Open AccessWalking Brooklyn’s Redline: A Journey through the Geography of Race
Author(s) -
W. Brad Johnson
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of public pedagogies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2207-4422
DOI - 10.15209/jpp.1191
Subject(s) - cobb , ephemeral key , race (biology) , genealogy , geography , estate , emigration , history , cartography , sociology , archaeology , law , gender studies , political science , genetics , algorithm , computer science , biology
The Red Line Archive includes visual, material and ephemeral artifacts collected during four walks along the perimeter of formerly redlined neighborhoods in north and central Brooklyn. These areas once provided affordable homes to working class ethnics, black people and immigrants of color; now, ironically, they are the epicenter of some of the most expensive and aggressively gentrified real estate in the city. Historian Jelani Cobb once wrote in the New Yorker, “The past haunts along the periphery” (Cobb, 2015). If this is true what evidence of past redlining are still visible today? What emotions, insights and visual metaphors might arise as I walked along the periphery of the original 1938 Red Line Map of Brooklyn? Equipped with camera and journal, I walked around the perimeter of former redlined neighborhoodsin search of clues.