set, not just as laborers, but as architects, engineers, as, we would call them botanists today. There's so many ways in which this is a this. This might be more of a story about mapping the realities of something. But again, maps being used to carve up communities to associate value with or take value away from communities. And this to me was the state of the art at the time of what we call redlining, where sometimes we look at redlining as the trigger, the initiator, the cause, but really redlining was the government saying, you know what, all this segregation stuff, it seems to be working. What can we do to amplify, to enhance, to support these practices? And they documented that work. And so now when disasters occur, we often find ourselves. Facing the full brunt of issues while others are being better supported. And even when we try to get a seat at the table, we experience bias, exclusion, and underrepresentation that makes it really difficult for us to survive, thrive, and really make the case for our communities. So coming together in communities like this, in spaces like this, help. And we hope that We have shared some tools and strategies for building spaces for change, that together we can not just learn about this great technology, but be prepared to confront the exclusion, under representation and bias that puts us in fight, flight, freeze, and fawn mode. We turned to our neighbors and we said, I'm with you. We turned to our neighbors and we shared an apology. We recognized the trauma of our experiences. We also recognized the power and strength that we have together, and how we can create lasting change. We talked about the kind of impact that we like to have through our programming, and we invited you all to share. your thoughts, your ideas, and I'm going to look at every single paper that we have here, trying to transcribe them. And we had powerful conversations and messages from great leaders across a variety of industries. We had time to be in community with each other, to share our stories, and I'll say I learned this approach from, from someone who said that who you are, Like a brand should be a promise and when you try to think about what you're promising your commitment is from a professional perspective Your name matters for sure But where you have impact where you are from how you quantify the impact and what you're passionate about really matters, so You know, I love for you all to think about even this is a tool not just for having great connection and community but for also Thinking about how you define who you are and the way you move through the world. We want to thank our sponsors, as we thank our speakers, and we thank our attendees for joining us over these past couple of days. It has really been a great experience for us, and we hope that it's been a great experience for you. 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. Northstar's programming is produced in large part by donations and sponsorship. If you'd like to support the next season of the Northstar Gaze podcast, please submit your donations to northstarofgis. org slash donate. If you'd like to sponsor this podcast or the homecoming event, reach out to us at the following email address. Podcast at notestarofgis. org or notestargis. org slash sponsorhomecoming. You'll find all these links in the show notes. We want to thank our sponsors of the 2024 Homecoming event, our institutional partner ReGrid, and our sponsors New Light Technology, Afrotech, 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 Star Guest Podcast, which is based on the 2024 Homecoming Conference event. This podcast is produced by Ayesha Jenkins and audio production in collaboration with Cherry Blossom Productions, Kied Bodega, and Organized Sound. 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.