Unpacking conflict zones with David Stovall: What happens when we refuse to look away?

Today, we’re speaking with David Stovall, author, activist and University of Illinois Chicago professor in the departments of Black studies and criminology and law and justice. David works with community organizations in schools to address issues of equity and justice resulting from structural violence. 

In today’s episode, we’ll wade into how this plays out for many Chicagoans, the conditions of social conflict zones and discuss the collective roles every individual carries in paving the way forward.  

 Welcome, David. So glad to have you on the podcast today.  

David Stovall  0:55 

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. 

Grace Khachaturian  0:57 

Absolutely. Hey, we are going to be unpacking conflict zones — what happens when we refuse to look away. Before we dive in, I would love to get a better understanding of your why. 

David Stovall  01:11 

Yeah, I mean I think when we, a lot of times, when I hear that, the first thing that comes to my mind is just a very quick statement, right? Because Chicago. I think that comes from being a Chicagoan, growing uphere and seeing certain shifts that have worked to the detriment of certain groups of people depending on their race, class, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation.  

When I think about my why, it’s always in relationship to if we have seen these changes work, then what are people doing to actually change their reality and to do something different, right? So it’s not just a resistance, but it’s also the capacity and the intentionality of building something.  

So as a Chicagoan, and when you see these kind of rationales made on people as to why they have been displaced or why they don’t have access to certain quality-of-life indicators, for me, it’s always putting that in the context, right? There’s a reason for this happening. It’s not happenstance. And more importantly, there are things, there are things that people are doing to resist it.  

So for me, that’s deeply important. So I always am trying to challenge myself to stay in that space to really understand that and work with others to change those conditions.   

Grace Khachaturian  02:38Why do you care so much about this community? 

David Stovall  02:41 

It’s not just the nostalgia of growing up here. What I have to take into account is that things could change.  

So now, how do we understand that change, and how’s that change work for the betterment of people or to their detriment, right? So it’s really around me trying to keep, again, trying to keep myself sharp around that. But that’s one of the reasons why I care, because I do believe that there is possibility. But more of the same does a lot of people even worse. 

Grace Khachaturian  03:18 

Tell me a little bit about your work.  

David Stovall  03:20 

Yeah. So I look at the intersection of race, place and school, right? So I look at those three things. How are they always in conversation with each other? Who has dared to challenge traditional systems around education? Who’s challenged traditional systems around housing, i.e. place? Who’s actually taken it upon themselves individually and collectively to challenge white supremacy? I look at the ways in which those things are in conversation with each other, and more importantly, how community members are working to change their conditions despite what they are being faced with. But again, not ignoring it, but saying, if we have an analysis of our conditions, then we can do our work differently to affect change, because we know the conditions. 

Grace Khachaturian  4:15 

Studying race, place, school — what potential does this research have on the change that it could make in this community? 

David Stovall  4:25 

I think about my own work in putting it together, so people can say, oh, that’s what’s happening. Oh, here’s what’s happening. I just had a conversation in the summer about structural violence. And somebody who’s been in the community, doing stuff at a number of different spaces, he said, “I always knew that I was facing something that wasn’t just individual,” right? 

There’s a way that this actually is the result of structures moving on people. And I felt like that was a really important way to think about the work, right? This was just a different articulation to something that he had already knew, right? So I think that’s a lot of my work may give new language to stuff that people may already know.  

But more importantly, hopefully they say, “Well, here’s something that’s possible, and now why aren’t we looking at this?” So now, again, being in service to community by way of the research. 

Grace Khachaturian  5:49 

What creates a conflict zone? 

David Stovall  5:52 

A conflict zone comes by way of people who have been displaced into other places where they are not known, under the guise of hyper segregation, where they may not have conversations with each other and may be of the same race and ethnicity, but still now have conflict. 

When we talk about conflict, we always have to think about conflict for what purpose and to what end. And I often ask my students is, well, you know, if I split the classroom in two, one side is one school and one side is the other. I close one school and send everybody to the school that remains open. What happens, right? A lot of times, students answer with “fights.” I say, “Well, alright, well, let’s do that 50 times in one summer, in the same space, without any mediation.” So now you’re talking about the engineering of conflict, right? This is a practice that’s done to certain groupings of people who have now been deemeddisposable. 

Because what I try to do in that conversation around an engineered conflict is to say we wrongly think about this as solely a gang problem, and it’s much more than that, right? We have to put in how people have been pitted against each other, right? And how they’ve been pitted against each other by way of place. And then there’s the space where conflict just breeds because there haven’t been the resources to address the concerns that people have in their respective communities, particularly around education, housing, health care, long-term employment. 

Grace Khachaturian  7:49 

Can you help me understand the perspective and the mindset of the person whose school was closed and they’re the ones experiencing displacement? What is that like personally? How does that impact a human? 

David Stovall  8:00 

I always think about it in terms of young people, because I think we use dropout language, and we don’t have an analysis of the condition.  

If I’m a young person, my school has been closed. I now have to think about, OK, do I go to this, my newly assigned school? Do I do something else? Or do I just say, going to school at this moment just isn’t the best look, particularly in reference to my safety and my ability to even engage in any type of learning. And we frame the young person who makes that decision not to go to school as the dropout.  

And I try to challenge that and say, we need to think of that as an informed decision, given the particular conditions, right? So really it’s upon us to reframe that condition and really understand that we’re talking about a historical function. We’re talking about a contemporary function of engineering conflict.  

So in this book that I just finished up, “Engineered conflict,” I’m trying to give an understanding of how structural violence functions in Black neighborhoods in Chicago and what people now have seen and what they are actively doing to pose something else.   

Grace Khachaturian  9:33 

So what happens to conflict zones when we refuse to look away? 

David Stovall  9:40 

When we refuse to look away, now the attention goes to, OK, now, what’s possible, right? What can we actively do to address these concerns? And I think that is the most important. And then, this new book, I highlight three organizations who actually did it. They said, look, we know this is an issue, right? There’s, there’s some things that we can actually do, so let’s figure out what our skills are and how we can utilizethose skills to address concerns in our, in the places that the people that we care about live. 

Grace Khachaturian  10:18 

At what point in your life did you decide, OK, this isn’t just something that I think about, but it’s something I want to dedicate my work to. 

David Stovall  10:26 

Yeah, so when I was in undergrad, I met a group of folks from Detroit who were youth workers, community organizers. And one of the folks from Detroit said, “You know, it’s one thing to talk about something, but it’s a very different thing to do something about it.” And that just stuck with me, right? Like that really kind of stuck in my head. 

And it kind of goes back to your earlier question. Instead of the why, it’s always, for me, it’s for what? So that started me on a path around thinking about, OK, well, what can be done? And who’s out here in the world doing work, right? So I think that, that kind of started my path around really kind of asking those two very basic questions — why and for what? 

Grace Khachaturian  11:15 

How has this work changed you as a person? 

David Stovall  11:20 

Yeah, I think it’s allowed me to understand possibility different, and I think it’s also allowed me to really begin to think about positioning myself always as a learner. 

I used to have a very kind of stern and staunch position around, you know, what it means to do justice-centered work in relation to education and housing. And being in community with young folks really challenged me to think about my own well-being, but also how to move beyond the rhetoric of taking care of myself to actually doing it. And I think that has, that’s changed me significantly in terms of how I approach justice-centered work, right?  

Because I used to just kind of have this thing where you just kind of hit it as hard as you can, just kind of do the thing and then figure out what it is that you’re doing. It’s this kind of frenetic pace. In opposed to saying, well, what does it mean to slow down? What does it mean to think about what it is that you’re actually doing? What does it mean to move with discernment? What does it mean to move with clarity? So I think those things are, have been sizable, notable changes in my own, in my own approach. 

Grace Khachaturian  12:55 

How can we, collectively, interrupt violence? 

David Stovall  13:01 

I think one of the things that we can do is kind of ask a very basic question, right? Are we supporting this thing that is working to the detriment of folks, whether it be uneven development, school closings, lack of affordable housing? Or are we supporting the things that people can use that work for their, towards their uplift, like living wage, full-time employment, like affordable housing that’s maintained, like viableeducational options, right?  

So now, I think asking that question of ourselves, right? Thinking about any solution starts with those who are on the margins. It is not a top-down process, right? That, that just does not work for people who have historically been isolated, right? It has always been a solution that comes from the folks who are suffering under those conditions. 

Grace Khachaturian  14:11 

What impact can activism have? 

David Stovall  14:14 

I think it’s critical, right? It’s central in this moment. A good friend of mine always says the most important work is done between protests, right? So it’s like the protest is just the agitation, right? That’s just to get more attention on the issue. Now that you’ve raised the consciousness, or you’ve raised attention, now you’ve got to do some work. And now if you do something else, if you have another activation, people are going to connect you to that work. So now, that in-between time is where we really, we have to dedicate our issues. But now, those elevations are necessary in bringing attention to our concerns. 

Grace Khachaturian  15:00 

What do you hope the future of Chicago looks like?  

David Stovall  15:05 

I think a city where people who may not have a lot of money have access to resources, to the things that allow them to live with not only a sense of dignity, but the capacity to support other people if they are ever faced with challenges. So I always think about, like, that, that is always my hope for Chicago. 

Grace Khachaturian  15:43 

David, I’m grateful for this conversation and the commitment you bring to this work. You’ve demonstrated what it means to refuse to look away, rolling up your sleeves and leaning in, as you said, because,Chicago. 

If you were to pick a song that you feel best represents your story, what song would you pick? 

David Stovall  16:00 

It’s a Bob Marley song that he actually did when — it was before it was Bob Marley and the Wailers, they were a group called The Wailers, and they had a song called “Burning and Looting.”  

(song excerpt plays) 

This morning, I woke up in a curfew 

Oh God, I was a prisoner to, yeah  

And it was in reference to the Jamaican government moving in austerity to get rid of some services that were deeply necessary to the Jamaican people at that time. And this is the late ’60s, early ’70s. And the lyricthat always would catch me when I first started listening to, listening to the song was, This morning I woke up in a curfew. Oh, God, I was a prisoner, too. I could not recognize the faces standing over me. They were all dressed in uniforms of brutality, right?  

So those, that, that vision, to me, always makes me think about what struggle is, right? Struggle allows you to understand that you are not separate from this, right? You are in this. So now, because you are in this, what are you willing to do? But, yeah, “Burning, Burning and Looting.” It’s a protest song, but it’s also a song of actualization and self-determination. 

Grace Khachaturian  17:34 

Well, David, thank you so much for your time on the podcast today. I’m grateful for this conversation, and then I know many others will be as well.  

David Stovall  17:42 

Definitely. Thanks so much.  

Grace Khachaturian  17:44 

Thank you.  

To learn more about David Stovall and his work in the show notes at today.uic.edu.