The Obligation of Privilege
Your Street Your Voice, class of 2020
The Obligation of Privilege
Joe Swank
June 24, 2020
I knew I wanted to be an architect as a teenager, when my parents undertook the design and construction of a custom home. I participated in the program meetings, and saw the house built from a plot of land to the final paint. I then had the opportunity to live in that home while I filled out my college applications to the architecture program at the University of Oregon. I also had assistance from my parents toward the hefty tuition. I graduated, got a job, got promoted, and have been a practicing architect for 15 years.
I am white. I am male. I am from an affluent household.
Like many architecture firms, Hacker has questioned our own lack of diversity over the years and struggled with an actionable plan to combat it. In the whole industry, you find a lack of diversity within architecture in both gender and in race. It is particularly staggering when you look at the data for the Black community - there are but 4 licensed African American architects in the state of Oregon. Our questioning of why this pattern persists was a huge step in understanding the connection between the lack of diversity in our industry and in our office and a mirrored lack of diversity in representation, visibility, and access to architecture for Black and BIPOC kids. This is how Your Street Your Voice was formed, an after school program facilitated and funded as a small investment in the future that could be actionable immediately. The Your Street Your Voice program is targeted toward minority underrepresented students, and is but one step in breaking down the obstacles to entering, participating in, and achievement within the architectural field.
Your Street Your Voice has seen modest growth and expansion year over year, and is but one piece of a larger puzzle to combat the pipeline issue for diversifying the architecture profession. Increasing the pipeline to the profession is imperative to truly creating a more long-term equitable vision for the industry and ultimately our shared built environment. This future cannot be accomplished by white architects simply listening to the communities that we are building for. The bias, education, and privilege of the white architect produces space that can never be in touch with communities that do not share such privilege. The industry needs to re-educate itself. We need Black voices at the table if we want an equitable built environment.
This re-education needs to start with the individual. It cannot be accomplished by simply reading and listening to Black voices. We need to engage. We need to support. We need to hear. We need to re-evaluate everything we have learned. Your Street Your Voice has provided opportunities and exposure to a handful of Black students so far, but what I want to express in writing this is the opportunity that a program like this has to re-educate those who facilitate it.
Your Street Your Voice is student led. Facilitators are there to listen, and to provide the tools for the students to express their vision. Each student responds in their own way to the same question at the heart of this program: If you could change one thing in your neighborhood through design, what would it be?
The projects envisioned and designed by students in my four years of facilitating Your Street Your Voice have opened my eyes to a world that my privilege has shielded me from: a Black student who described the feeling of being tracked and watched at the grocery store as if she were to steal something, who designed a community market of her own, to counter her lived experience; the library project that was coupled with a literacy center, to embed adult education into one Black student’s community; the renovation of a vacant, blighted building into a museum in another student’s neighborhood, dedicated to Portland’s history of oppression and fully visualized with a sequence of exhibits leading you from white statehood through redlining to the present day.
Your Street Your Voice is also about representation. Each term concludes with a final review of student projects, and the program strives to bring in a mix of industry professionals from underrepresented demographics to review our students’ work. Guest reviewers have included professionals from across the industry, including architects and landscape architects, designers, developers, and urban planners, to inspire and show students what is possible. Guest reviewers can speak personally to our students of their own hurdles, and what it took to overcome them. A Black University of Oregon classmate of mine told the story of a guidance counselor attempting to dissuade him from architecture because it was a white profession. He was told he would never make it. To hear his story of perseverance, his annual struggles to stick with it despite the cost, and without the same support and confidence, was eye-opening. Hearing this and knowing it paralleled my own experience is really the point at which I realized the obligation that comes with privilege.
Those of us granted privilege by gender and / or the color of our skin need to acknowledge that and act on it. We need to increase kids’ exposure to architecture in elementary, middle, and high school, and we need to make our career paths visible and accessible specifically to those who are least represented in architecture today. We need to support them in application and admittance into architecture programs; change the framework of what is taught, how it is taught, and who is teaching it; provide financial support, internships, and employment; and perhaps most importantly, we need to provide opportunities for leadership. That is the obligation of our privilege. We have created this problem, and we continue to perpetuate it – and it is our responsibility to remove the barriers and end the cycle.
This cannot be accomplished with a social media statement. It will not be accomplished by making a future commitment. It ends with actions, today: action is a donation of funds; action is a donation of time; action is a commitment of individuals to organize, reach out, and engage. We have a long way to go and we must not lose sight of the commitment to the longer-term investment required to make our industry viable to the communities it serves.
If you are looking to act on something now; below is a list of local and national organizations to donate to, plug into, and participate in:
Your Street Your Voice
Hip Hop Architecture Camp
Urban League of Portland
Portland African American Leadership Forum
Black United Fund of Oregon
PDX Equity in Action
Care Not Cops Campaign PDX
Dont Shoot PDX
Critical Resistance PDX
Black Resilience Fund
Right 2 Root
PDX Protest Bail Fund
Self Enhancement, Inc.
Kairos PDX
The Anti-Racism Design Resources list, curated by a collaboration between Space Industries x ELL https://bit.ly/anti-racist-design
