You might have seen Rinny's eclectic work on Instagram under the handles @RinnyRiot or @browniepointsforyou. The multi-hyphenate is making waves to check your racism, sexism and all the other -isms to come.
Read all about the H-town hottie below.
How do you celebrate your Blackness during Black History Month?
I was lucky enough to grow up in a community where the influence of Blackness on the culture has always been highly visible—Black history programs in school, Black trail rides by the Southwest Trail Ride Alliance through the hood and Black Heritage Days at the Houston Rodeo were opportunities where we could just show out. I was taught the importance of celebrating Blackness 365 days a year, because I'm Black beyond February. In the words of the late Whitney Houston, "We need a whole year."
In what ways have you incorporated your Blackness into your creative medium?
My creative work is linked to the personhood of Black identity. While the collage work is 100 percent based on how I've navigated social spaces as a dark-skin Black woman, I use my photo work to create the representation that I feel history missed.
What restorative work do you want to see contributed to rectify the years of wrongful power distribution?
The short answer: Reparations.
The long answer: Those in power should acknowledge how they have benefitted and continue to benefit from an infrastructure built on oppression before they can effectively implement the work. The belief that financial redistribution alone can dismantle anti-Blackness has been proven wrong. Restorative work is not an opportunity to rebrand without accountability.
If you could sit down and chat with any prominent Black figure, who would you choose?
I'm having a hard time choosing! It would have to be between Betty Davis, Lola Falana or Pearl Bailey.
What inspired you to create prints? Were you always involved in the arts?
I aspired for a space to be heard, and I grew up absorbing so many messages through advertising. Accompanying messages with a lens of nostalgia in advertisement felt like the natural medium to artfully disperse messages and ideas. I've been involved the arts for as long as I can remember. I participated in dance and theatre throughout my whole life. Outside of that, I currently work as an actress and writer in LA.
As a business mogul with an influential social media presence, what do you hope your followers take away from your art?
It's a hefty goal. However, I saturate viewers with intentional unambiguous imagery of Blackness adjacent to my personal experiences as a means to normalize and create validation for the range of experiences within Black identity—while rejecting the notion of being "othered."
Your work contains a variety of Black women ranging in different sizes and colors. How important is the representation of Black woman for you? Did you see a lot of Black representation in art growing up?
Representation is extremely important and intentional with anything I do. I don't desire to ever divorce my identity from the work I create. Growing up in the historically Black neighborhood of Third Ward in Houston, I was afforded the opportunity of being exposed to Black art at a young age. From the local art institutions such as the Project Row Houses to the Shrine of the Black Madonna, Black representation in art felt accessible in comparison to what I saw in mainstream media.
A lot of great artists come from Houston. Why do you think that is?
Houston/H-town/Space City is just that bitch.
Taking back power is a recurring theme in your artwork, how do you take back power in your everyday life?
I've found my own power in being assertive—whether it's addressing why I'm being profiled and followed in a store or holding the people in positions of power accountable for consistently exploiting the labor of Black women for diversity clout.
What does the future look like?
Black with a capital "B."
That’s just what Walker and a group of Black, homeless and housing-insecure mothers and children did in November, moving into the unoccupied “Magnolia Street House” to shelter themselves as they called attention to the blatant injustices of Oakland’s overwhelming housing crisis.
Wedgewood Properties, the owner of the house and flipper of dozens of other properties in the area, lost little time in fighting to evict the families. In an early January ruling, Moms 4 Housing lost their case to Wedgewood, which claimed the moral high ground in the situation. Shortly thereafter, the Moms were forced from the home just before 6 am by officers of the sheriff's department armed with riot gear and AR-15 rifles.
In the wake of the Moms’ eviction, and in celebration of their recognition by the Oakland City Council as Black History Month honorees, we checked in with Walker to talk about what’s happened and what’s to come for the Moms.
You’ve gotten a really militant response. Does the scale of that reaction surprise you?
Not the scale of reaction, I don’t think that surprised us, but the support has been outstanding. And we appreciate all of our supporters, it just lets us know we are on the right side of history, we’re doing the right thing, and I think this resonates with everyone, because all of our basic needs are being commodified. Housing is a basic human need, and I think folks are starting to realize that capitalism is playing a part in that not being a reality. And it should be.
It’s been an intentional act of civil disobedience. You’re a lifelong activist. Is that true of the other moms?
Yes, I’ve been a community organizer since the age of 14. All of the other moms have been organizing in their communities, and we’ve seen the change that gentrification has had, we’ve seen our community be victims of the foreclosure crisis, and we’ve seen our folks be displaced either out into the street or to any outside place, to Vallejo, Fresno, Madesto, places like that.
What’s it like seeing so much support for your mission?
The support has been great, folks are realizing that this is their fight, too, and I think some of the opposition—we’re really clear on the overall message, because we were never about, like, “Oh, so they can just come and take my house.” It was never about that. We wanted to bring awareness to speculation in our community. Corporations that buy hundreds of homes a month and horde them for profit when there’s actually folks that need housing.
There’s no scarcity of housing. There’s a profiteering crisis. There’s a moral crisis that lets this happen in a city with four vacant houses for every one homeless person.
Wedgewood stated the court’s ruling wasn’t only legally correct, but ethically and morally right. I can almost understand playing the devil’s advocate to argue that it’s not ethically ideal, but to say it’s morally okay to have so many homeless people and people pushed out of their homes is truly insane.
We’re all on stolen land. This is indigenous land, so when we talk about “stealing,” this country was stolen, and the corporation does not need this home. They’re composed of five different companies that all play a part in displacing folks.
In their CEO’s office there’s a big Monopoly board. They’re doing this on a mass scale, and I’ve heard that they have properties all over the world. I was very shocked by the overwhelming support, but it just lets me know that everybody is having this issue.
There’s a lot of issues especially with the homelessness in Oakland. It’s been a 47 percent increase since 2017 in homelessness. That is absolutely alarming. It should be an emergency. Until we brought awareness, national attention to this, our mayor wasn’t acting on it, our governor had declared a state of emergency, but the community, our supporters, Moms 4 Housing and other organizations put pressure on these people to actually act. So it just let me know the power of the people. When we organize, we can win.
What have been some of the greatest successes of the movement so far?
Having shelter for those 58 days for myself and my children. We know the facts about homeless children and brain development, but I actually got to see that. I got to see my son take his first steps in that house on Magnolia Street, and say his first words, which were “Thank you.” And my daughter being able to be free and have some security.
It’s so important for our children to have shelter and I think a lot of us don’t even think about what it’s like for children to be homeless and not even have space to develop. That’s been the most rewarding thing to see personally.
Also movement-wise, to see that this is still Oakland. Even though Oakland is rapidly changing, there’s still that history of resistance here, and we’re going to continue to resist, and we’re going to continue to organize, and we saw the power of the people in this whole situation. Our community continues to show up for us.
What’s been the most unexpected challenge?
Just dealing with a company that hired a PR firm and just dealing with someone who tried to smear the overall objective of the movement, which is for folks to have housing. That has always been the forefront of our struggle. We’re fighting for everyone, not only ourselves.
Dealing with the militarization of the eviction, that was very unexpected. I was actually on Democracy Now! Doing an interview when I heard from Amy that they were coming into the house, so we got over there, and it looked like a scene out of a war zone. They sent robots into the house, they had drones flying over the neighborhood, there were tanks, there was riot gear, military fatigues, police with AR 15, everything. I’ve never seen anything like that in a residential neighborhood to evict mothers and children at five o’clock in the morning.
And they had no idea that our children were not in the house, but luckily we prepared and had our children away and in a safe space, but they didn’t know that. That was a challenge and right now we are holding the Alameda County Sheriffs accountable for this. They have to be held accountable for the way they came in to evict mothers and babies.
What’s the long term goal?
We’re working on a lot of things right now, and our overall goal is to end homelessness. To make sure that folks that want shelter have shelter. And to recognize that housing is a human right. So we’re always going to fight towards that. We also want to be a resource for other homeless mothers and homeless people, and we want to work on policy change, legislation, and come up with real solutions. We just want to work towards real solutions with grassroots organizing.
We have to take care of ourselves, because some of our elected officials are not, unless we put pressure on them. We’re going to continue to put pressure on them, hold the sheriffs accountable, and keep the movement going.
What are the kids’ reactions and what do you hope they take away from this?
Well my daughter, she asks, we’re not at mom’s house right now, and I’m like, we’re not, we might go back, we’re in negotiations. She’s 5 and she’s very intelligent, so there are some things I can explain to her.
Overall, I think it’s been a good experience for our children because they’ve bonded, all our children love each other, it’s like a sense of community has been created, they see us speaking and they see us taking a stand and putting our bodies on the line for others, and I think that’s the best example you can give to your children, is to be on the right side of history and to be working to make the world a better place for them. I think that when they get older they will really appreciate this moment and the courageousness of their mothers in bringing awareness to this issue.
Moving away from home and into the city for work, I did exactly what I had been aggressively coaxed to do growing up: I held my breath with deep pride and put my back into my job. And somewhere between commuting, grinding and traveling, I lost the bandwidth to think about home. Yet on the day of the parade, I felt uncomfortably emotional, missing my fishbowl bedroom, the dwarf cherry trees in my backyard, but more than anything, my family on Chinese New Year.
Shortly after arriving, my friend who I attended with asked me what surprised me most at the parade. At first, it was the number of people who had showed up for the festivities. The streets were lined with an impressive crowd even before 2 p.m., the time the parade began. We had barely secured a spot where we could watch the parade in viewing distance.
But if my friend were to ask me again now, I was mostly and extremely taken aback by the diversity of the crowd in attendance. Men, women and children from every march of life looked on and cheered as ornately decorated floats and presenters inched past.
I was born in Massachusetts, but my mother and father are both immigrants from Vietnam and China, respectively. While I had the privilege of navigating the intersections of not one, not two, but three diverse cultures as a first generation American, celebrating the start of the Lunar New Year was a strictly confined ceremony that took place after school—largely separated from my life as an American student. There was never really any mention of it in school save for my Mandarin class, where my peers and I hosted a small local celebration with group presentations and express-catered Chinese food like lukewarm lo mein.
Standing still at the parade with my hands in my pockets, it was then and there that I felt my identities—the ones that I had compartmentalized over the years—collide like the crashing cymbals in front of me.
If you have the chance to check it out next year, bundle up and get there early.
