Today I talk with Rahim Kurwa about a powerful study of housing rights and police repression in Southern California. Tapping into a vast historical archive as well as oral histories with residents of Antelope Valley, California, Rahim traces the complex relationship between this region and the City of Los Angeles. Using David Harvey’s famous notion of a “spatial fix,” Kurwa argues that for decades Antelope Valley acted both as a safety value for LA’s over-accumulation of capital, and Black labor. Anti-black racism took the form of powerful collaborations between local police departments, politicians, the courts, the media, and citizens groups that acted as vigilantes. Yet Rahim Kurwa also speaks about organized resistance to these attacks that resulted in significant victories, and of the history of Sun Village, that started on land from a socialist community, and grew into an all-Black town. Given today’s brutal ICE assaults on migrants and others in Los Angeles and the policing of public and private space, this episode is of special importance.

Rahim Kurwa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His work is broadly focused on the policing of housing, and he has published work on this topic in Du Bois Review, Housing Policy Debate, City and Community, and Feminist Formations. His book, Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing, traces the past century of Black history in Los Angeles' northernmost outpost, known as the Antelope Valley, showing how pre-1968 methods of racial segregation have been replaced today by policing. At UIC, he is currently studying the eviction crisis in the Chicago Housing Authority while teaching courses on race, class, gender, and the law. He received his PhD from UCLA in 2018.

From Indefensible Spaces, Police, and the Struggle for Housing, to the Case of Abolitionist Housing: A Conversation with Rahim Kurwa