Faculty Friday: Paula Austin
Faculty Friday is a series highlighting members of the Initiative on Cities (IOC) Faculty Advisory Board, by exploring their work on campus and in the city. This week, we are highlighting Paula Austin, Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences.
Diya Ashtakala: Tell me about yourself and your work.
Paula Austin: I am a Professor of History and African American Studies. I have been at BU since Spring of 2019. I teach African American history, civil rights history and introduction to Black studies as well as a course on US childhood history. I published a book in December 2019 with the New York University Press called Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life. It looks into the intellectual history of poor and working class young Black people in racially segregated Washington D.C in the early 20th century.
What projects are you currently working on?
I’m currently working on two projects. One is the history of policing and campaigns against police violence in Washington DC from the turn of the 21st century to the 1960s. I want to write and research the history of the police department, role of the anti-Black police violence, community responses, media — specifically Black media responses and campaigns. I want to look at the reforms for DC police, the reforms they received and those that didn’t work. I’m seeing this as an important kind of precursor to help us think about police abolition, the abolition of carceral structures and defunding the police. I’m looking at this history to kind of help us think about why reform may not be possible.
The second is the practices of self-care in activist communities. I’m looking at how Black women activist communities, from the turn of the 20th century into the Black Power movement and in the 70s, incorporating the ethics of care and how they practice care amid organizing for social, gender, economic and racial justice.
What do you think are the biggest challenges faced by cities?
Racial and economic inequality work together in so many urban spaces across the country and that is manifested in terms of racial segregation, residential racial segregation, economic segregation, and segregation in schools. They are a layered set of problems that are related to each other that I think it’s hard to pull those apart as one being more important than the other because I think they are so connected to each other.
How can cities better address the problems that minority communities face?
Leadership and elected officials must use data collected from communities about their problems and conduct an assessment regularly. Many communities are experimenting with ways to deal with violence and harm without interacting with the police. Community work is focused on ideas and practices that prevent harm. There is a lack of dissemination of what communities are doing in these areas out to the wider public, so we often don’t know what these practices look and thus think they are impossible
What do you think the future of cities will look like?
We are poised to have our first woman of color mayor in Boston, but other cities have already done that. There also needs to be a shift in the municipal budget towards community organizations, health institutions as well as other issues like mental health and addiction crises. Cities could put budgetary changes in place so that local communities can meet some of those needs. The thing I appreciate about the IOC and MetroBridge is the research they provide to city leadership.
How can students become more engaged with cities and play a role in addressing the challenges that cities face?
When I think about young people, I think about school equity and who’s getting funding, and [how] the ways that successful schools are being defined can be problematic if they are based exclusively on standardized tests. I would love to see new thinking about what a successful school is and how then those schools are rewarded or supported when they are “successful”. The other thing is leisure and recreation. An examination of how young Black and brown people are seen and interacted with in public spaces and complaints from people when they see a young person in a public park, making assumptions about what that person is feeling or doing. I’d like to see continued research on the adultification of Black girls and criminalization of Black boys and adolescents — and that this research either creates a particular practice or ends a particular surveillance in public spaces. I remember being surveilled as a high school student taking the subway home from Manhattan to Brooklyn and that there were more transit police on the subway after school as if there was a threat when a group of young people took the subway.
If you were the Mayor of Boston and had unlimited resources, what program or project would you pursue and why?
I have no desire to be the mayor of any city, but I would love to see the reshaping of budget percentages of what agencies and institutions get from municipal funding and see so much more money spent on social services and on educational support and less money spent on “crime” response. Revamping the budget holistically and getting what [agencies and departments] need and less money being spent on false ideas about safety and security is something that I would also like the city seriously consider and implement.
What do you love most about Boston?
I’m happy to be back in a real city! It’s nice to return to a familiar urban rhythm and public transportation that makes sense. I love to get takeout from local Caribbean restaurants and get candles from the Botanica, which are things I used to do in New York. If I’d never left New York, I would have never learned to drive. I appreciate Boston as an urban place and am happy to be back in a place that “makes sense” to me even though it is not the city that I grew up in.