March 25. Race and the Spatial Dimensions of Inequality in U.S. Cities
Workshop: William Chan
Theory
Claude Fischer, 1995. “The Subcultural Theory of Urbanism: A Twentieth-Year Assessment,” American Journal of Sociology 101(3):543-577.
George Lipsitz, 2007. “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape,” Landscape Journal 26(1): 10-23.
Robert J. Sampson, 2014. “Notes on Neighborhood Inequality and Design,” posted to SSRC’s The Cities Papers: An Essay Collection from The Decent City Initiative, New York, http://citiespapers.ssrc.org/black-suburbanization-american-dream-or-the-new-banlieue/
Paul Jargowsky, 2014. “The Spatial Dimensions of Inequlaity ,” posted to The Cities Papers: An Essay Collection from The Decent City Initiative, New York, http://citiespapers.ssrc.org/black-suburbanization-american-dream-or-the-new-banlieue/
Approaches to the Case Study: Ghetto as idea, place, and experience
St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, 1945 (2015). “Along the Color Line,” chapter 6 in Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Nothern City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mitchell Duneier, 2016. “Chicago, 1944: Horace Cayton,” chapter 2 in Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Elijah Anderson, 2018. “This Is What It Feels Like to Be Black in White Spaces.” The Guardian, June 9. Retrieved (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/09/everyday-racism-america-black-white-spaces).
Garnette Cadogan, 2016. “Black and Blue,” in The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, ed. Jesmyn Ward. New York: Scribner, 129-145.
Workshop
We will discuss the impact of racial segregation and structural racism (including its intersectional aspects with gender, sexuality, and class) on Hunters Point/LIC and your research sites or topics.
Cayton and Drake (1945) describe the fear white people had of ‘social-equality’ and how property owners’ associations were designed to prevent black people from moving into middle-class white neighborhoods. While the restrictive covenants that created legally enforceable boundaries to black communities were overturned through Supreme Court cases between 1948 and 1953 (Dunier, 2016), the legacy of such segregation is long-lasting and has impacts to the present day in various ways. As Sampson (2014) describes, racial inequality is multidimensional and due such long term “concentration of poverty, racial isolation, and single-parent families, and […] rates of residential and housing instability (p.1). This inequality was by design through various governmental initiatives, such as “land use policy, zoning, planning, growth management, mortgage lending, highway construction, and infrastructure construction and subsidies” (Jargowsky, 2014, p. 3). Lipsitz (2007) confirms such descriptions, elaborating on the toxic environments that communities of color are more likely to live in, as well as the stark differences in inheritance between black and white people.
While black residents of segregated neighborhoods are legally able to move and would likely not face the open hatred and hostility of previous generations, they will still find themselves burdened with the challenges of navigating white space, where the consequences can range from mild to dire. Cadogan (2016) describes having to anticipate how people will perceive and respond to his presence as a pedestrian – especially with focus to hostile police. In line with Cadogan’s personal narrative, Anderson (2018) describes how Jane Jacobs’ ‘eyes on the street’ can backfire when those eyes view black bodies through a lens of paranoia and suspicion, with the example of the black law student who was abused by the police while waiting for the bus in the predominantly white neighborhood in which he lived.
Overall this week’s readings trace the legal and social histories from the early-mid 20th century to the present day that helped to shape the racial neighborhood segregation seen in American cities. While both legal and social conditions have changed, many aspects of racial inequality and injustice persist to this day that result in a marked difference in both overall life potential and the relationship to ones lived environment.
-Christopher Ryan
While I don’t want to ignore the points about the durability of race-based segregation and exclusion at the neighborhood level that many of our readings focused on, I’d also like to bring up the question of “diversity” and how this concept relates to the structural reality of segregation. For instance, I appreciated Lipsitz’s theory of contrasting paradigms of space from the lived experiences of powerful/peripheral groups. At the same time, I think the singular functions of white activities in the market – the fans who gather outside the state-subsidized sports stadium – and black activities as protection from the market – the Mardi Gras Indians as mutual aid societies – tries to make the blurred nature of urban economies simple. Consumption economies in cities both manage and commodify ethnicity and racial difference, and the New Orleans state has an interest in protecting Mardi Gras Indians’ performances in their functions of ‘authentic’ tourism industries. Diversity continues to exist as a hallmark of cities – in some ways relying on the ecological claims of Fischer – while the inequality Sampson and Jargowsky highlight are continually reproduced.
How does diversity, as an ideal, as a commodified experience, rely on segregation? The New York state government describes the county of queens as follows: “Queens is the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world, as residents often closely identify with their neighborhood rather than with the borough or city. The borough is a patchwork of dozens of unique neighborhoods, each with its own distinct identity.” (https://www.ny.gov/counties/queens).
How has this “patchwork” occurred through national policies of immigration, economic forces of red lining, community-level racist reactions like restrictive covenants and acts of violence, and state policies of policing?
In this week’s readings, we focus mostly on residential segregation and maintenance of inequality through neighborhoods and housing. I kept thinking about taking this a step further to think of cities as hubs of im/mobility, in which housing segregation intersections with other related forms of spatial access – like education, transportation, economic opportunity, and environmental justice. The inequality shaping residential access for racialized groups often overlaps with negative implications for these other areas as well.
These im/mobilities also relate to the performances of racialized spaces, like that of “Mardi Gras Indians” brought up in Lipsitz and articulated in Anderson – thinking about how “public spaces are subject to change” in the presence of demographic changes of an area. It makes me think of the celebration of the West Indian American Day Parade along the Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn in comparison with the evolution of St. Patrick’s Day Parades in Manhattan: “ethnic” celebrations that, early in their traditions, occupied space on streets in which they were othered/racialized. The Irish on St. Patrick’s Day through inclusion into the white mainstream gained residential mobility and greater acceptance and achieved normalcy in public celebrations of Irish American pride. The West Indian American Day Parade, on the other hand, fits into the pattern of “social subordination in the form of spatial regulation” with racialized surveillance and news coverage (Lipsitz, p. 17).
– Ali
Before even getting to Lipsitz, this week’s readings brought me quickly to the city of New Orleans. Specifically it was Robert J. Sampson’s pinpointing mixed-income housing as a favorite policy of those seeking to target the problem of neighborhood segregation and the related inequality. In our discussions of urban renewal projects, the history of razing existing city life in order to construct the various “urban visions,” continued to undermine any parties’ good intentions (though, as discussed, many of these visions were embedded in segregationist ideals). Hurricane Katrina presented a unique “opportunity” for planners in New Orleans: the people had already gone, and the poorest had little means to return. Nobody had to be kicked out. A number of long-standing public housing projects were demolished, and in their place, mixed-income housing was built. I specifically remember when Lafitte was slated for demolition, because it did not withstand particularly significant damage during the storm. Got curious about what happened, so here’s an NPR piece about what came of these developments: https://www.npr.org/2015/08/17/431267040/after-katrina-new-orleans-public-housing-is-a-mix-of-pastel-and-promises
In general, though, I think the Sampson piece really highlights the challenges of housing policy and the faulty assumptions of some of its best-intentioned projects. It also points to why many find de Blasio’s inadequate. First, in many ways, they reinforce existing neighborhood segregation. The “affordable” units in development in better-off neighborhoods are, in general, priced for people who are making far above the median income in the city while the very-low-income units are in buildings further out in the boroughs, etc. But more fundamentally: what is the difference between anti-poverty policy and policy targeted at reducing inequality? If residential segregation is, indeed, a primary contributor to inequality, and its stickiness is related to the stickiness of poverty (which, due to their shared racial and generational dynamics, I generally assume it is), is “equalizing” policy, like mixed-income housing and support for middle-income families, which are politically popular, actually doing anything to address long-term, systemic inequality? (Probably not.)
History matters … and the consequences linger
Sampson’ notes emphasizing the deep entrenchment of historically spatialized and bundled inequalities and Lipsitz’s contextualizing the (unequal) contestation between two (“white” and “black”) spatial imaginaries in New Orleans as linked to major events and developments in American history can make for rather pessimistic reading. The painfully obvious present-day legacy of century-long de jure and de facto residential segregation and limits on occupational and educational advancement in the Chicago described by Drake and Cayton accentuate the message.
I embrace their big picture; I only have minor quibbles on Lipsitz’s essay:
(a) there seems to be a tension between his defense of the “black” spatial imaginary that emphasizes the collective, public space, “use value” (over the “white” spatial imaginary that privileges the private, individual-greedy/miserly, asset appreciation/profit-motivated “exchange value”) and his desire that the system be righted so that New Orleans’ black community may ALSO reap the financial rewards (for themselves and as bequeathed inheritance to their descendents) from house-property appreciation.
(b) Understandably Lipsitz favors the rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina with the temporarily displaced black residents returned to their former neighborhoods rather than pay them a lump sum to relocate to other (mainly Sunbelt) cities. Cadogan’s relocation in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, from New Orleans to New York City (a loss to the former, yet another gain for NYC and literature – it was my pleasure to meet him and his co-author Rebecca Solnit when their book of NYC maps and walks was published a couple years ago), is an unintentional riposte to Lipsitz. If indeed New Orleans is racially divided into lower and higher ground, and if that unequal allocation corresponds roughly to environmentally more vulnerable and toxified land vs. somewhat less exposed and “cleaner” land (only RELATIVELY less endangered, since the whole region is a heavily polluted petro-industrial river delta next to the rising shoreline – it’s a sitting duck for the near-certain coming series of Katrinas), it is not at all clear to me that the benefits of saving/restoring the collective-network ties and public value of the preexisting black neighborhoods/communities definitely outweight the existential threat of living under the specter of more inundations.
Elijah Anderson traces dynamics of interaction across the color line after a half century of racial integration since the Civil Rights Movement. He states that, while black people have experienced an unprecedented period of upward and outward mobility, cities can still be conceived of as “a mosaic of white spaces, black spaces, and cosmopolitan spaces.” (pp. 10) The black middle class has grown, moving into occupations that were previously more or less out-of-bounds. Accruing more wealth and status it has often moved out of the ghettos and into better city neighborhoods and suburbs. Members of the black middle class frequent white professional, commercial, religious, and social settings, but they are still “in terms of phenotype and skin color… virtually indistinguishable from the blacks who reside in the local ghetto, and they are profiled on occasion for this reason.” (11) There is, Anderson submits, an “inherent ambiguity in the… black person’s public status.” (12) White people continue to view black people through the lens of negative stereotypes. Their new presence in white spaces generates apprehensions of a threat to the social status of white people. This often issues in attempts to put black people “back in their place,” often subtly, sometimes violently, sometimes with the coercion of officials of the state.
Lipsitz, Sampson, and Jargowsky all in various ways extend this concern with the limits of the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. Black people continue to face discrimination in housing and insurance markets. The tax code remains biased against them. Through various devices black people continue to be forced into poorer areas, where they face higher levels of crime, violence, and environmental pollution, where they suffer from impaired access to public amenities, good schools, quality healthcare, and remunerative job opportunities.
Racial inequality is durable.
There is a tradition of comparing South Africa and the United States, although particularly its South. The focus has been on the emergence and institutionalization of Jim Crow and apartheid. George Frederickson (1981), in White Supremacy, argued that apartheid was distinctive in that it was structured by considerations of white minority. The creation of ten fictive ethnic “homelands” covering 13% of the landmass of the country was a relatively gargantuan exercise concerned with dividing the black population politically, marginalizing it from seats of power in the cities, while ensuring a ready supply of migrant labor, cheaply, with costs of reproduction supplied in the homelands. It strikes me, when going over this week’s readings, that the comparative study of segregation has not been complemented with the comparative study of subsequent processes of racial integration in the two societies, at least not to my knowledge. And, if so, that’s a useful peg upon which to hang a research project.
– Ryan Brunette
In Black Metropolis, Drake and Cayton identify employment and housing as being two areas where the “color-line is tightly draw” (112). However, while the forces of employment subordinate Black communities, housing laws create segregation. The forced ghettoization of Black communities in American cities perpetuates a cycle of inequality: often neglected by City officials, these neighborhoods become breeding grounds for poverty, vice, and limited access to commerce. Sampson echoes these inequalities in his essay “Notes on Neighborhood Inequality and Urban Design.” In particular, he highlights that inequality is multidimensional.
As I’ve mentioned before in class and on the blog, since I have moved every year in the past 10 years, I have had the chance to witness the multidimensionality of inequality in predominantly Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn. For example, when I lived in the part of Bed Stuy that is considered Stuyvesant Heights in 2013, I did not have access to a supermarket and there were no healthy food options walking distance from my apartment. I was living in a true food desert, and the implications for this lack of food choices further exacerbated other community inequalities related to health. In Prospect Lefferts where I currently live, a new grocery store stocked with organic items recently opened as a way to accommodate and attract white gentrifiers. However, the current customer base is not exclusively white. By my estimation, at least half the customers are Black and Brown. Why hadn’t this supermarket opened sooner? Why weren’t there healthy food options before white gentrifiers moved in? It doesn’t appear to be a lack of demand for healthy foods from communities of color – rather, it appears as though the investment was not deemed necessary until developers saw an opportunity to attract White affluent residents to the neighborhood.
As Lipsitz argues in “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race,” White communities have the privilege to benefit from the exchange value of space whereas communities of color are relegated to building the use value of space. However, the use value of Black and Brown spaces is being threatened by gentrification as community members are increasingly being pushed out of neighborhoods leading to a break down of the neighborhood bonds that constituted the use value of space. As the use value continues to be chipped away, what value will remain for Black and Brown spaces?
Finally, I’m not sure if this was an oversight, but the syllabus linked to an essay by Kimberley Johnson entitled “‘Black’ Suburbanization: American Dream or the New Banlieue?” and I’m so glad it did! I found this article fascinating and distressing. As the “great inversion” unfolds where increasing numbers of White affluent families move to city centers while Black and Latino families leave the cities for the suburbs, it is increasingly marginalizing these communities and stripping them of their political and social capital. In many ways, the suburbanization of these communities is physically separating them from concentrated political aparati and, in turn, leading to a mass silencing of these increasingly neglected communities.
– Rebecca Krisel
As I combed through this week’s readings I felt Lefebvre peering over my shoulder. These theories of powerful or marginalized communities fundamentally revolve around space as a social practice and as a socially produced phenomenon. Sampson’s theory posit that subcultures are not a uniquely urban phenomenon but are instead based on communication methods and networks that are amplified by large concentrations of people who might identify with a particular subculture—in, for instance, a city. This theory is optimistic, in my opinion, by dint of the fact that Sampson focuses on positive and willing self-identification with a particular group. Though he acknowledges the existence of people who may qualify for a particular subculture and decline to participate in it actively, his theories break down a bit when one considers, as Lipstitz does, communities in which governmental and social redlining that force the residents to stay within the borders of a “subculture.” In this way Sampson’s and Lipsitz’s theories of urban communities contrast each other in the manner of a positive and negative photograph—Sampson creates a system of analysis for positive identifications, and Lipsitz explains why some communities are held captive by the socially constructed and constricted space of preexisting power structures that value purity and homogeneity. Indeed, Lipsitz’s concept of the spatialization of race and the racialization of space takes one side of Lefebvre’s theories wholly to heart—communities and space itself is a product of society, and is socially enforced by those with the power to do so.
Space, it seems, tends to embody and magnify societal values when one considers it in relation to minorities, be they immigrants, blacks, women, children, Native Americans, or LGBTQ+ communities. It is here, on the margins, that (un)changing social attitudes have larger consequences than the topical. As Marta points out in her essay on Children’s Spaces, the spatial aspect of childhood blossomed in response to an avid consumer culture (more diversified and specific spaces= more items to sell) and also an aggressive heteronormative agenda of gender and sexuality. These spaces take shape in response to societal norms and pressures, and in turn these childhood become vessels of the social stimuli that engendered them.
-Caroline House
One recurring question in this week’s reading is “who should tell this story?” It gets asked explicitly in Duneier’s narrative of Drake and Cayton’s work on Black Metropolis. As black sociologists they had a keen awareness and insider access to tell of “negro life in a Northern City.” The science community, as it were, felt the objectivity of an outsider like Gunnar Myrdal was better equipped to study blackness rationally. The result is two works, Black Metropolis and An American Dilemma, which offer a unique opportunity for comparative study in methodology as much as content.
As much as any other subject, race (and gender) challenges the supposition that sociology (and political science) can be a purely scientific and rational pursuit. The blackness of sociologists like Du Bois, Drake, Cayton, Bobo, Anderson, etc, has to be acknowledged while reading their work and as a result their individuality becomes more inherent to their writing, more so that of white sociologists (for better or for worse). First-person narrative become almost unavailable even when if considered outside the norm of much academic writing. To borrow analysis from Fisher’s subculture theory, this first-person writing becomes an “unconventional” aspect of an academic “subculture.” The result is that even in academia blackness appears to hold a prominence within “white space.” That black sociologists hold most prominence in the study of race exemplifies the racialization of the sociologist space as much sociology wishes to examine the racial space.
-Adam Sachs