Got Any Fux to Spare?
Tags: BlackLivesMatter, Transportation, Traffic, Messaging, Community Engagement

Quick Black History Month Shout-out … slash PSA for White Saviors.

“Please Sir, my bowl for fux-to-spare is so empty!”

It’s still Black History Month and on any given day, I am tasked with regenerating the branches of my Fux-to-Spare-Tree because I’m fully preoccupied thinking about the following:

The safety/sanity of my Black Life in America, especially as I strive to protect the growth and well-being of my Black Children in America. The violent and measurable threats to our collective survival (e.g. “the school-to-prison-pipeline”) are compounded by the failures of those in positions of power to even understand my lived experience. The cost of living in Seattle vs. the cost of having critical thinking skills in Seattle. The “many mansions” I have access to are purely metaphorical. My advanced degrees set me back like … at least $150k, and I have already performed Viking burials in my head for run-of-the-mill American dreams like “home-ownership.” Other important stuff like the effect of police brutality and systemic racism on children, the constant violent displacement and theft from my global indigenous family here and around the world, the pure debacle of our current national election politics, the safety of immigrants caught in the eye of the alt-right storm, xenophobic Coronavirus hysteria, the insidious nature of anti-Muslim sentiment across media, and maybe also the more petty fact that I’m currently missing Carnival at home in Trinidad, which is my goddamn birthright.

All this to say, that “traffic safety” ranks pretty low even for me these days and I have been working as a consultant for SDOT to engage the public in the messaging around these issues.

But if I claim to care about people at all, especially non-white people who have nuanced and complex intersectional identities, then I kinda have to care about traffic safety because statistically, it isn’t the White-identified, wealthy, cis-men who are getting injured or killed in these traffic incidents (although they may be involved)— it’s folx who look like me who are suffering!

All this to say, if there is a field nearby where you can plant and regrow some of our precious fux, please consider sowing the following seed and please let that sucker spread as far and as wide as possible (preferably in the form of a meme*):

Rainier Ave S. averages more crashes per day than any other street in Seattle.

Billboard Photography by Tariqa Waters (Martyr Sauce), featuring Lain Littlejohn and Luzviminda Carpenter.

And as Charles Mudede wrote, “That’s just not normal.”

Normal has certainly taken on new territories in recent history. But what I hope some people are now beginning to see is that it’s not really an accident (systemically) when the most vulnerable folx are also tasked with not getting themselves run over or run into when walking, or riding, or driving in their own neighborhoods.

We can do better and we should.

But on behalf of all of us, I’d like to ask …

If you are procrastinating doing something much more pressing, perhaps you can make the time to help us keep this conversation going. I’m proud of SDOT for course correcting and making space for the folx most affected to lead this conversation. If you live on/around Rainier Ave S. in Seattle and have been affected by the traffic, I want to hear your story.

Tell it to me in the form of a meme*, or email nonwhiteworks@gmail.com with a short narrative describing what you or your family/friends experienced on Rainier Ave S.