Phëlix Cultivates Black, Queer Joy while Sprouting Roots in New Places
By Aaron Thomas he/him
Being Black is my activism. My Black joy is resistance, my purest form of protest. Black rest is an inherent right bestowed upon me by my ancestors. My enslaved ancestors will always live free, vicariously through me and the generations after me, because I will empower them with Black joy in abundance. A reclamation of my peace, my Black joy affirms that I am not a victim. I am an agent of change. I am resilient because my Black joy is revolutionary.
Phëlix
The question Phëlix asks herself is, “Where do Black people go to be together, to feel safe, to experience joy, and to thrive?”
Phëlix is a freelance creator and the brains behind Cute Ass Bar, a creative consulting agency and cocktail/hospitality lifestyle brand that focuses on diversity and inclusion, content creation, and community events. She is also the Founder and Executive Director of BO$$ x You Can’t Stop the Revolution, a nonprofit that aims to disrupt the status quo, build commUNITY & amplify systemically vulnerable voices by cultivating social and economic power to the people, by the people.
During the 2020 pandemic, Phëlix was involved with a a lot of community outreach programs in Louisville, including collaborations with The Coalition for the Homeless and Trouble Bar, a female-owned bar in the city’s Shelby Park neighborhood. Despite her love for the community, there came a point where the opportunities for growth in Louisville plateaued, which left Phëlix feeling called to search for a BlackUtopia where she could continue to grow as an organizer and advocate for Black liberation.
Her search led her to a crossroads: Harlem or Bed-Stuy, two historically Black neighborhoods each with their own rich history of Black resistance and resilience. She ended up moving to a street in Bed-Stuy named after the prominent revolutionary civil rights leader Malcolm X. “It wasn’t intentional, it was serendipitous,” says Phëlix, “He’s one of my favorite historical figures, so it felt like the universe was affirming my choice, giving me signs that I was meant to be in this space.”
But the tint on Phëlix’s rose-colored glasses started to wear off when, instead of an abundance of Black joy, she saw an invasion of white girls sipping from coffee cups. “Now don’t get me wrong, the Black joy is absolutely still there, but you have to be intentional about the ways in which you find it, because what we have is a neighborhood under siege. As queer folks we don’t always get the luxury of acceptance from family and loved ones, so we create chosen families,” she says, going on to describe her own experience of migration while growing up. “Because of the Black diaspora and the ways in which many of our ancestors were taken from their native lands, many of us don’t know our authentic roots. There are many places that will always feel like home to me. My intersections of Blackness and queerness are what gave me the idea that we can also have chosen roots.”
Phëlix moved from Louisville back to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn in 2021. Bed-Stuy, as it’s referred to by locals, is a proud Black-majority section of New York City, with a history of Black resistance that dates all the way back to the Great Migration of the 19th century, when thousands of formerly-enslaved people traveled north to escape violent discrimination in the South.
In the late 1960s, Bed-Stuy became one of NYC’s quintessential cultural lifelines and a hub of flourishing Black culture. At that time, nearly a quarter of the neighborhood’s residents owned their own homes, making it the largest accumulation of Black homeowners in North America. The neighborhood’s demographics began to shift from 1990 to 2010. With the influx of younger, more affluent, white residents staking claim on the area, rent increased almost 40% during those years. From 2012 until 2022, over 20,000 Black residents were pushed out from Bed-Stuy and replaced by 30,000 white residents. Once a safe haven for housing equality, Bed-Stuy has only grown increasingly gentrified, white-washed, and unaffordable, as rents continue to rise.
At first glance, a rehabilitated neighborhood looks very appealing: infrastructure updates, contemporary businesses, and new life. These improvements often come, however, at a great social cost. Rapidly increasing property values quickly mushroom into skyrocketing rental prices, foreclosures, and mass evictions. Long-time residents, displaced from their homes, oftentimes end up on the streets or leaving New York altogether.
“A lot of people don’t know until they have to know,” Phëlix observes, “There is a direct correlation between the houseless population and gentrification. Actually, a better word for what we’re seeing happen to many neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy is not ‘white-washing’, but sanitization,” says Phëlix, offering a visual, “You’ll see the closure of a Black-owned restaurant, but the white-owned coffee shop that takes its place keeps a mural of Biggie on the wall. It’s a double slap in the face because not only is it demographic displacement, it’s cultural appropriation at the same time.”
Phëlix identifies gentrification as one of the primary factors impacting the erasure of contributions Black people have made in America. “We start combating gentrification by first learning about and knowing the history of these neighborhoods and why their survival is so important,” Phëlix explains, “These are not rare stories. They are not exclusive to New York or to Louisville. This happens in thriving Black communities consistently, repeatedly, and deliberately. It’s not just the rent going up. There are so many other systemic and strategic tactics city and housing officials use to cripple a community to lower its value and make it seem undesirable.”
“What if Bed-Stuy was a BlackUtopia?” Phëlix asks herself, “What if the rich cultural history that our neighborhood was built upon was never interrupted by the forces of white supremacy and gentrification?” She is dedicated to exploring these questions, in collaboration with the community, because the stories she’s trying to excavate and create are about and of this community.
“These constant reminders of how Black pain has inevitably become an unrelenting spectacle loom over the deterioration of my mental health. Never one to suffer in silence, I decided to once again utilize my skills to create a space where I could consciously address and effectively respond to these generational curses and traumas plaguing, thus my new initiative LoveBlackually was born,” says Phëlix. This immersive experience celebrates Black healing, Black creativity, and of course Black love. LoveBlackually incorporates hybrid digital content, visual art, and interactive viewer participation while deliberately amplifying and exploring the untold stories of Black (POC, femme, LGBTQIA+) entrepreneurship, ingenuity, and courage in the face of overwhelming odds.
“I’m back in Brooklyn to continue this same advocacy, which has led me to expand on my anti-gentrification work. The displacement of the residents of color and the mom & pop shops, specifically in Bed Stuy is extremely alarming,” Phëlix says, “In particular, my LoveBlackually project that explores Bed-Stuy as the site of a BlackUtopia, reimagines the endless possibilities that could be realized if this space was afforded the opportunity to remain the hub of an ever-expanding cultural revolution that it once was.”
To this end, Phëlix is working to effectively and accurately honor, uplift, and preserve the legacies of the Black and Brown residents who came before us here in Bed Stuy while working together to bring about a radically different future that makes it possible for this community to reach its full untapped potential. United, we can create a richer and more detailed picture of the chosen roots Bed Stuy was, is, and can continue to grow upon.
Another way Phëlix is addressing the gentrification crisis is by combining her expertise with community organizing and the service industry. In November of 2022, she was one of six Black bartenders selected by Brown and Balanced, an organization that celebrates Black bar and hospitality professionals, to participate in the premiere event for Portland Cocktail Week hosted by Lush Life. After a transformative experience attending a four-day course on sustainable business models for bar startups, Phëlix conceived of a new community-building initiative, which she called BRiC (Building Resistance in Community).
BRiC is an immersive popup experience that reimagines the meaning and functionality of a progressive bar culture by transporting guests to the front lines of social justice movements. “I understand that not everyone feels empowered on the front line. That’s why I wanted to curate a space where they can still feel impactful. The idea is that folks will unwind in a fun and relaxed social setting while simultaneously learning about important systemic issues from the comfort of a bar stool,” says Phëlix. Profits will benefit social justice organizations, mainly the preservation of historically Black communities like Bed-Stuy.
Both programs will launch in 2023 under the BO$$ x Cute Ass Bar umbrella, and are designed to serve Bed-Stuy and beyond. So, with all that in mind, where can Black people go to be together, to feel safe, to experience joy, and to thrive? Phëlix isn’t sure, but she’s determined to curate those spaces.
“I honestly don’t know where Black people can go to feel safe and experience joy, because America has shown us time and time again that we aren’t safe, that white folks will invade our spaces without warning. But what I do know is that I’m optimistic, and that even if I can’t find that joy, with the proper resources, I can create it.”
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