Park Slope Reader

Persisting in Park Slope

Meet Shahana Hanif, The Bangladeshi Muslim Woman Running To Represent District 39

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Shahana Hanif – Mailer Marketing Campaign 2021 for City Council

When she was 17 years old, Shahana Hanif received life-changing news. A doctor told her that the reason she was experiencing so much pain each day was that she had Lupus, a disease that causes the body’s immune system to attack its own tissues and organs.

“I barely knew what Lupus was,” said Hanif, a Muslim feminist and daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants running to represent Brooklyn’s 39th District in the New York City Council. 

“I had just started the 12th grade when I was diagnosed,” she added. “When I should’ve been thinking about colleges, prom or going abroad, which were the conversations my friends were having, I was needing to understand this degenerative, complicated medical issue that I had never heard about.”

Hanif felt alone. In storybooks, “there were not protagonists who looked like me,” Hanif said. At home and in her community, having a chronic illness was taboo and stigmatized. Despite being diagnosed with an incurable disease that, at a young age, occupied many of her thoughts and emotions, Hanif was pressured to keep her diagnosis, and all of the struggles that came with it, somewhat to herself. 

Now 30 years old, Hanif has spent the past 13 years in and out of intensive care units. She has gone through chemotherapy, had biopsies and has had both of her hips and her left shoulder replaced as a result of the complexities of the disease. 

At the beginning stages, Hanif remembers waiting for hours and hours, confused and in pain, in the waiting area of the emergency room at Coney Island Hospital. In ICUs, she was consistently left without access to adequate medication. 

“The limitations in care for young people and for immigrant communities was very evident,” said Hanif.

A couple of years later, while pursuing her undergraduate degree at Brooklyn College, Hanif remembers struggling to find housing that accommodated her inabilities. “I had not yet had my hips replaced, and I was suffering,” said Hanif. “I couldn’t walk.”

Soon after, Hanif had her application to Access-A-Ride, the NYC public transportation van service designed for those with certain disabilities and health conditions, rejected. 

“To get rejected was humiliating,” she said. “It is absurd to think that a service that should be available to people like me includes bureaucracy. I didn’t get to make the decision for myself, someone else did. This meant that I was spending hundreds of dollars on car services to get to and from doctors’ appointments. This was before Uber, Lyft and other rideshares.”

For over a decade, Hanif has felt the weight of living with Lupus. But as a Muslim woman with parents who immigrated from Southeastern Asia, she knows firsthand that structural inequities are not limited to those with illnesses or disabilities. 

“This disease pushed me into becoming a fighter,” said Hanif. “I learned to advocate for myself.” 

Throughout college and her professional career, Hanif has actively worked as an organizer in and around her home neighborhood of Kensington. Since May of 2018, Hanif has served as the director of organizing for current District 39 councilman Brad Lander, who is giving up his seat because he has reached his term limit. 

Hanif has focused a lot of her work on preserving and expanding public space for community events, advocating for immigrants and protecting those affected by domestic violence. She helped create the Avenue C Plaza, a public park in Kensington, a neighborhood long-known for its lack of public outdoor space. In April of 2019, Hanif was profiled in The New York Times after helping a Bangladeshi woman escape from an abusive forced marriage. 

If elected, Hanif would become the first Muslim and South Asian woman ever to serve in the New York City Council. She would also be the first woman ever elected to represent District 39, which covers Park Slope, Kensington, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, and parts of Borough Park. 

As a city council member, Hanif’s number one priority would be improving education equity in the District. 

“I am a student of the district. I went to P.S. 230 in Kensington,” said Hanif. 

Hanif personally experienced the local public education system, which she said routinely fails many students and their families, particularly those who are immigrants or have disabilities. 

Specifically, Hanif would work to end admissions screening, a process heavily criticized for putting Black and brown students at a disadvantage. She would push for smaller class sizes, more guidance counselors and accessibility for students with disabilities. And she would work to create pipelines for Black and brown teachers. 

The second mission on Hanif’s agenda would be pushing for “free and accessible healthcare.” She would organize for universal healthcare and push to create a statewide single-payer healthcare system. She also claims that she would invest in translators and interpreters in the healthcare system to help immigrants, like her parents, understand what doctors and nurses are telling them. And she would recruit mental health counselors of color, with disabilities and from immigrant communities to work in public hospitals and community-based health clinics. 

As the daughter of a Bangladeshi restaurant owner, the third item on Hanif’s long list of priorities is to provide a path for small businesses to recover from the COVID pandemic. 

“So many stores on 5th Avenue and 7th Avenue are shuttered,” said Hanif. “The most impacted are women-and minority-owned businesses.” 

Specifically, Hanif wants to pass commercial rent cancellation, pass commercial rent control and permanently establish the Open Streets program, which provides restaurants and bars with more space to sit people and allows for more public art and performances. 

“I’m envisioning a new form of governance, one that isn’t alienating folks or making politics or government a separate entity,” said Hanif. “I’m just taking all of the work I’ve done, now with some bigger tools, to city hall. And the folks I’ve been working with are coming with me.”

LEARN MORE ABOUT SHANA FROM BK

The Protests Heard Around the World, part one

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As Black Lives Matter Protestors Make History, Some Are Fighting to Save A Historic Black Site From Demolition 

Photos by Paul English

Following George Floyd’s death this May, thousands of Brooklynites, just like community members from so many cities across the country, gathered. Congregating at Grand Army Plaza, the protestors marched and chanted in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, calling for police reform and fundamental changes to end systemic racism. 

The protests heard around the world are historic in their own right. However, just four months prior, and less than two miles away, activists were rallying for a separate cause. Their chant: “Black landmarks matter.” Assembling outside the Barclays Center this past February, the activist marched to fight the demolition of, and grant Landmark Status to 227 Duffield Street— a building long believed to be an entrance and safe-house along the Underground Railroad. 

What You Need To Know About 227 Duffield Street 

227 Duffield Street

Located between Fulton and Willoughby Street, Duffield Street was co-named Abolitionist Place in 2007. The unassuming redbrick building has long been in jeopardy. It was built circa 1848 and was owned by Harriet and Thomas Truesdell. The Truesdells were abolitionists who moved to Brooklyn from Rhode Island in 1850— a time when anti-slavery sentiment wasn’t prevalent in New York City and the same year the Fugitive Slave Law was passed.

Because there had to be a secrecy to Underground Railroad activity, documentation is limited. Which makes it more difficult to officially verify who and what was involved. Much of Duffield’s history has been passed down through oral history. There are several insights, however, that strengthen the building’s ties to to the Underground Railroad. For starters, it’s in between Plymouth Church on Ocean Street and Bridge Street AME Church on Stuyvesant Avenue, two noted Underground Railroad stops. Then there are maps and property records from the mid 1800s with lines running east to west that link buildings on Duffield Street to each other. 

The most commonly brought up point though:  The tunnels. Chatel, who owned the building from 1998 until her death in 2014, was passionate in researching the history of her home and noted an archway in the building’s sub-basement sealed off with boulder. “Look at that tunnel! Tell me what that looks like!” she said during an interview in 2007 with the Brooklyn Rail. Likewise, Lewis Greenstein, who inherited the building at 233 Duffield Street after his mother passed in 1992, noticed alcoves that looked like fireplaces, shafts leading to the street, and a circular shape on the floor, all on the lower floor and cemented over. 

The First Fight To Keep The Duffield Properties

Chatel and Greenstein started to organize in 2004 when they learned their properties were within the scope of the Downtown Brooklyn Redevelopment Plan and at risk of being taken under eminent domain. Once the two challenged the Economic Development Corporation during an open review of the redevelopment plan, the city agreed to commission a report from the consulting firm AKRF to look into the historic merit of the buildings. 

Two years later, AKRF concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence to state a clear connection between the Underground Railroad and the properties. But Chatel and Greenstein were critical about the way the firm handled the research. By this time they had formed the Duffield Street Block Association and had made connections with local activists who also found the report troublesome. These critics said AKRF left out key pieces of data, like the key to the map that showed connecting lines between the buildings. They also left out the opinions of eight of their twelve peer-reviewers, who had concerns with the evaluation. More troublesome, AKRF didn’t hire an archaeologist to look into the tunnels. 

In June 2007, a non-profit law firm filed a lawsuit against the city on behalf of the activists. In November, they won the case narrowly. Chatel’s lawyer, Jennifer Levy, said at the time that the city settled the case because they realized it was the fastest way to continue with the rest of the development plans. 

The battle in 2007 was a victory for Chatel, Greenstein and the other activists. But the close attempt to demolish one of the few remaining sites of Black history in Downtown Brooklyn in favor of parking garages was a sign of things to come. It also raised the question: Why shouldn’t the Landmarks Preservation Commission grant this building landmark status? 

#GetOrganizedBK

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“Here’s the first of many flyers you’ll get tonight,” smiles a bookish white man, extending a sheet of paper as I approach Congregation Beth Elohim’s Temple House, located across the street from their majestic but under-repair sanctuary in Park Slope. It’s a humid, mid-September evening, and, as I pass through the open doors, an older woman hands me another page. “Unrelated,” she explains.

 

A Progressive Movement Grows Strong in Brooklyn 

In the time it takes to climb the stairs and claim a folding chair in the steadily filling ballroom, I have, indeed, run a gauntlet of progressive politics. I now have flyers for organizations that fight voter suppression and are working to end solitary confinement; reminders to bring my own bag to the grocery store and get involved with participatory budgeting; invitations to an Indigenous People’s Day Celebration and town hall meetings on climate change and the NYS Constitutional Convention. I’ve signed letters to Governor Cuomo and Senators Gillibrand and Schumer urging them to defend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. “This letter is different. It’s for the carbon-tax,” encourages a casually dressed white-haired woman as she approaches my seat with a clipboard and pen.

In the front of the room, a slideshow asks in black and white: “Race: does it affect where you choose to live? To eat? To socialize? To send your children to school?” Above the din of warm greetings and exchanged hugs floats the accompaniment to the projections, a recording of the rally cry, “Whose streets? Our streets!”

It’s hard to find a simple way to encapsulate the multifaceted, nonhierarchical, community-based resistance movement that is #GetOrganizedBK (sometime hashtag-less, sometimes abbreviated as #GOBK). “It doesn’t exist in any typical structure you can think of,” Rabbi Rachel Timoner tells me, as she, New York City Councilmember Brad Lander, and I huddle, post-meeting, in a ballroom-adjacent children’s playroom piled high with playmats and primary-colored toys. Formation? Gathering space? The two debate. “It’s a set of people who want to do this work together and want to get better at doing it together,” says Lander. “And that is powerful.”

 

Rabbi Rachel Timoner addresses at group meeting of #GetOrganizedBK

 

Timoner, Senior Rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim since 2015, and Lander, Mayor DeBlasio’s successor as representative of Brooklyn’s 39th District, are well-connected and trusted local leaders with decades of collective experience in community organization. In the immediate wake of Donald Trump’s election, as people reached out to them in confusion, anger, and fear, they met at Dizzy’s, put their heads together, and set a date to take action. Tuesday, November 15, exactly one week after the election, #GetOrganizedBK met for the first time in CBE’s sanctuary. The first meeting, which drew close to 1,000 attendees, offered a collective space to grieve, but also spurred those congregated to ask, as Timoner recalls, “In what ways do we think people are going to be impacted, and how do we think we can start to defend people and protect civil liberties.”

Early meetings set a template moving forward; notable speakers and panelists, often from city-based nonprofits, discuss salient topics. Afterwards, breakout groups gather in classrooms, nooks, playrooms and basements to delve deeper into specific issues. In the year since the election, Get Organized Brooklyn has mobilized en masse many times, including rallies in opposition to Trump’s travel ban and a “die-in” in opposition to the proposed Obamacare repeal, but the bulk of the work — letters written, phone calls and donations made, events organized — is done by these issue oriented working groups. Arts as Activism, Combatting Antisemitism & Islamophobia, Free Press, Women’s Health, Solidarity With Immigrant Neighbors, and at least eight other subgroups form the backbone of #GOBK and carry the torch of activism from day to day and week to week in coffee shops, bars, and living rooms.

And that was really the point all along. As Lander puts it, they wanted to “just provide some room for people to self-organize and get started doing things.” “One of the key parts of the model,” Timoner adds, “is that we realized pretty early on that we’ve just gotta get out of the way. There are so many people and so much energy and so many issues that if we try to control it or direct it, we’ll just slow it down.”

 

In the Ballroom of Congregation Beth Elohim, Councilmember Brad Lander makes opening remarks.

 

Timoner also expresses amazement at how the working groups have blossomed. “There are often so many efforts within Get Organized Brooklyn,” she says, “that we can’t even keep track of all of them. We’ve often been surprised — we’ll see something fully formed out in the world and say, oh, that came out of this?! And we didn’t even realize. It’s very cool.”

The evening’s meeting, “After Charlottesville, what must we do?” was orchestrated by #GetOrganizedBK’s Racial Justice working group almost exactly a month after a white-nationalist rally resulted in the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer. In the time since, Trump cancelled DACA, a program which aided 800,000 immigrants. Then came hurricane Harvey. And hurricane Irma. “We’re not, as human beings, built for this level of chaos,” Lander remarks. “A peculiar feature of these times is not just that there’s hate, but that it’s chaos in our minds.” The benefit, then, of the working group structure, is that people can lovingly tend their own patch of grassroots.

Wendy Viola joined Indivisible BK, a working group connected to Indivisible groups nationwide, after the first #GOBK meeting. “I really appreciated the concreteness and discreteness of the actions and goals,” she shares. The group meets every other week to work on “keeping folks engaged and taking manageable actions to keep the pressure on our elected officials,” but they also collaborate with other working groups. “#GetOrganizedBK put me in much closer and more frequent contact with the people in my neighborhood, which I’m very grateful for.”

The night’s meeting doesn’t start on time, but by the time things kick off, the 300-seat space is filled to capacity. The vast majority of the audience is white and over 50, but there is a self-awareness to the homogeneity. They are there to learn and fortify one another for the fight ahead. “When you see people up there who are working on these different efforts and campaigns with such clarity and intention and great analysis and dedication, it’s so hopeful,” says Timoner. “And when you see the room full, it’s so hopeful.”

After introductory remarks by Timoner, Lander, and the co-leaders of the Racial Justice group, Eric Ward, the Executive Director of the Western States Center, gets up to speak. In a little under 15 minutes, he outlines a history of white supremacy in America. “The best defense,” he concludes, “is visible, unapologetic unity.” Later, Timoner echoes the sentiment. “I 100 percent believe what he says. What we can actually do is convene around our shared vision of democracy. When we do that, that is not only our best defense, but also moves us toward the city and country we dream of.”

 

Let’s Make New York City A True Sanctuary City

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In 1985 in Arizona, a Presbyterian minister learned that a group of refugees fleeing death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador was in need of safe passage across the US border. More concerned about their lives than the law or the political leanings of his neighbors, he helped them over the border and into his church basement, assuring them he would refuse to turn them over to the authorities. In doing so, according to the New York Times, he unwittingly spawned the use of a term that has recently come back into fashion: “sanctuary.”

While the anti-immigrant crowd is busy enacting travel bans on Muslims, telling Spanish-speakers to “go home” even if home is here, threatening to withhold federal funding for noncompliance with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and cheering on agents as they lurk outside schools, courthouses, hospitals, and other government buildings for families to disband and livelihoods to disrupt, officials in cities in California, Massachusetts, and New York have responded by defiantly proclaiming themselves “sanctuary cities,” promising protection to immigrants and their families.

[pullquote]Let’s show our undocumented friends, relatives, coworkers, neighbors, and other loved ones that when we say we’re going to do everything in our power legally to protect them, we mean it.[/pullquote]In New York, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have in recent months detained a 39-year-old man in Manhattan Criminal Court, three people waiting outside Queens Criminal Court, a 19-year-old Ossining student on the night of his senior prom, and scores of others in both city and countywide sweeps. In response, local officials have beefed up funding for immigrant legal services, instructed school officials to turn away agents without warrants, and advised local police to no longer grant voluntary detainer requests. On the state side, the New York Assembly has passed or introduced legislation barring cooperation with ICE (The Liberty Act), granting pathways to citizenship (The DREAM Act), and allowing undocumented drivers to obtain licenses (A4050)—though some Senate leaders have fiercely opposed these bills and others like them.

While these are important efforts, and they should be lauded, the truth is that they don’t go nearly far enough. With this in mind, here are three steps city and state leaders in New York and beyond can take right now to become true sanctuaries for their undocumented residents:

1. Preemptively issue trespass warnings to all ICE and DHS agents and employees:

For decades in just about every city in America, police, prosecutors, judges, and an array of staff at different municipal agencies have used written and verbal trespass warnings to keep people they deem “problematic” or “undesirable” away from parks, schools, public housing developments, busses and subways, and they have done it under threat of arrest and prosecution. Today, however, when these same city leaders in “progressive” enclaves such as Boston and New York promise undocumented residents protection, they seem to keep forgetting that this powerful legal tool is at their disposal. It’s time we remind them.

Elected officials with the appropriate jurisdiction should immediately begin ordering the posting of signs such as the following in prominent positions on all courthouses, schools, hospitals, parks, pools, ice rinks, busses, subways, bus and subway stations and terminals, and all other buildings or facilities where essential local government services are offered:

“Any Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employee or agent conducting immigration investigation work on these premises without a valid warrant signed by a judge in her or his bodily possession is trespassing pursuant to NYS Penal Law 140.05 and, if in possession of a firearm, NYS Penal Law 140.17.”

This is an important first step that elected officials can take to demonstrate to immigrants and their families that they are serious about using all legal means necessary to provide the largest amount of physical and geographical protection possible. It’s also something that homeowners, landlords, and business owners can do, because private property owners have the authority to post written trespass warnings prominently on their own premises. The message to federal immigration agents in any city claiming to be a sanctuary city must be crystal clear: if you are trying to detain and deport our friends, neighbors, and loved ones, you’re not welcome here. Go and get a warrant, Redcoat, or kick rocks.

2. End Broken Windows, and criminal and civil enforcement of petty infractions:

Broken Windows, marijuana arrests, turnstile-jumping (known officially as theft of services), and other so-called “quality of life” arrests have been responsible for funneling thousands of immigrants at risk of detention and deportation into searchable criminal record and fingerprint databases that contain court dates, places of abode, employment details, and other highly sensitive identifying information.

In February, after ICE conducted a citywide immigration raid that landed 40 people in custody, Karina Garcia, an organizer with the ANSWER coalition, told the Village Voice: “We cannot claim to be a sanctuary city when police flood immigrant communities with cops who are racking up summonses and arrests in huge numbers.”

Ms. Garcia is dead-on. If elected officials in New York and other cities want to be taken seriously when they invoke the word sanctuary and offer protection to immigrants, they cannot continue to support dragnet police practices that substantially heighten the daily risk of detention and deportation. The city has proposed back-end measures to reduce the number of days of certain sentences to avoid triggering immigration consequences, but this is not nearly enough. A true sanctuary city cannot—and would not—allow its police department to continue indiscriminately funneling immigrants into a system that places them in imminent danger of the very thing they’re supposed to be protecting them from.

3. Repurpose the NYPD Gang Division as the Immigrant Protection Division:

According to a 2015 report by Babe Howell, criminal law professor at the City University of New York, the NYPD’s Gang Division has quadrupled its ranks in recent years despite violent crime being at its lowest level in decades. This deployment has occurred in the face of a massive body of criminological data showing that a public health approach to gang violence is far more effective at preventing shootings than law enforcement operations, and that it achieves better results at a fraction of the cost.

In 2016, for example, five employees at an organization called 696 Queensbridge cut shootings down to zero in 96 public housing buildings in Queens for more than a year. If the City of New York wants to protect its 3.7 million-plus immigrants who largely live in the same areas being targeted by the NYPD’s gang raids—neighborhoods like Harlem, East Flatbush, Queensbridge, and parts of the Bronx, to name a few—then the city should fund and scale programs like 696 Queensbridge with the same power of mandate as police.

Properly funding and scaling such programs would allow the city to safely and more effectively prevent gun violence while reducing the burden on gang division officers to solve entrenched societal problems that law enforcement is unequipped to address by nature of its job description. A data-driven allocation of public safety resources would free up legions of patrol officers for more strategic real-time deployment. This would allow them to respond to calls of ICE and DHS agents violating trespass warnings, to confirm whether or not they have the requisite legal paperwork to be on the premises, and to escort them off if not. It would also allow patrol officers to respond to calls of agents in the area, so that they could escort those at risk of deportation into court when they need to report crimes or obtain protective orders, visit city hospitals, and safely drop their kids off at school (just imagine the amount of community trust such efforts might restore in the NYPD).

Perhaps more importantly, scaling successful public health intervention models like 696 Queensbridge to all of New York’s gun violence hotspots would all but eliminate gang-related gun homicides and nonfatal shootings citywide. This would free up detectives to clear an alarming and growing backlog of unsolved anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-Semitic hate crimes that have spiked by as much as 100% in New York since November. And lastly, such a move would give detectives more time and resources to infiltrate and detain white supremacist terrorists before they can kill, as in the case of the 28-year-old Baltimore man who killed 66-year-old Timothy Caughman in Hells Kitchen in March.

New York City and New York State have implemented some important measures to protect immigrants, but there is still a long way to go. Queens Borough President Melinda Katz recently said the presence of ICE agents “severely disrupts and obstructs justice”. Not only is she right, but her argument also extends by way of logic to all essential city services—honestly, can there be anything more disruptive to students learning, victims going to court, patients seeking medical care, commuters navigating crowded bus and subway platforms, etc., than the specter of federal agents lurking around every corner trying to snatch people out of crowds without warrants?

So, let’s get serious, New York. Let’s show our undocumented friends, relatives, coworkers, neighbors, and other loved ones that when we say we’re going to do everything in our power legally to protect them, we mean it. We can start today, by demanding that our elected officials implement these three simple steps forthwith.

 

Resources:

696 Queensbridge

http://www1.nyc.gov/site/queensbridge/local-resources/healthy-community.page

 

ANSWER coalition

http://www.answercoalition.org/

 

How to Contact your Elected Officials

https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials/