Abolish Rent: An Anecdote on Winning My Eviction Case, Blackness as Fungibility & Accumulation & The Tenants Movement

Rent is the gap between tenants’ needs and landlords’ demands.” — Tracy Rosenthal & Leonardo Vilchis, Abolish Rent

The transience of the slave’s existence still leaves its traces in how black people imagine home as well as how we speak of it. We may have forgotten our country, but we haven’t forgotten our dispossession. It’s why we never tire of dreaming of a place that we can call home, a place better than here, wherever here might be. It’s why one hundred square blocks of Los Angeles can be destroyed in an evening. We stay there, but we don’t live there. Ghettos aren’t designed for living. The debris awash in the streets, the broken windows, and the stench of urine in the project elevators and sarwells are the signs of bare life. — Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Residents of Seneca Village, a thriving Black community that was razed to the ground to make way for Central Park (left). | A map of Seneca Village (right).

After a two-year long battle against the landlord (both Keora Legrand and Amira Legrand) — from Keora doing everything from charging me illegal late fees for rent, attempting to denigrate my personhood —Amira, who installed cameras in the entrance of the apartment so as to surveil me specifically— to antagonizing my roommates (Fred Mezidor and Tasha Tracy — both of whom are Black) to the point of them authorizing state violence to have me killed (i.e. calling the pigs on me for playing “loud music”)— my eviction case was dismissed as of a week or so ago.

This victory could have not been achieved without the indefatigable strength of my Haitian ancestors (who I’ve prayed out to on few occasions and internalized their power from) — the support of the few and many comrades who I’ve been in community with who I have met along the way — in and outside of having formerly been part of a tenants union, namely, Brooklyn Eviction Defense, and last but not least, my tenaciousness to plainly reinforce that both the harassment, numerous instances of intimidation leveled against me to self-evict, had at several points agitated me, but did not sway me into submission.

This victory had served as an reminder of the unethical formation that is The World — that the malignancies that were happening to me, were systematically by design. Eviction is a state-sanctioned violence and to paraphrase Tracy Rosenthal, the white State designates it against the law to not subscribe to the capitalist logics of rent. Despite these odds, law is white and thus has no moral faculties. In the opening chapter of Rosenthal and Vilchis’ book, they remind us that every first of the month, we have the option to recognize our autonomy. By recognizing our autonomy, we can choose to refuse the calamities of today and initiate a rent strike of our own even before becoming familiar with the lexicon because we simply don’t have the money—while coming to later acknowledge that rent striking is often a collective strategy made by the consignment of comrades who support those who face the violence of landlordism and evictions:

Every first of the month, we hand over a share of our wages to meet our human need for housing. Our rents rise faster than our incomes, and inequality grows. Every first of the month, more tenants go without food, medication, and basic necessities to pay this tribute. More people take up residence with family, in cars, and in tents outdoors. But every first of the month is another opportunity for organizing, collective action, and collective refusal. Every first of the month is an occasion to educate ourselves and our neighbors about the housing system that ensnares and degrades us. Every first of the month, we can bargain for better conditions, gain more control of how we live. Every first of the month is a chance to take a risk.

Taking a risk is a risk in itself, and despite my condition — while I feared for what happen to me in the event I became homeless — thinking of when my father was homeless and my mother took him in — I had a “like father, like offspring” moment. What had befallen him I believed would inevitably happen to me. The evident difference was that I cut my parents out of my life and I had no other means of support but looking to reach out to comrades who might have the emotional bandwidth to let me stay at their place in the interim until I got my shit together. More apprehension had arose. The questions that spiraled through my mind even as they do now were:

1) What does getting one’s shit together mean in an antiBlack, ableist, capitalist world?

2) What if I never get my shit together and I’m just going to spend the rest of my life disillusioned and discombobulated, trying to figure shit out every day until I’m dead?

3) I don’t believe I’ll ever have the capital to be a homeowner in my lifetime, so what does it mean to go from here and the next day? And the next?

What I did know, however, is that in the moment that I faced being evicted, I refused not only because I felt disrespected on a personal level, but also because to displace someone who doesn’t have the money to stay housed is evil. An option of refusal remains, and refusing to refuse the apparatus of rent I committed myself to. In one way or another, as unsettling as the outcome would’ve been, I had no choice as I was perpetually broke, even with money.

There should have never had to have been occurrences where I was constantly falling into financial distress like I am now — even with a so-called “part-time” job that has frequent furloughs throughout the year — where people — Black people, who subscribe to the U.S. Empire (aware or not of the precariousness of their situation(s) in this fascist settler colony decide to become parasitic landlords, murderous pigs for the State, I.C.E. gestapo agents, U.S. Army soldiers, Israeli Occupation genocidaires and what have you) decide to level a case against me to have me displaced — to have our own people displaced — as is the case for Black peoples living in New York City — as if, we are all not racialized captives wherever we are in the world.

There is no solution like the mythos of Black Capitalism to “fix” the problem of dispossession, huh?

There is no careerism — i.e. getting to the bag-ing our way out of landlords’ persecutory and exploitative power — out of this antiBlack world. Landlords, big and small, unequivocally are a hindrance to a better world and therefore they must all be abolished. While I revel in my recent victory and transition into the next chapter of my life, I revisit an abridged analysis I gave on Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis’s didactic and illuminating work, Abolish Rent after having finished reading it as I navigated the landlord’s petition to have me evicted.

Having given Abolish Rent a first read, I appreciated the thorough analysis LA Tenants Union organizers Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis outlined in their primer on rent, the history of the political antagonism in the “war on tenants” that is concurrent with the war on drugs and to paraphrase Black nonbinary trans writer, DaShaun L. Harrison, “the war on obesity” — our collective role as tenants (housed and unhoused) as a political designation that is in a perpetual, multifaceted class conflict with landlords, real estate agents, homeowning-abettors and the colonial settler fascist colony that is the United States of America.

Highlighting moments of vigor and triumph in the organizing, mobilizing efforts and rent strikes successfully orchestrated by Los Mariachis de Union de Vecinos to Hillside Villa and unhoused tenants collectives like Echo Park Rise Up, I‘m grateful to have read this work and recommend it to everyone looking to get involved — to build relationships and comradery with their communities and one another to learn about more their positions as tenants. Tenancy is not designated specifically to those who are paying to live in a property. A tenant is an all-encompassing term that defines those who do not have ownership to capital to the extent that it is accumulated in the ownership of property — the monthly extortion of tenants occupying said property who are coerced to pay their landlords in order to stay there.

In the same way our bosses rob us of our (borrowed) time and money in order to live, landlords are no different. Though the answer to the problem of capitalist exploitation is for the proletariat to destroy capitalism, this declaration is an empty one. The slogan within Leftist circles is:

Fight! Fight! Fight! Housing is a Human right!

What does this declaration mean? What does this invitation to Black people to be in affinity with nonBlacks and white settlers to fight for housing rights that are inseparably designated as human rights? Black people, who are invited to be in affinity with tenants unions whose demographic are white settlers and nonBlacks? Those whose material positions are not in conflictual relation to each other, but rather, are structurally antagonistic to each other? Inextricably connected to Black dispossession?

A few days ago, a few Black comrades in South Africa and those of us in the U.S. engaged in an insightful conversation based on a close reading of Frank B. Wilderson III’s introduction and first chapter of his work, Red, White, & Black: Cinema And The Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. One comrade had said, to the problem of Humanism:

All these liberation movements are striving to be Human, but to be Human is antiBlack, so now what?

A world without rent and landlords is idyllic at best, but it will not put an end to the unethical formation that is our current world, such that I’m inclined to call into question the ethical and political faculties of a tenant union as it functions as its own kind of liberation movement to which it is hindered by the unthought. As Saidiya Hartman described in her memoir, Lose Your Mother, the position of the Black and the quest to seek home is inseparable from a history that has foregrounded modernity and the social order of today. Wilderson, too, reinforces the fact that human rights were always accessible to everyone who is not Black:

The race of Humanism (White, Asian, South Asian, and Arab) could not have produced itself without the simultaneous production of that walking destruction which became known as the Black. Put another way, through chattel slavery the world gave birth and coherence to both its joys of domesticity and to its struggles of political discontent; and with these joys and struggles the Human was born, but not before it murdered the Black, forging a symbiosis between the political ontology of Humanity and the social death of Blacks.

It goes without saying, that even as most of us excluding white, cishet, able-bodied, neurotypical men who experience oppression, are not subject to it in the same way. The construction of the Human, could have not come to the fore without the ongoing genocide of Africans — in the United States, Ayiti, The Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Gambia, and abroad.

Contextually, this returns to what I mentioned earlier about recognizing our autonomy in the face of the violence of evictions, the declarative slogan of “housing being a human right” and subscribing to refusal. Refusing, by participating in an individual and or collective rent strike is necessary (if and when, for example, we are faced with financial hardships or what have you.)

Moreover, this is not to devalue our efforts in that we deserve housing not only for the fact that nonBlacks have displaced us via gentrification or that our own people have subscribed to landlordism to participate in displacing lumpenproletariat Black peoples, but to also relentlessly probe the viability of our refusal.

In other words, to what end?

For Black peoples, “freedom is an ontological question rather than an experiential question,” which is to say that it is not enough to for us to relegate our oppression merely to what we experience on a daily basis. Freedom for Black people is inseparable from the anarchistic statelessness of our existence such that, the conditions of The World have enclosed their political and libidinal investments in the enslavement of Africans, which functions as an antithesis to Blackness. To put it differently — to paraphrase Frantz Fanon — we have left ontology by the wayside. It is evident that there has been no cognizant effort of the severity in which white civil society and its junior partners have chosen to fathom Black being and the transgressions that have led us here. Highlighting the Middle Passage as the epicenter — the site of which reverberates the antiBlack, capitalist logics of rent today, Wilderson continues:

The violence of the Middle Passage and the Slave estate, technologies of accumulation and fungibility, recompose and reenact their horrors on each succeeding generation of Blacks. This violence is both gratuitous (not contingent on transgressions against the hegemony of civil society) and structural (positioning Blacks ontologically outside of Humanity and civil society). Simultaneously, it renders the ontological status of Humanity (life itself) wholly dependent on civil society’s repetition compulsion: the frenzied and fragmented machinations through which civil society reenacts gratuitous violence on the Black — that civil society might know itself as the domain of Humans — generation after generation.

What do invitations to joining tenants unions mean then, when we as Black people are fighting for that which we are barred from? Those of us who are Black homeowners and Black landlords, the so-called indemnities of owning a home, or having enough money to procure housing cannot and will never meld us into the “Human fold.”

No matter how much money you make, you are still just a Nigga.

As such, Blackness is the embodiment of ontological incapacity. This is to say that the sociopolitical motivations of fighting for housing for all is a fundamentally Human question. To put it another way, Black people’s desires, aversions, aspirations, grievances and what have you, are not registered in the peripheral sphere of Human recognition as we are barred from this plane of existence:

Whiteness is parasitic because it monumentalizes its subjective capacity, its lush cartography, in direct proportion to the wasteland of Black incapacity.

By “capacity” I have meant something more comprehensive than “the event” and its causal elements and something more indeterminate than “agency.” We should think of it as a kind of facility or matrix through which possibility itself — whether tragic or triumphant — can be elaborated: the ebb and flow between, on the one hand, “empty speech,” racist actions, repressive laws, and institutional coherence and, on the other hand, “full speech,” armed insurrection, and the institutional ennui. This is what I mean by capacity.

It is a far cry from Spillers’s state of “being for the captor” and Judy’s “muted African body,” a far cry from pure abject- or objectness: without thought, without agency, “with no capacity to move.” In short, White (Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity: Without the Negro, capacity itself is incoherent, uncertain at best.

The heuristic attempt to establish and procure Black home-ownership as a resolution, a means of curtailing nonBlack encroachment, colonialism by gentrification and the call for us to accumulate generational wealth so that the younger Black generation of today will follow suit, by becoming agents of the state by “buying the trenches” — a sentiment that is echoed by both Black liberals and conservatives, ultimately, fails to redress the problems of property relations given that it was not only enslaved Africans who have looted themselves from the plantation, but also the fact that we, too, have been prospectively tasked with looting ourselves from the plantation as our ancestors have:

In light of all this, it is no surprise that we are all looters. We don’t have standing to own property anyway. It is a fact. That’s why we are arrested and murdered as we enter our own houses, why we are stopped as we’re driving our cars, while there is a right to bear arms, we also know we don’t have that right. What ultimately determines the difference between “good” and “bad” looting is this history of who has been owned and who has been property. It prevents any natural or easy relationship between Black folks and property.

Indeed, Abolish Rent is a poignant polemic that thoroughly examines the history and contingent violence of capitalist exploitation of the tenant. Rosenthal and Vilchis succeed at explicating on the tenant-landlord relation and how this violence (of racism and sexism) is systematically compounded by real estate agents and landlords’ punitive power.

Conversely, racism is not interchangeable with antiBlackness.

AntiBlackness is not a form of racist discrimination but rather, the foundation of that which maintains the existence of the Human — the coherence of the social order, i.e. today’s world.

The incremental steps needed to take in order for tenants to come into our power and unite as collectives to foreground rent abolition and take ownership of property is to bond, get to know our neighbors, and inevitably join a tenants union. In becoming a part of a union, a significant part of building strength within it is being in consignment with, for example, rent striking. Rent-striking, is one element that is argued in part of being in a tenant union in the long-term struggle of actualizing this idyll:

Of course, we know the struggle for a just housing system isn’t won when a single landlord backs down. A single rent strike will not abolish rent.

Yet rent strikes, besides extracting concessions, build lasting organizations for poor and working-class people to fight back against the exploitation and domination of rent long-term.

Each rent strike builds new competencies, from collective decision-making, to escalation tactics, to negotiation techniques.

Each rent strike produces long-term relationships, shaped by the experience of collective struggle.

Each rent strike both tests and builds our capacity.

Each rent strike develops the power of tenants as political subjects.

A bridge between the utopian future we want and the practical capacities we need to get there, each rent strike is a step forward in realizing the seemingly impossible — a world without landlords, a world without rent.

Those of us fighting and yearning for this to be actualized, however, is more impending than it is euphoric as it leaves much to be desired for the reason that white settlers and nonBlacks have yet to “grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death”:

If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the “Negro” has been inviting whites, as well as civil society’s junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today — even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement — invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance with death.

Even in a tenants union, virtually, every tenant may vigorously be against landlordism, but not everyone is for the eradication of dispossession. The plantation is not swayed by petitions or pithy condemnations. As the late Selamawit D. Terrefe once succinctly put it:

A political program that would upend the contemporary order cannot be done without Blackness, and that’s what becomes threatening. Any Black political program that would want freedom would have to include violence.

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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is a Nyack-born American-Haitian independent Goodreads author, writer, music producer, and educator who resides in Brooklyn, New York. His pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. He writes poetry, short stories, and essays. He is published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of Perennial: a collection of letters.