Liberation Is Not a Metaphor in Buffalo
Why Freedom Without Land, Safety, and Institutions Keeps Failing Our City
by Luxorae, Culteral Commentator
Luxorae
Buffalo has always understood labor, sacrifice, and survival. What we have not fully confronted is the difference between being declared free and being truly liberated.
For many Black Buffalonians, freedom arrived on paper. Liberation never arrived at all.
We are often told that liberation is behind us—that civil rights laws settled the question, that representation signals progress, that patience will eventually deliver equity. But anyone who has lived on the East Side, watched neighbors pushed out by speculation, or seen generations cycle through prisons and low-wage work knows the truth:
Legal freedom is not the same as lived power.
In Buffalo, that distinction is not theoretical. It is geographic. It is economic. It is generational.
This city was built by laborers who worked the docks, the steel plants, and the grain elevators—many of them Black migrants who came north chasing dignity after fleeing southern terror. They built neighborhoods, churches, businesses, and institutions under hostile conditions. Yet when industry collapsed, what followed was not liberation, but abandonment.
Vacant lots multiplied. Redlining hardened. Capital fled.
And a people were told—again—that they were already free.
Today, as major redevelopment projects move forward and billions flow back into Buffalo, the question is not whether the city is changing—but for whom.
Freedom Without Land Is Fragile
In Buffalo, land tells the story plainly.
Entire neighborhoods were stripped of value by policy, not neglect. Redlining maps from the twentieth century align almost perfectly with today’s disinvestment. Urban renewal uprooted families without replacing the wealth it destroyed. More recently, development has returned—but too often without the people who endured the hard years.
When a community does not own land, it cannot stabilize itself.
When it cannot stabilize, every gain is temporary.
Liberation requires durable control over space—housing that cannot be extracted, institutions that cannot be priced out, neighborhoods that do not disappear the moment they become valuable to someone else.
Buffalo’s resurgence will remain incomplete until those who held this city together during its lowest moments are not merely included, but rooted.
Prisons Are Not Separate From the Economy
Buffalo understands incarceration not as an abstraction, but as a recurring event in family life.
Prisons are often discussed as sites of punishment. Less honestly discussed is their role as economic engines that extract labor and remove people from civic life. New York State still permits prison labor under conditions that would be illegal outside a cell. The impact is not only individual—it is communal.
When thousands of men and women cycle through confinement:
households lose income,
children lose parents,
neighborhoods lose stability,
and political power is diluted.
Calling this system “corrections” does not change its effect.
A city cannot claim progress while entire zip codes remain vulnerable to permanent civil death.
Liberation requires demarcation, restoration of rights, and reinvestment in people—not cages.
Institution-Building Is How Communities Survive
History shows that oppressed peoples do not wait to be rescued by fairness. They build.
In Buffalo, Black churches once functioned as banks, schools, and organizing hubs when no alternatives existed. Mutual aid societies helped families survive exclusion. Informal economies filled gaps left by discrimination. These were not acts of separatism; they were acts of survival.
Other communities—Indigenous, Jewish, immigrant diasporas—have followed similar paths. The lesson is consistent: liberation follows institution density.
Not representation.
Not rhetoric.
Institutions.
Schools, credit unions, land trusts, media platforms, cultural ownership structures—these are how a people convert endurance into continuity.
Buffalo does not lack talent or vision. What it lacks is sufficient protection for institutions rooted in communities that have historically been managed rather than empowered.
Safety Is a Precondition for Freedom
No one is free if their children are unsafe.
In Buffalo, violence is often framed narrowly as crime, divorced from housing instability, economic stress, trauma, and disinvestment. Policing alone cannot produce safety—especially when trust is thin and fear is routine.
True safety requires:
stable housing,
accessible mental health care,
credible community-based conflict resolution,
and equal application of rights, including self-defense.
A city that wants liberation must invest in conditions, not just consequences.
What Liberation Would Actually Look Like Here
Liberation is not a slogan. It is measurable.
In Buffalo, it would look like:
rising Black land ownership and housing stability,
community-controlled development instead of displacement,
declining incarceration exposure across lifetimes,
independent educational and cultural institutions that endure,
children growing up without rehearsing fear,
wealth that compounds instead of evaporates.
When these conditions exist, freedom no longer needs to be debated.
A Call to Build, Not Beg
Buffalo is at a crossroads. Attention is back. Investment is returning. The question is whether this moment will deepen old patterns or finally break them.
Liberation will not arrive by permission.
It will be built—deliberately, locally, and collectively.
The choice before us is simple, if not easy:
Do we want symbolic inclusion in systems that remain extractive?
Or do we want durable power rooted in land, institutions, and safety?
Buffalo has survived enough.
It is time to build what survival alone never guaranteed.
About Luxorae
Luxorae is a Buffalo-based author, artist, and owner of Luxorae LLC, Buffalo-based company focused on culture, strategy, and community-centered work, with a background social science Her writing examines power, land, institutions, and explores liberation, through a local lens.