We Speak Our City Back: A Series on Gentrification

by Alycia Kamil

We Speak Our City Back

On Language, Gentrification, and Black Presence in Chicago

There are stories that arrive already smoothed out. Made digestible for funders, developers, and media outlets. The kind that trades in progress narratives and polished soundbites. This is not that kind of story.

This piece opens differently. The voice is deliberate. The words are weighted. The creator is not interested in spectacle. They are naming harm and demanding return.

What unfolds is a poetic confrontation with gentrification in Chicago, but more than that, it is a confrontation with the quiet devastation of language. How entire neighborhoods are renamed, rebranded, and reimagined without the consent of the people who built them. How the cultural infrastructure of Black communities is gutted behind the closed doors of planning meetings and zoning commissions. And how, in the midst of it, Black people are expected to be grateful for sidewalks and coffee shops that were never built for them.

The video is rooted in the speaker’s own voice—steady, sharp, full of grief and clarity. It moves through Chicago like someone walking a familiar route for the hundredth time, noticing what’s been lost, what’s been stolen, what’s been flattened. The language is tight and tender. There is no distancing. The speaker knows this city. The speaker loves this city. Which is why the betrayal cuts so deep.

Gentrification is not presented as an abstract process. It is named as violence. As displacement. As theft. As a continuation of the same policies that have always treated Black life in Chicago as expendable. Urban renewal. Redlining. School closures. Transit cuts. Surveillance infrastructure. These are not separate stories. They are chapters in the same playbook.

But this piece is not simply an inventory of harm. It is also a blueprint for something else.

The creator speaks with intention about using language as a tool for repair. They believe in speaking back. In reclaiming narrative. In using their words to push us toward a future rooted in Black liberation and abolitionist imagination. A future where land is not currency. Where Black families are not forced out to make way for rooftop gardens and dog parks. A future that does not rely on nostalgia, but on memory as a political act.

This work belongs in the Black Life Everywhere: Chicago archive because it cuts through the euphemisms. It speaks plainly. It does not confuse development with progress. It understands that words can be weapons or tools—and this piece chooses the latter with precision.

The creator insists on being present. They name what they see. They push against the lie that this is how cities evolve. Their language is a form of accountability. It says, we were here. We are still here. We remember what this block used to sound like. We know which elders are missing. We know how fast the rent rose. We know the timelines and the code words and the backdoor deals.

This is the kind of storytelling that holds a mirror to power. It offers no apology. It speaks with the authority of someone who has lived through the transformation and knows the difference between beautification and erasure.

The creator understands that speaking can be a form of strategy. But they also understand that survival must be organized. This is why the piece ends with clarity. A call to reclaim the city. A call to rebuild from within. A call to remember that presence is a kind of resistance, and that the city cannot heal without truth at its center.