ABOLITION
EVERYDAY SH!T: THE PILOT ISSUE
No Arena in Chinatown x Abolition Journal Roundtable Recorded at Ginger Arts Center, March 2025
In the summer of 2022, three billionaire developers, David Adelman, David Blitzer, and Josh Harris announced their plans for a new basketball arena to be built neighboring Philadelphia’s Chinatown. For the next three years, communities within Chinatown and the greater Philadelphia area united to form a steadfast coalition to combat the methods of corporate interest and greed. This resulted in an intersectional, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary display of community solidarity and organizing strategy. Following the glorious win and confirmation that the 76ers arena would stay in South Philadelphia, some of the leaders within the movement, including representatives from Asian American United (AAU), Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance (APIPA), No Arena in Chinatown Solidarity Group (NACS), Students for the Preservation of Chinatown (SPOC), and Students Against the Sixers Arena (SASA) gathered within the Ginger Arts Center to reflect on the livelihood, successes, and fails of the No Arena in Chinatown Campaign. Facilitated by Christopher R. Rogers, who sits on the leadership team Abolition School, Abolition Journal, and other Philadelphia organizations, this conversation is the first of many future reflections regarding organizing, community, and solidarity within Philadelphia.
While the participants in this roundtable rejoice at the decision to keep the 76ers arena within South Philadelphia, they also recognize that the fight to save and preserve Chinatown, and other areas with a largely marginalized population, from the predatory grasp of billionaires. This conversation, as mentioned previously, is just one of many necessary conversations needed to document and archive the No Arena In Chinatown campaign and the many lessons in intersectional solidarity that arose from the active community organizing over the past 3 years. The coalition will continue to strive towards preserving and constructing bonds within the wider Philadelphia, so that when the time arises, solidarity is stronger than ever.—Summarized by DJ Graves, Abolition School Fellow
Ed. Note: This roundtable conversation has been excerpted from the hour long dialogue and lightly edited for public consumption.
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Abolition Journal is really excited for this conversation for our debut issue, especially as we believe in the importance of pursuing organizer debriefs, for self reflection, for generative critique, for the realizing of strategies for shifting power that we'll all need for the future. As you all come to the other side of the campaign, and that's probably the first question underneath that, is this really the other side? You can talk about that, and what has been important for you to sit with from the years of this campaign.
Debbie Wei: Maybe I just start with where are we? Are we on the other side of this campaign? And I think it depends on how we define what the campaign is. So did we stop the Arena? Yes. Are we concerned about the future of Chinatown as a community? Yes. But for me, and I should speak for myself, this was also about three multi-billionaire oligarchs and what these oligarchs are doing around the globe. And with that in mind, this is certainly not the end of the campaign. This was a shot across the bow. This was an attempt to see if we could have enough power to stop that train, because we've never, historically, have ever been up against enemies quite like this. So, yeah, yes and no…
DJ Graves: I completely agree. Obviously, I think that, like this is, I guess, the first step of many to combating these billionaires. To borrow Taryn and Kaia's words, even though Kaia is not here tonight, we're Students for “the Preservation” of Chinatown (SPOC) , not like the saving of Chinatown. It's still about preserving it and continuing to build institutions within Chinatown that continue to thrive and nourish the community, like the Ginger Arts Center where we're at right now. So I guess, yeah, that this fight is nowhere near over. The fight will always be going for as long as all of us in this room are alive, and way after…
“So to some extent, the campaigns succeed or they fail, but they always have a time limit. The challenge is always how do you keep those relationships, those connections, that institutional memory alive.” —Andrew Lee
Andrew Lee: Yeah, one of the challenging things about so many of these keystone anti-displacement fights is they're about controversial developments. So to some extent, the campaigns succeed or they fail, but they always have a time limit. The challenge is always how do you keep those relationships, those connections, that institutional memory alive. The Stadium Stompers had a fight, and then they won. Then it stopped. The People's Townhomes had a fight interconnected with this fight. How do we make sure that we maintain our connections and so that when there is the next major controversial development in this city, we don't have to rebuild everything from scratch, even knowing that the next one won’t probably arise in Chinatown, right? It might be a different community of color in a different part of the city, but how do we draw out what Debbie said: This is a fight for all of us against the ruling class.
Neeta Patel: I would say it was a fight against the Arena and it is a fight for building, preserving, protecting community and defining what community is. It is an extension of an ongoing conversation that I've been engaged with, with people in this room for 30 years, which is precious. So that alone helps us have a little bit of a lot of trust, but a little bit of muscle memory about "Okay, here we go again." I know the fight against the billionaires is not over. They'll just throw on another face, and right now there remains a no-holds-barred, straight-out assault and attack on all our communities. So no, the fight has not ended, but I'm so appreciative for this conversation, because my head has been spinning both of where we've been and what we're facing now. I want to process this through, and I think what's grounding us is cherishing that it’s a fight for people and it’s for space and it’s for these relationships; for our self-interest, but all others as well. And how do we keep that focus moving forward? Because, the billionaires, they have a royal flush hand right now, and they're playing it.
Ellen Somekawa: We’re now in a moment where it's multi billionaire oligarchs with a multi-frontal assault that we can't wrap our heads around, because they are doing 30 things and assaulting so many communities at the same time. And so, you know, part of the open, pressing question remains: How do we use the power of our relationships to rise up together?
The multi-racial, cross-identity, cross-geography coalition built during the No Arena in Chinatown struggle was incredible. Could you speak to the importance of the expansive, intersectional, relational work necessary to create, inform and sustain that type of coalition building? Don't be afraid to share about some of the challenges in that work, because if we intend on challenging for power, as was definitely evident, those intra, inter-community contradictions are going to be the ones that the billionaire class draws on and tries to move first with to divide and conquer us. So we have to speak, we have to do our first proactive work of those challenges between our communities and put those things on the table so that we can create something that can get beyond the propaganda that we already know is coming.
Taryn Flaherty: I can talk a little bit about how I feel like SPOC was one of the first to kind of build the relationship with the People's Townhomes, just because we were in such close proximity to other student organizers. I was a sophomore, so I was 19, and I was deeply shaped by the Townhomes protests on campus, the encampment at town homes at 40th and Market. And even though I grew up, you know, with Asian American organizing as my background, my historical background, like as a child growing up in that, it was really the protests around the Townhomes as an adult that I was experiencing that pushed me into it. Obviously, COVID mattered. That was definitely there, but the Townhomes were in such close proximity, and, I was actually there. And so I thank those activists, like Mel, like Krystal, like all the members, as in the residents, but then also the students. They were the ones teaching me how to write a press release. They were teaching me how to run a protest: what kind of banners I need to have, if like the first protest that SPOC held against the Arena, all the banners are Townhomes banners. And it makes sense, a lot of the banners can be utilizing both fights. But it was truly like the townhomes that kicked off all of SPOC work. And I think that was the beginning. Mel spoke at our first protest, and then we would speak with them at every protest. And they attended every protest after that.
Christopher R. Rogers: I’ll add this into the mix just full disclosure. So I was one of the founders of Police Free Penn. The ability for Police Free Penn, which starts in May of 2020, in response to the police violence on 52nd street, is calling in students on the Penn campus. But I think it multiplies when we get to the Drexel campus and other campuses of like, the role of the student activists is not just about focusing on the administration, and certainly we have administrative demands, but our work needs to be about being accountable to the visions of, at that time, Black Philadelphia. Black Philly Radical Collective put out these demands to “End the War on Black Philadelphia Now.” The struggle in Police Free Penn was us trying to create a new pathway that is saying, Yes, we're going to fight on campus, but if we're only talking about on campus PennCard-holding demands, if we are not doing anything for Philadelphia, we probably don't deserve the right to have the mic and the attention we wield. So the the idea like you mentioned, of like that, organizing from 2020 and a response to police violence in Philadelphia created the avenue to where we had some sort of a flexible infrastructure so that when the residents of the Townhomes were ready to lead a fight, we could then leverage that infrastructure to reinforce support for the Townhomes, which I’m now learning that then was leveraged to inform the Students for the Preservation of Chinatown. That's the type of accounting that we're trying to do in Abolition Journal. How do you show this genealogy of these things moving, grooving, and informing other experiments and building up over time, and all these different critical connections that make up an enduring local movement ecosystem.
Andrew Lee: That's cool, especially with the nexus of campus organizing, because there's such high turnover, so something that happened 10 years ago, it's like four generations of student activists. SPOC really led the way in building that solidarity explicitly, yet it was also interesting because it was like students at these predominantly white elite schools who led that solidarity effort. Who would expect that?
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“When I think about Chinatown, I think of it as a symbol of our resistance to white racism and our continuing resilience in the face of discrimination. I think it’s important as a physical and material entity because, through our senses, we also understand the world around us and feel connections with other people. Chinatown is a place that is a complex community because of its history.” - Mary Yee
“When I think about Chinatown, I think of it as a symbol of our resistance to white racism and our continuing resilience in the face of discrimination. I think it’s important as a physical and material entity because, through our senses, we also understand the world around us and feel connections with other people. Chinatown is a place that is a complex community because of its history.” - Mary Yee
Debbie Wei: We had to hold down Chinatown. One of the things that billionaires do is buy out your community, and if Chinatown wasn't united, we'd die, right? They would be able to say, we have an agreement the city would go forward. So in terms of that organizing, a lot of that is relational. A lot of that is based on prior relationships with other people to hold a community like Chinatown. That is 4000 residents, 300 some businesses and everybody's in each other's business, and people who may hate each other have to come together to hold Chinatown down. Unity across the board; that's a lot of work.
And there’s always interference from outside too. At a certain point in the campaign, I said something like “Billionaires are greedy!” and I immediately got accused all over Twitter of being anti-semitic. And I'm like, How? I didn't make that connection. Y'all made that connection. That wasn't me, but that was when we realized that was a tool they were going to use to malign our sincere message.
Debora Kodish: This was really personal for me, living in West Philly, being the white person, a Jewish person—moving into this really welcoming Black neighborhood in ‘81. I watched David Adelman’s Campus Apartments and other predatory developers taking over our neighborhood and displacing people. And I didn’t know what to do. And then Adelman came for Chinatown. Adelman was going to pitch the arena at his Jewish Federation Real Estate breakfast. So when Debbie called, I had never organized an action before. But we have worked together [motions to Neeta, Debbie, and Ellen] for more than 30 years. NACS [No Arena in Chinatown Solidarity] started as a Jewish action standing up for our friends and neighbors, and calling out an attempted land grab for what it was. I felt a responsibility to try to do something here to protect peoples’ homes, a place that is a cultural treasure. People I love. I do think that the deep relationships that AAU [Asian Americans United] has had over many years was why so many people showed up for that first action, and it was because of the righteousness of the issue and the righteousness of the advocates. It's a call and response process. . .
“But we developed these principles of unity at the beginning. We spent a lot of time thinking about how do we make this space, how do we respect language, how do we respect voice, how we get people to sign on to the values too, more than simply the petition.”—Neeta Patel
Neeta Patel: At the very beginning, when this news [of the Sixers Arena proposal] first dropped, we automatically said, "We are not going to let them divide and conquer us.” We will not do that, even if there were just a handful of Chinatown organizations in the room. But we said that both internally, like amongst our organization, amongst the community groups here, and externally, outside this community, we know that's the tactic. It's always the tactic. It's never fair to say one community is monolithic and you have to speak in one voice, but we know that's how they do us. That's the wedge, and that's how they move forth. But we developed these principles of unity at the beginning. We spent a lot of time thinking about how do we make this space, how do we respect language, how do we respect voice, how we get people to sign on to the values too, more than simply the petition.
30 years, the multiple generations present here, the more than 30 years of relationship building. A challenge right now in Philadelphia is that a lot of movement work has become transactional, and it narrows to we're just doing this thing: Can you come? But here, you all discuss stewarding these relationships over the many different struggles that you all have engaged in over the long haul. It's easier to move beyond the immediate, to the larger scale, right back to how y'all started: This campaign isn't just about Chinatown, but about dismantling the power and overwhelming influence of private capital on our city politics. The long term relationships surfaced within this struggle remind me, how can we talk about those relationships as an asset to hold on to, and could you speak to what we as organizers and movement workers in Philadelphia need to learn about the long game?
Ellen Somekawa: I mean, I feel like you can't really talk about the campaign without recognizing the long years of AAU’s consistent investment in an organizing infrastructure. What we're doing is youth leadership. What we're doing is getting people to serve their communities. And that favorite Grace Lee Boggs quote of mine, "The most radical thing I ever did was to stay put." And so our "staying put"-ness is what makes the relationships possible across decades and across generations. It's not only years together, but then the kids growing up and then having children. Knowing you will be involved. You know that. Without that long road of AAU doing consistent investment into our community, FACTS wouldn't exist. API-PA, the arrival of API-PA, fundamentally changed the tools in our toolkit and the resources in our bank. And so all these things, cumulatively, laid the groundwork for this campaign.
And that favorite Grace Lee Boggs quote of mine, "The most radical thing I ever did was to stay put." And so our "staying put"-ness is what makes the relationships possible across decades and across generations. It's not only years together, but then the kids growing up and then having children. Knowing you will be involved. You know that.—Ellen Somekawa
Jenny Zhang: I feel like part of the reason why I was even here was because of AAU, the investment AAU has had in Philadelphia and in Chinatown specifically. I was a college intern at Asian Americans United for one of their summer programs. It did help me realize that I will never do youth work. But that office. There's so much history, just even in that office that you can see. There's a huge poster of Debbie wearing a no stadium shirt, holding up a sign that says“Chinatown is troubletown! “ over Jim Kenney’s head (*Former Mayor Jim Kenney was a City Councilperson at the time Chinatown fought a baseball stadium). “Everyone who goes through AAU knows about the work AAU has done is to fight the stadium, to fight the casino, and to be in the office is, in fact, to witness physically what AAU was built throughout the years. I even remember when the news came out in July 2022, I asked, “What is AAU going to do about this?” Like, I work at API-PA. But I was like “Oh my gosh, we gotta convene,” so I got thrown onto email exchanges and noticed Debbie's name and noticed Ellen's name. There's all these people that I've read about and learned about from the walls of the AAU office. It's really powerful to organize with them.
Taryn Flaherty: Another thing I wanted to add about Jenny's thing is that, I mean, Auntie Debbie, you already heard me say this, but one of the most valuable things that came out of this fight was the raising of youth leaders. A lot of us in Mireya, DJ, and my generation, our generation. A lot of us who have been involved in AAU or have been involved in like organizing, or retaught the history, like we know, we know the history, we know what happened, and we feel very connected to those histories, but we've never actually lived it, and we've never actually participated in organizing. I think the most recent arena fight was the introduction of, like, college students who grew up in Philly, who will stay in Philly, or high schoolers who, some of them will go to college somewhere else, but a lot of them are staying here and intend to stay here. It’s not always a direct relationship between two organizations, but more expansively between a city's young people and overall community organizing efforts across a variety of organizational forms. It's probably why the three of us are so involved in Ginger Arts. The work that AAU did, these institutions that raised us, these relationships; it's our duty to continue them.
“The work that AAU did, these institutions that raised us, these relationships; it's our duty to continue them.”—Taryn Flaherty
Mireya Gutierrez: Yeah, almost all of SASA's founding members were AAU youth summer interns. I did two summers and a school year; it definitely raised me. I was in the room when AAU found out [about the Arena proposal], and we were in the middle of dreaming up what we wanted to be built in Chinatown, and we were dreaming about a place like Ginger Arts, or another park, or something like that. And so it was really ironic when that happened.
Our goal for SASA was to get students from all around Philly and even suburban kids joined, like a lot of Asian suburban kids who were invested in Chinatown because it's the only place that their parents would go to to get groceries. But, like Taryn said, we learned all these histories through AAU and stuff, and we never lived it, but I think once we started getting super involved in the fight it was picking up. We learned how joyous it is to be a part of a fight where you're continuing a legacy and the people who started it are right in front of you or right next to you. I know that was really encouraging, because getting high schoolers involved is hard and it is a lot more relational. Like we really had to become friends with everyone! We had to incentivize by sharing the joy also, not only aligning morals, but understanding how awesome it is to feel part of such a nourishing community and caring community.
“We had to incentivize by sharing the joy also, not only aligning morals, but understanding how awesome it is to feel part of such a nourishing community and caring community.”—Mireya Gutierrez
And that was why we really enjoyed working with the Juntos youth as well. We organized conversations with either first-gen or second-gen immigrant youth and how much our stories align as Asian versus Latina immigrants or children of immigrants. How much our struggles are similar and different. Building those relationships with Juntos and learning about each other's movements and really caring about it is what we did during the No Arena fight, and now SASA is trying our best to show up for a lot of like ICE-Out-Of-Schools events. Because we care about it. We learned about it during the movement, because we talked with each other and became friends.
Debbie Wei: Ultimately what any of us want is structural change, right? It’s knowing that. We beat the oligarchs on the Arena, but that is not structural change. We gotta have a—someone referred to this as a horizon—we have to have a 100-year horizon, and strategize like it may take us 100 years to get to structural change. What are the steps that we can make to get there? Yes, a campaign is a step, but it’s also the perseverance in bringing in youth, creating a lineage, deepening relationships. That's the stuff that carries us to the horizon. It's not always the actual action; it is the political awareness, it is the learning, it is the skill exchange. It's building a sense of comradeship. That's the vehicle that's taking us to that horizon.
“That's the stuff that carries us to the horizon. It's not always the actual action; it is the political awareness, it is the learning, it is the skill exchange. It's building a sense of comradeship. That's the vehicle that's taking us to that horizon.”—Debbie Wei
DJ Graves: On that note of building a lineage, I’ve been staring at Debbie's shirt the entire time. It is the Chinatown shirt. It’s an embodiment of that lineage. That's what I really like about it, is that it's like, not only able to say "No Arena in Chinatown", but you're able to see the past movements where we out-organized the ruling class. It's a material reminder, a material marker of the work we're doing, the work that we continue to do as we keep on going. We know the work isn't done. It’s the fact that our people are still wearing these shirts and still celebrating that we know the history that we have is alive.
Roundtable Bios
Taryn Flaherty, Neeta Patel, Jenny Zhang Bio Coming Soon
DJ Graves is an undergraduate student and organizer who is focused on creating long term sustainable change through counter-hegemonic educational institutions. He works as one of two Outreach and Engagement leads at the Ginger Arts Center located within North Chinatown, where he ensures that middle and high school age individuals across Philadelphia find a safe third-space. Grounded in theories of intersectional and internationalist principles, DJ is excited and eager to continue learning along his comrades as they all collectively work to end capitalistic systems of oppression.
Mireya Gutierrez started as an aau summer intern in 2021 and went on to assist in the founding of students against sixers arena(sasa), a group to mobilize high schoolers from philadelphia and surrounding areas to stand in solidarity with and protect philadelphia's chinatown from predatory development. with sasa, she supported the opening of the ginger arts center, where she took the role of general manager. she is currently a health care studies student at the community college of philadelphia.
Debora Kodish is the founder and longtime Director of the Philadelphia Folklore Project (1987-2014), co-founder of the Folk Arts – Cultural Treasures Charter School (2005-2014), and founder of No Arena in Chinatown Solidarity (2022->): ongoing collaborative efforts working at the intersection of grassroots traditions and social change.
Andrew Lee has been involved with grassroots anti-displacement campaigns in San José, California. He currently lives in Philadelphia, where he continues to work on similar issues. He has written for Yes! Magazine, Teen Vogue, and The Progressive and serves as Managing Editor for The Anti-Racism Daily.
Since 2014, Ellen Somekawa has been the Executive Director of the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School, a community initiated K-8 public charter school in Chinatown. Prior to that, Ellen was the Executive Director of Asian Americans United. Ellen has grown from participating in many campaigns, including such as Justice for Heng Lim; No Stadium in Chinatown; No Casino in the Heart of Our City; and the 2009 boycott of Asian immigrant students in response to bias violence at South Philadelphia High.
Debbie Wei has worked to defend Philadelphia’s Chinatown from projects that would have destroyed the community. In 1993, she helped defeat a proposal for a federal prison, in 2000 a proposal for a baseball stadium, in 2008, a proposal for a casino and helped to lead the most recent successful fight against a basketball arena. Debbie believes that you can’t just fight, you need to build. She co- founded Asian Americans United in 1985, Chinatown’s annual Mid Autumn Festival and in 2005, the Folk Arts Cultural Treasures Charter School in Chinatown, Philadelphia’s only primary school focusing on the needs and education of immigrant students and families. She served as the first principal and executive director of FACTS.