Introduction (last edited in Dec 2020)
This post, first created in March of 2016, has since been edited a number of times. For years it was pinned at the top of “Community Artivism, a creative perspective from LA’s Skid Row neighborhood,” the precursor to doodles without borders.

The below guide was first created at the height of Skid Row Design Collective‘s active work, and was framed as a beginning of a conversation around the “intersection of arts, social justice, and community improvement without displacement,” focusing on the role of arts, cultural, and social spaces in this conversation. I have since been introduced to a variety of analysis and resources, from Community Cultural Benefits Principles Toolkit out of Detroit, to the work of Migrants in Culture; and this conversation is as relevant today as it was then!

Suggested Use of Language Guide
Los Angeles’ Skid Row neighborhood
(started March 2016, last edited in February 2025)

Skid Row neighborhood
Skid Row residents live, resist, connect, organize, celebrate and support each other, despite experiencing first-hand and witnessing daily the most overt manifestations of racial, gender, social, health and economic inequalities and oppressions in our society. Skid Row is often first to experience the brunt of local, country-wide and global dehumanizing, neoliberal, capitalist policies that deliberately deepen inequality as it relates to housing, healthcare, food and access to a dignified human life.

Skid Row is a working class, majority Black, incredibly diverse, low- and extremely low-income community.  Skid Row is a deeply under-resourced residential neighborhood, part of Black LA, while also in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles, in alignment with anti-gentrification struggles of neighboring Little Tokyo and Chinatown neighborhoods.

Skid Row is not unique. Skid Row’s struggles are inseparable from the Black Liberation struggle in and beyond the American empire, the Working Class struggle, LGBTQ struggle for human rights, Tenants Power struggle and many more. It is exposed to the same anti-Black, white supremacist, imperialist, colonial, patriarchal, ableist oppressions–with the violence of class war and capitalism as the through line–which manufactures civic disenfranchisement, criminalization of poverty, and economic oppression affecting more than 150 million people (from rent-burdened tenants living in fear of displacement, to people living on the street in daily fear for their lives in every major city of the country) in so-called united states.

Skid Row neighborhood–as countless neighborhoods worldwide, undeterred by systemic oppression–is a bastion for defending humanity and of mutual aid as a method of survival (including the abolitionist mutual aid groups coming from without, but here focusing on neighbors looking out for each other in a myriad of informal ways). While Skid Row is not immune from replicating systems of oppression, it is also a place where every day residents come together, stand up for each other, show solidarity, empathy, and love.

Locally and globally, working-class oppressed people led, collective liberation struggles already align with Skid Row. Our common struggle must be to find ways to cultivate, grow and defend spaces where the necessity for universal protections of all basic human needs is the baseline. Our common struggle must be for each person’s individual responsibility to align with the collective responsibility to build power that will extend this baseline to the entire world.

1. Referring to Skid Row neighborhood.
   A NEIGHBORHOOD:
   – Always capitalize Skid Row
   – Preferably refer to Skid Row as “Skid Row neighborhood” or “Skid Row community,” to offset the erasure of Skid Row as a neighborhood in the mainstream.  “Skid Row” and “In Skid Row” is also OK. “On Skid Row” is not acceptable, as it reflects how we relate to a place and a neighborhood (you dont say “on Echo Park”, you say “in Echo Park”).
   
   WHOSE NEIGHBORHOOD?
   Skid Row is a majority Black neighborhood and a community of color, while also being very diverse. Notable cultural presence: Black and diasporan African, Afro-Caribbean, Latine/x/o (from Mexican to Central and South American), Indigenous, East Asian, and European. Skid Row is also–along with Los Angeles, and the rest of the American continent–Native, Indigenous land that is occupied, settled and colonized; specifically Indigenous Tongva/Kizh and Chumash land (www.native-land.ca). Skid Row is a residential, working class, low and extremely low income neighborhood.
   With mysogyny, queerantagonism, transantagonism, and anti-Blackness deeply engrained in our society, including Skid Row, arming yourself with an anti-patriarchal (pro-women, pro-queer, pro-trans) and anti-racist (pro-Black) lens along with class analysis is critical for equitable work here.
   If you are not from Skid Row, whenever participating in anything in Skid Row, understand how your participation relates to equity, distribution of resources, decolonizing culture, heritage, race, land, and economic equity.
   Questions to ask:
   – who is in the leadership?
   – whose culture and cultural history is being recognized?
   – who locally is benefitting socially, economically, culturally?
   – whose social norms are being followed?
   
2. Homelessness.
   Skid Row neighborhood is almost always defined as it relates to homelessness. While a 40-50% of residents are unhoused/homeless, and that is a staggering proportion of people daily experiencing the extreme end of the violence of housing precarity, centering housing status (and a deeply socially stigmatized status at that) to define a person or a neighborhood is a form of dehumanization. See “Referring to Skid Row Neighborhood” section above for a fuller definition of Skid Row residents and Skid Row neighborhood. All people who live in the Skid Row neighborhood, both housed and unhoused, are community residents.
   
3. On collaboration with the Skid Row neighborhood
   COMMUNITY:
   a) ONLY describe your work as “community” project, if you are actually partnering with neighborhood residents in some way and centering neighborhood voices in a significant way (see “Whose Neighborhood?” section), AND if you can answer how your work is aligned with community improvement without displacement.
   b) If you decide your work is community work, use “strengthening” or “partner with” (never “building” or “creating”), to center existing community and neighborhood initiatives, legacy, and history.
   COLLABORATION: Whenever considering a project that involves Skid Row, seek approval from community entities that center Skid Row residents, active community participants, and grassroots initiatives, before getting started (as a starting point: (a) Peace and Healing Center, (a) LA CAN, (c) Sidewalk Project). Many social services organizations and governmental agencies are involved in Skid Row, but they rarely represent the residential perspective.
   WORDS OF COLLABORATION: sometimes “help” or “serve” are the right words, but see if “collaborate”, “contribute”, “partner” are a better fit. Words that underscore the importance of equal standing and equal voice.
   WITH: Prepositions can make a difference. Can you make a commitment to stop doing things for Skid Row, and start doing things WITH Skid Row neighborhood?

Note to photographers/videographers: Ask yourself what and why are you photographing? Ask for permission. Ask questions. Look beyond the surface.Apply the above perspective on language to your pictures. Do not sensationalize. Is you photograph exploiting vulnerability or a stereotype? Is it poverty porn? Is it racist? Is it objectifying and dehumanizing?
Can you capture the creativity, solidarity, and community in the Skid Row neighborhood? How will you use the photo? Did you get individual and community approval?

Content by Hayk Makhmuryan in collaboration with Skid Row neighborhood residents and supporters, http://www.DoodlesWithoutBorders.com
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license