The city of Seattle removed the Black Lives Matter garden on Wednesday morning. The garden was planted during the 2020 George Floyd protests.

The Seattle Parks and Recreation department said that it was going to undertake a “turf restoration” project in Cal Anderson Park, the home of the garden, according to the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog.

The Parks Department called the Black Lives Matter garden which had existed for three years “makeshift” and “temporary,”  and said the removal was due to “public health and public safety issues,” as well as the aforementioned turf restoration. In addition, the city also removed homeless encampments near the garden. None of the gardeners were given advance notice, according to The Seattle Times.

Seattle made its plans to remove the garden months ago, but Black Star Farmers protested the city’s plans. Black Star Farmers is a local non-profit group dedicated to “improving BIPOC communities’ food sovereignty,” “[reclaiming] Black and Indigenous relationships with the land,” and works “to create self-sufficient communities,” according to its website. BSF maintained the garden, according to The Stranger.

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Black Star Farmers alleges that SPR was “removing the garden to placate minority-but-powerful stakeholders that have been pushing for the removal of BLMG since 2020.”

The city, however, says that the Black Lives Matter garden “has created unsafe conditions for all park users, including the vandalism of Cal Anderson public bathrooms, public drug use, unauthorized camping, and a significant rodent problem, along with other issues.”

One of the community gardeners, Saunatina Sanchez, told KING-TV that the community tried to work with the city to protect the garden.

“We have consistently gotten pushback from the city about helping with that project,” Sanchez said. “Instead of working with us, they have consistently decided to be antagonistic and tell us that this wasn’t in their control so we needed to leave.”

SPR says it offered Black Star Farmers space near a community center where the garden could be moved, but BSF said the garden must stay as it’s part of an occupation protest, according to KING-TV. A recent statement says that Mayor Bruce Harrell is hoping to move the garden elsewhere in Cal Anderson Park, the station reports.

The garden was planted in 2020, during the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, or CHOP, later renamed to CHAZ, or the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Between June 8 and July 1 of that year, protesters took over a few blocks of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood near Cal Anderson Park.

The protesters called on the city to cut the police budget by 50% and use that money for community programs in Black communities, according to NPR. The site was cleared after an executive order from then-Mayor Jenny Durkan on July 1.

During the occupation, activists also painted a Black Lives Matter road mural, which has been maintained by SPR after being restored in late September 2020.

Featured image by Casey Rogers/Flickr under Creative Commons License.

Former NFL star Colin Kaepernick says that he doesn’t believe that capitalism would allow for the end of white supremacy.

Kaepernick made the statement in an interview with The New Republic promoting his new book, Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies, co-edited by Kaepernick, Robin D.G. Kelley and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. The book compiles work from Black authors including W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin and Octavia Butler, and is available as a free ebook from Haymarket Books and Kaepernick Publishing.

When asked why Kaepernick partnered with two Black Marxists as his co-editors, he praised their work and credited them as “understanding that Black liberation simply isn’t possible under capitalism.”

“I think the anthology makes this argument quite well, and I hope it challenges readers to see that racism is not white supremacy’s only ingredient. White supremacy persists in part because of its relationship with capitalism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, and so on,” Kaepernick said.

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He also called out Republican efforts to keep what they call “critical race theory” out of the classroom.

“Black Studies and, more generally, a critical engagement with U.S. history, threatens the white supremacist status quo. Any attempt to whitewash the past should actually be understood as a concrete step toward fascism and a desire to build a nation state where power is concentrated in the hands of a self-anointed (read: white) few,” Kaepernick said. “That said, I wouldn’t characterize GOP attacks on Black Studies as an ‘obsession’ but rather as core to their white supremacist political project.”

Kaepernick rose to prominence as a popular quarterback after being chosen by the San Francisco 49ers in the second round of the 2011 NFL Draft. He earned conservatives’ ire in 2016 by kneeling during the national anthem in protest against police brutality and racial injustice. After the 2016 season, he became a free agent, but was not signed by any teams. Kaepernick last played in the NFL on January 1, 2017.

Our History Has Always Been Contraband is not Kaepernick’s only book this year. This March, he released Change the Game, a graphic novel he wrote with Eve L. Ewing that was illustrated by Orlando Caicedo. The book, intended for young adults, is about his high school years.

“Part of the goal in telling the story is [for readers] to take pride in your Blackness, take pride in your culture. My hope is young people and readers walk away and they seize their power,” he told CBS Mornings.

Featured image taken from YouTube screenshot from CBS Mornings appearance.