At the end of May, in response to George Floyd’s murder, downtown Oakland was roiled by protests. Architect Deanna Van Buren and her team at the nonprofit Designing Justice + Designing Spaces had been working out of a ground-floor office located in the city center. After a night of turmoil, she and her DJDS cofounder, Kyle Rawlins, found that their workplace’s plate-glass window had been smashed. Rawlins, who has since left the organization, taped up a sign that said “This is a local Black-owned business.” “We should have put that sign up before, not after,” says Van Buren ruefully. She shared pictures of the damage in a Facebook post that reads, in part, “[We] will never give up our mission to end the violence and oppression embedded in our justice system and its built environment.”
The deaths of Floyd and so many more Black individuals, along with COVID-19, have highlighted the structural racism that has long galvanized advocates for prison abolition like Van Buren, who has been working on alternatives for nearly a decade. The United States holds the inglorious title of having more of its author Michelle Alexander in an interview at the start of last year.
