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URBAN GEOGRAPHY,Vol.41,Issue2,P.340-350

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Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Kevin Ward University of Manchester kevin.ward@manchester.ac.uk http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3810-0889 Chocolate Cities seeks to challenge urban and race scholars to rethink the relationship between place and culture in understanding Black life in the US. Hunter and Robinson challenge the traditional narrative that Mason-Dixon line is a meaningful division in African American identity and experiences of racism. They refute the narrative that the American South is the bastion of racism and that Black migration north and west provides freedom from white supremacy. Instead, the authors assert that if the American South is equated with racism and white supremacy, then ALL of the United States is the south. This assertion is powerfully introduced with an excerpt from the Malcolm X’s famous speech “The Ballot or the Bullet” in which he proclaims “As long as you South of the Canadian border, you South.” Like Malcolm, the authors encourage us to think about African American history and culture as an interconnected web shaped by variations in the form of white supremacy, not its presence and absence. Chocolate Cities are not only the places in which African Americans experience the economic, social, and political constraints on freedom generated by American racism, but these are also the locations in which Black people generate the cultural, social, and political resources to resist racism and repair the conditions of racial inequality that they are experiencing. Again Hunter and Robinson (2018 Hunter, Marcus A. , & Robinson, Zandria F. (2018). Chocolate cities: The black map of American life . Berkeley: The University of California Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) challenge the dominant framing of Black urban life as a social problem and cultural deficit. These authors use an asset-based approach to studying Black communities which enables them to identify the economic, cultural, social, and political resources embedded in communities that others would simply label “the ghetto” and highlight the organizing tools and strategies that Black residents mobilize in their search for freedom. Thus, place emerges as a central analytic lens to understand both how racism shapes Black life and how African Americans challenge structural racism and attempt to recreate the United States as a truly democratic nation where equality and freedom for all is a reality. Hunter and Robinson (2018 Hunter, Marcus A. , & Robinson, Zandria F. (2018). Chocolate cities: The black map of American life . Berkeley: The University of California Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) construct a place-based cultural history of contemporary African-American life using a combination of archival, ethnographic, and census data. Through their exploration of the biographies of specific African-American “pioneers”, the authors attempt to document both the unity and place-based variations in Black culture and politics. The book is divided into four parts (the map, the village, the soul, the power) with each representing an essential analytic lens to more successfully interpret the realities of African-American life, past and present. In part 1, the authors introduce the concept of chocolate maps and reimagine the discussion of regional difference in the US to reflect six distinct and interconnected versions of chocolate cities: Up South, Down South, Deep South, Mid South, Out South, and West South. In part 2, Hunter and Robinson us the concept of “village” to describe the place-based mobilizing strategies Black people use to survive structural racism and actively challenge its power. In chapter 3, the authors use the concepts of “soul” to discuss the varied cultural products created in chocolate cities and their role in the African American struggle for freedom. Part 4 of the book introduces the concept of “power” to discuss how African Americans have leveraged the human, economic, and political resources embedded in chocolate cities to generate political power at the local, state, national, and even international level. Each of the four parts of the book contains 3–4 chapters using the individual biographies of Black pioneers as diverse as James Baldwin, Arthur Lee, Aretha Franklin, W.E.B. DuBois, and Tupac Shakur to illustrate the dynamics of these analytic concepts. One of the major limitations of Chocolate Cities is that it does not sufficiently evidence the documented regional differences or theorize dimensions of place that generate those distinctions. The authors assert that chocolate maps represent “a living geography, whose areas and regions are always being constructed, mirroring, and defined by the movement of Black Americans across the United States over time (p.19)”. Yet the maps that are presented in the book are static and fairly similar to normative regional maps of the country with different names. The reader is never told exactly what is distinctive about each region. How is the Up South different than the Out South and why? What makes the experiences of Black people in the Chocolate City of Pittsburgh more similar to their peers in Oklahoma City rather than those in Philadelphia? Have these regions always existed as distinctive or is it dependent on other factors such as: the flow of Black and non-Black migration, the rates of residential segregation, the political practices like gerrymandering? Each of these possible factors emerges in the authors’ discussion of the dynamics of specific chocolate cities and their residents. However, there is not an explicit discussion in the book about the empirical evidence for this typology or the theoretical factors that generate it. While the idea of a chocolate map in the tradition of critical geography that centralizes the lived experiences of Black Americans is extremely valuable to our analysis of race, politics, and culture, the ones outlined in this book gloss over meaningful differences in Black life and politics. Nevertheless, Chocolate Cities makes an important contribution to the bodies of scholarship on race in the United States, Black life and culture, racial inequality, urban sociology, and Black politics and social movements. Its major contribution and challenge to each of these areas of scholarship is the invitation to centralize the importance of place and to contextualize the dynamics within each chocolate city as an interactive network of resources (potential or actualized) in service to Black liberation. Kesha Moore Drew University Chocolate cities and a nucleus for freedom and soul On 16 January 2006, just months after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, then mayor of New Orleans Ray Nagin delivered his famous “Chocolate City” speech. Nagin declared, “We ask black people: it’s time. It’s time for us to come together. It’s time for us to rebuild a New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. And I don’t care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day.” (Grimm, 2014 Grimm, Andy. (2014, September 8). Ray Nagin in his own words: The soul of New Orleans, Chocolate city, and the biggest g – -n crisis in the history of the country. New Orleans Times-Picayune . Retreived from https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/article_b5a53e28-8a1d-5a61-8084-e2fa84ae115a.html  [Google Scholar], np). Despite the sea of criticism that followed his comments and Nagin’s subsequent qualifying remarks about chocolate being mixed with white milk and dark chocolate, Nagin was making a normative claim on the future of the Crescent City, a city that had been majority black since the mid-20th century and whose black residents were now scattered across a new southern diaspora. The largely negative white reactions reinforced the tacit and overt ways that black geographies are erased (McKittrick, 2006 McKittrick, Katherine . (2006). Demonic ground: Black women and the cartographies of struggle . Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]). Here the erasure was not just the literal devastation of many historically black, chocolate neighborhoods, which as Woods (2007 Woods, Clyde A. (2007). Sitting on top of the world: The challenge of blues and hip hop geography. In KatherineMcKittrick & Clyde A.Woods (Eds.), Black geographies and the politics of place (pp. 46–81). Boston: South End Press. [Google Scholar]) notes, black residents had built over the course of three centuries. It was also the deluge of neoliberal policy-making that would exacerbate the struggles of newly vulnerable black residents in the storm’s wake. Indeed, Katrina exposed how our present white supremacist geographic order creates a broader illusion that the “external world is readily knowable” to such an extent that we believe that what we actually see is true (McKittrick, 2006 McKittrick, Katherine . (2006). Demonic ground: Black women and the cartographies of struggle . Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar], p. xv). By articulating a vision of black space that was largely absent from white supremacist visions of the city that had long focused on the French Quarter and ignored the centrality of the city to the unfolding Southern Diaspora, Nagin brought attention to the long and important role New Orleans played in the unfolding of Chocolate spaces. This tension of making place and making time (Hunter & Robinson, 2018 Hunter, Marcus A. , & Robinson, Zandria F. (2018). Chocolate cities: The black map of American life . Berkeley: The University of California Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p, 78) amidst the ongoing spatialities of anti-black racism is exactly the ongoing dynamic that Marcus Hunter and Zandria Robinson enter into with their book, Chocolate Cities (2018 Hunter, Marcus A. , & Robinson, Zandria F. (2018). Chocolate cities: The black map of American life . Berkeley: The University of California Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). When placed within the intellectual framework of Chocolate Cities, the reaction to Nagin’s comments as well as Katrina itself reveal how and in what ways our current geographic conceptualizations of the urban landscape reinforce broader normative understandings of how the city works and who it is for. By countering broader normative visions, Hunter and Robinson's (2018 Hunter, Marcus A. , & Robinson, Zandria F. (2018). Chocolate cities: The black map of American life . Berkeley: The University of California Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) work explodes our contemporary concept of how and in what ways we have come to understand the Black diaspora, and the ways the multi-scaled and temporal geography of American cities' function. In so doing Chocolate Cities challenges the simplifying logics of whiteness and expands our concepts of the US South and the myriad Souths which have come to frame a range of race-connected practices (Wilson, 2002 Wilson, Bobby M. (2002). Critically understanding race-connected practices: A reading of W.E.B. Du Bois and Richard Wright. The Professional Geographer , 54(1), 31–41.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) that take place and have place in the US urban landscape. By centering black residents’ agency in the making of chocolate cites, Hunter & Robinson, 2018 Hunter, Marcus A. , & Robinson, Zandria F. (2018). Chocolate cities: The black map of American life . Berkeley: The University of California Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 18) expand our understanding of spatial practices that connect chocolate cities across scales, US geographies and temporalities and draw out how “black geographies of America have both shifted and remained remarkably consistent,” Utilizing a broad array of sources including art, literature, music, and politics, Chocolate Cities challenges normative understandings of African American life and highlights the ways our current maps of Black life are wrong (Hunter & Robinson, 2018 Hunter, Marcus A. , & Robinson, Zandria F. (2018). Chocolate cities: The black map of American life . Berkeley: The University of California Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 3). Perhaps more importantly, by expanding out Black southern geographies from the deep south delta and Atlanta through the Carolinas and Virginia and across the multiple souths of the United States, Chocolate Cities expands and problematizes the very idea of Southern Studies and mainstream scholarship which posits the South as a backwater or unimportant to the broader political, cultural, and economic life of the United States. Further, by collapsing the distance between chocolate cities, such as San Francisco, Detroit, Harlem, and New Orleans, Hunter and Robinson advance new analytical and conceptual frameworks for understanding race and resistance in the United States Because of the shifting frameworks of the Black diasporic experience, “The South” becomes part of a larger intellectual and radical tradition of resistance. As the authors argue, “The South” is not just shorthand for systematic inequality” but becomes a broader framework for “understanding and analyzing the striking similarities across Black communities and neighborhoods” throughout the United States (ibid, p. 2). As a result, this book is a watershed moment to think critically about how our present mainstream intellectual conceptualizations of black urban life erase and destroy black knowledges, experiences, places and culture, and how these same erasures reinforce the very structures of white supremacy that give intellectual weight to ongoing projects of gentrification, urban displacement/containment. By drawing out the persistence and the shifts in and across diasporic chocolate cities, Hunter and Robinson join the intellectual tradition of black scholars such as McKittrick, Woods, Kelley, and others who draw our attention to the ways that African Americans seek and build places where they can be both black and free. The result is also a book that stands as a clarion call to rethink Southern Studies and its place within broader intellectual currents. Long seen as the depository for the sins of the slavery and the overt racisms of the nation (Jansson, 2017 Jansson, David . (2017). The work of Southering: Southern justice and the moral landscape of uneven racism. Southeastern Geographer , 57(2), 131–150.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), the South is the birthplace of resistant struggles against the US settler state and, as Chocolate Cities highlights, has given rise to a set of black radical traditions. These traditions are central to understanding race-connected political practices which become central to the unfolding freedom aspirations of Black people throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But by casting the South as “everywhere below Canada” (Chapter 1), as Malcolm X does, Hunter and Robinson rearticulate a geography of the United States as multiple souths – the “deep south” “down south” “up south” “mid-south” west south” and “out south.” Using James Baldwin, Lauren Hill and Zora Neale Hurston’s insights the authors challenge the simplifying logics of whiteness and understandings of how these race-connected political practices unfold throughout the United States. Thus, this book becomes an important intervention not only in African American, Black Studies and Urban Studies, but Southern Studies as well. Perhaps more importantly, through their work a range of paths are opened to rethink how and in what ways resistance to white supremacy has unfolded in and across the US landscape – how place, time and resistance are bound up in the ongoing work of freedom. Thus, this book becomes a broader invitation to rework what McKittrick describes as a Black Sense of Place and the myriad ways black life is forged through shared histories of the Black diaspora. Perhaps no section illustrates their insights better than the section “Making Place, Making Sound” (Hunter & Robinson, 2018 Hunter, Marcus A. , & Robinson, Zandria F. (2018). Chocolate cities: The black map of American life . Berkeley: The University of California Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 94). Chronicling the career trajectories of Aretha Franklin and her work at the Muscle Shoals recording studio of Fame Records they argue that her work was reflective of the “Up South” geographies of Detroit and the race-connected practices of a city simmering with racial tensions, Hunter and Robinson argue that Franklin’s brand of soul broke the “conventional sonic mold” (ibid, p. 96). Blacks’ place-making practices have a sound, a soul and power that was infused through and within Franklin’s recording trajectory and life. As they write, the kind of soul music Franklin created: Was a new instantiation of the familiar language of the blues. Black people had certainly brought the village epistemology and its discursive and esthetic practices with them as they made chocolate maps. But the new rhythms of urban life and creation shifted the cadence of Blackness, as soul came to occupy the place in the spirit that had once been held by blues and gospel (Hunter & Robinson, 2018 Hunter, Marcus A. , & Robinson, Zandria F. (2018). Chocolate cities: The black map of American life . Berkeley: The University of California Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 96). If it is the reworking and geographic reconfigurations of an expansive, multi-faceted and multiple-souths black culture which was central to the melding of these traditions into something new and powerful, it was also the rhythms and repetitive nature of labor in the heart of America’s industrial corridor that “shifted the cadence of Blackness.” As a result, what we see at the heart of Chocolate Cities is the rupturing of a set of geographic conceptualizations that historically has naturalized urban life by re-inscribing white supremacist hierarchies and ontologies through the understanding of how race unfolds in urban America. Instead, Chocolate Cities sutures together the black experience across time and space away from the white gaze and illuminates an “intricately dynamic lifeworld” (Hunter & Robinson, 2018 Hunter, Marcus A. , & Robinson, Zandria F. (2018). Chocolate cities: The black map of American life . Berkeley: The University of California Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 61) from the home to the village to the city. Freedom is always constructed intentionally, resistantly, and soulfully. Traditional ways of understanding the urban renders black spaces as always and everywhere violated. By centering “Black people as strategic place makers” (Hunter & Robinson, 2018 Hunter, Marcus A. , & Robinson, Zandria F. (2018). Chocolate cities: The black map of American life . Berkeley: The University of California Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 179) the book explodes a vision of diasporic black life and instead sees the diaspora as soulful, as in not only full of Black people – literally full of souls–but filled with vibrant communities and peoples making life and meaning out of an expansive Southern diasporic experience. Thus, the making of Chocolate Cities is revealing of the ways black people have survived and come to create the deepest and most profound expressions of American political and cultural life. Critically by engaging with the themes: freedom, safety, resistance, and Chocolate Cities outline a kind of diasporic trialectic from which to understand how these spaces operate – how they resist and counter. As Hunter & Robinson (2018 Hunter, Marcus A. , & Robinson, Zandria F. (2018). Chocolate cities: The black map of American life . Berkeley: The University of California Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 117) note, Katrina “rocked chocolate maps, piling physical displacement on top of cognitive and social displacement.” The explosions of state violences visited on the black New Orleanian diaspora was compounded by geographies that left Chocolate Cities exposed to the environmental destruction as well. Yet, while we well know this devastation, this weariness and the ensuring ways that white supremacism works and unfolds in these contexts, Hunter and Robinson tell us that the nucleus of freedom work and building soulful and powerful places is not washed away. A chocolate future is “born and reborn” on the levees of the Mississippi River, where New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward residents see beauty despite abandonment. It is born in New Orleans’s Treme and in the beat of a second-line parade where black residents make and claim to space despite the efforts of gentrifiers and developers to push them out. The chocolate future contracts and expands, ebbs, and flows (Hunter & Robinson, 2018 Hunter, Marcus A. , & Robinson, Zandria F. (2018). Chocolate cities: The black map of American life . Berkeley: The University of California Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 183), but here – through Hunter and Robinson, it is mapped as an inevitable logic born through centuries long practice of resistance. Joshua Inwood Pennsylvania State University Anna Livia Brand University of California-Berkeley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8291-5970 See on both sides, an Ode to New Orleans 1 Side A Remember those days when rewind buttons were a luxury. Reserved for more expensive headsets, rewind was like a secret musical consumption ability manifested for those with the financial means to manipulate a song or an album to where they wanted to hear or rehear, play or replay, stop or repeat. Meanwhile, the rest of us had to finesse the fast forward button, flip the tape and zoom ahead so that you could rewind the flipside–give a little, so that you can get some form of freedom and control. In our journeys, we have come to deeply appreciate that every place has a story to tell, and like those old-tape decks, they often have at least two sides. And so we decided to hit play on our mixtape of observations about the geographies of Black people. Flipping from side to side, coast to coast, farm to town, a simple yet profound rule sprang up: Wherever two or more Black people are gathered, there is a chocolate city. Chocolate cities, as praxis and experience, teach of the power of two. The power discovered in the two of us working collaboratively. The power of two Black neighbors making signs to protest police violence. The power of two Black mothers sharing child-rearing tips. Or the power of two dynamic musicians, one on coronet and the other on flute, filling the air with jazzy whimsy along Frenchmen and Bourbon Streets. Not so quietly, New Orleans has been playing a mighty role in the soundtrack that is Chocolate Cities. A living testament to the problems and possibilities of America for Black people from all walks of life, New Orleans is still recovering from the devastation brought upon it by the lethal combination of Hurricane Katrina and subpar infrastructure nearly 15 years ago. But one hurricane ain’t gonna stop no Nawlins’ show. The Second Line will dance and play and bounce its way into the future. Parliament will still be played at the Spotted Cat. The Queen Diva, Big Freedia will not be denied her stage at Louis Armstrong Park, the Superdome and some Bouncin’ Beignets, the official Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream flavor churned and produced in her honor. And the Essence Fest lives on, musically conjuring a chocolate city within the humid chocolate city of New Orleans that lives a full four days comprised predominantly of 100,000 Black women and LGBTQ folk laughing, twerking, meeting, singing, listening, hearing, playing, eating, greeting, loving, arguing, and sweating the pulsating beads of Black joy. And so came a familiar pain. No less than two days following the conclusion of the 25th Annual Essence Festival, the city was flooded. A new hurricane sat at the city’s edge, ominous and massive, a reminder of how quickly Black joy can again become Black pain. It seemed the fest’s headliner, Philly’s own Frankie Beverly & Maze, were more than right when they gifted the world the song “Joy & Pain” 30 years ago in 1989 amidst an America diving deeper into the conservative right wing political nexus of Reaganomics and the first Bush family presidency. As indicated in the sociological wisdom of Frankie Beverly & Maze, dual truths and experiences like joy and pain are what we found time and again, two sides of the same coin of everyday Black life. It foregrounds our work together in Chocolate Cities, as also a powerful reminder that at least two things are always already true about Black space and place. Black life at different places and different times can be and is both the same and distinct at the same-damned-time. Young Jeezy is always already right. We must accept and share this wisdom. For the conditions of and for Black people are built upon a shared experience of anti-black and predicated on white supremacy alongside critical distinctions based upon era, region, hemisphere, or place. To admit that and accept that is not to the detriment of key international, interregional, ethnic, and placed-based distinctions. Rather, we should and must spread this message, this social fact, because it is ever present in the Black quotidian experience demonstrating the profound connections across space, time and place. For example, there are deep connections and political similarities between the murders of Sandra Bland and Tamir Rice and Hadiya Pendleton and Eric Garner and Duanna Johnson. We were always Black urban researchers and researchers of Black urban life, being Black and coming of age in Philadelphia and Memphis, respectively, in the 1980s and 1990s. Imagine our feeling, then, sitting up in Chicagoland classrooms in the early aughts, reading University of Chicago and Chicago School-descended urban theory, and seeing our homes and our quarter-life experiences and work overlooked. We thus spent our early careers carving out, to borrow from Thomas Gieryn (2000 Gieryn, Thomas F. (2000). A space for place in sociology. Annual Review of Sociology , 26(1), 463–496.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), a space for our Black places in urban research. This required remarkable attention to place specificity and the differences between Black places. They said: was Memphis not simply Chicago on a smaller scale? Wasn’t Philadelphia’s destroyed Seventh Ward like any number of other materially obliterated Black neighborhoods? No, we said. Prove it, they said. Thus, we carried the banner of place specificity high. We still appreciate the importance of place differences. As a homeboy and homegirl from the site of the MOVE bombing and the King assassination, of the urban northeast where Nixon’s Southern Strategy worked and the place with highest infant mortality rate in the country for several years, we know place matters for Black outcomes. While Black infant and maternal mortality, for instance, are unacceptably high all over the Black Map, it is and has been especially high in parts of the Deep South, where rurality, the legacy of enslavement, and laws restricting midwifery combine with the universal features of anti-Black misogyny in the medical industry to shape disparate intraracial outcomes across place. We want every contributing factor to be uncovered. But looking from the perspective of the forest, we want an end to racial disparities in Black maternal and infant health everywhere period. Indeed, maps change, and the ones we have presented are static representations that draw on existing demarcations. As we write this, Harlem and Shaw are melting leaving the whereabouts of its new chocolaty destination mysteriously shrouded within multiple cycles of Black migration and emigration. But the names Black folks give these places matter for how they understand their experience in one region or the next. Moreover, the Black cultural production that emerges within and across these regions demonstrates that Black people see their experiences across space and place as far more similar than we do with our social scientific microscopes. And it is Black people’s sense of things, not our contentions that they would get a bit more returns to their education if they moved to Charlotte versus Atlanta, that shape their movement across the Black map. Our naming and re-configuration of these regions, then, hews closely to Black folks’ good sense about the relative danger they and their babies are in as well as their sense of culture. What we are doing is an interdisciplinary Black spirit science, geisteswissenschaften, and to see the forest, the spirit, we had to fly high above the statistical trees. Side B After ‘trina hit I had to transfer campus Your apartment out in Houston’s where I waited Staying with you when I didn’t have an address Fucking on you when I didn’t own a mattress Working on a way to make it out of Texas, every night -Frank Ocean, “Nights” It was rumored that in response to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s Chocolate City speech, Mitch Landrieu, who would later succeed Nagin as mayor, said that “the top of the Superdome is white and will always be white.” Whether Landrieu actually said this or not, Black New Orleanians’ recounting of this narrative reflected a deep understanding of how white supremacy would operate in reaction to Black assertions of autonomy and freedom through placemaking in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. And with nary dataset or GIS access, Black folks were right. Rampant police corruption and murders of Black New Orleanians, a gutted school system that became an experimental ground zero for charter management organizations and their investors, etc. And the water rises. The levies remain an infrastructural reminder of the trauma that displaced longtime residents, and nearly wiped away a defiant Black culture that had nourished the city for centuries. We are thankful for New Orleans and the invocation of New Orleans as an origin site for this spirit, on the Mississippi River, south of the Mississippi Delta, at the north of the so-called global South, just east of the West. We witness what was: libations for the lost chocolate cities of Magnolia and the lower 9th Ward. We witness what sustains and continues: Big Freedia and crew stopping traffic and twerking; the everyday band battles and those of the Bayou Classic; Essence Fest and movies about Essence Fest as the Chocolate City pilgrimage; the second lines for the known, like Dr. John, and for the most known unknown; the spiritual workers, in their white or with their roots or donning their elekes, returning again or for the first time. We need to know more now than ever how people are surviving and thriving, even when a state and nation fail them and literally fly over them as they drown, baptized by the inescapable floodwaters of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism. We will remember that our babies died, not that they died more or less. We will remember the sound. We will remember that we are more connected than we’ve been allowed to know, more than we have been told, more than they teach even the smartest of us in classrooms across the county. And it is in this collective realization where sameness and difference are harnessed and celebrated that the most beautiful features and promise of the chocolate city lay before us. We are the village that we need. While others may choose to forget us, we must always remember ourselves, our homespace, our journey to a land that belonged to indigenous tribes, families, and cultures, and that despite all that was stacked against Black people, we remain. We are still here. And chocolate cities are where we combine our powers to change our circumstances and build a better world for all. Marcus Anthony Hunter University of California, Los Angeles Zandria F. Robinson Georgetown University