About the Project | Curating • Archiving • Mourning | With & For Atatiana
What kinds of possibilities for rupture might be opened up? What happens when we proceed as if we know this, antiblackness, to be the ground on which we stand, the ground from which we attempt to speak, for instance, an 'I' or a 'we' who know, an 'I' or 'we' who care?
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake (7)
Angela D. Mack and Cody Jackson speaking
at a March and Rally for Atatiana Jefferson,
sponsored by TCU's Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
(CRES) Department,
@ TCU's Saddler Hall, October 2019.
Photo Credits: José Luis Cano
From Angela: Cody and I are PhD students together at TCU. This project was birthed out of a visceral response to my community in crisis when Atatiana Jefferson was murdered in October 2019. She was the sixth victim to die in FWPD-related shootings since June 2019. What do you do when the issues that you take up in scholarship plunges your city and communities of color in crisis? What happens when a neighborhood is villainized in the media without context from the people who know and live there? How does another young Black person, minding their own business in their own home, die at the hands of police officers... again?
I am a native of Fort Worth, and more importantly, I was born and raised in the 76104 zip code. in 2019, this zip code was noted as having the lowest life expectancy in the STATE OF TEXAS! This, along with issues of crime, poverty, and deficit, are the narratives populated about where I come from without giving my community a whole picture. This project is presented to contextualize this specific section of Black Fort Worth, of Funky Town; it is presented to honor the life of Atatiana Jefferson and to memorialize her value and worth; and it is to take up arms, to add to the discourse of those who engage in this work and to keep Fort Worth accountable. For me, this is a personal project, a passion project, a necessary project to contribute my part in the healing and justice that is needed in my city.
From Cody: As someone who has only lived in Fort Worth for about a year and half, I was aware at the outset of this project it would be just the beginning of my learning about and with Atatiana's life, the 76104 community, and my colleague Angela Mack. Angela's labor, in the wake of Atatiana's death, was not only a point of departure for this project, but her work throughout our campus community was instrumental in contextualizing the events in real-time. Before, during, and after our seminars, Angela shared information, context, and history with me and our colleagues. While this website is the product of a project, it is so much more than what the word "project" connotes at times.
Over the course of weeks after Atatiana's death, the silence from TCU campus administrators, particularly top campus administrators (a silence that continues to this day) was a particularly pivotal moment in the creation of this project. Not only do I hope that this project, to use Angela's phrasing, "renders" these, and so many other, silences visible, I also hope that this project can be an evolving space for collaboration, resource-sharing, and transformative healing and archival justice.