Black Lives and Spatial Matters

Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis

Jodi Rios

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501750472, 9781501750465
• eBook ISBN: 9781501750489
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Black Lives and Spatial Matters is a call to reconsider the epistemic violence that is committed when scholars, policymakers, and the general public continue to frame Black precarity as just another racial, cultural, or ethnic conflict that can be solved solely through legal, political, or economic means. Jodi Rios argues that the historical and material production of blackness-as-risk is foundational to the historical and material construction of our society and certainly foundational to the construction and experience of metropolitan space. She also considers how an ethics of lived blackness—living fully and visibly in the face of forces intended to dehumanize and erase—can create a powerful counter point to blackness-as-risk.

Using a transdisciplinary methodology, Black Lives and Spatial Matters studies cultural, institutional, and spatial politics of race in North St. Louis County, Missouri, as a set of practices that are intimately connected to each other and to global histories of race and race-making. As such, the book adds important insight into the racialization of metropolitan space and people in the United States. The arguments presented in this book draw from fifteen years of engaged research in North St. Louis County and rely on multiple disciplinary perspectives and local knowledge in order to study relationships between interconnected practices and phenomena.

Part I

BLACKNESS AS RISK

1

RACE AND SPACE

We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities . . . arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did.

—John Ehrlichman, adviser to Richard Nixon

A cultural politics of race employs and conflates culture, race, and belonging across space and time. In the four years it has taken to write this book, the political rhetoric in the United States has relentlessly illustrated this statement as immigrants and citizens identified as “nonwhite” or Middle Eastern are portrayed (through cultural signifiers) as threatening to and incompatible with so-called American ideals. Evolving racial logics disguise racism in cultural references and follow the routes of people, institutions, and increasingly globalized political currents. Although these logics manifest differently within the specificity of local environments and temporal contestations of cultural practice, they rely on the “persistent production of blackness as abject, threatening, servile, dangerous, dependent, irrational, and infectious.”1 The state of Black fungibility and its relationship to the ordering of the modern world is theorized and named by Saidya Hartman and many others across the field of Black Studies. Indeed, Black Studies is a response to this condition. For the purposes of the arguments made in this book, I refer to this condition as blackness-as-risk. This phrase acknowledges the critical work that risk and fear perform within every dimension of subjugation—social, cultural, physical, spatial, phenomenological.

Part one of this book specifically studies historical and contemporary forms of cultural politics that produce and rely on blackness-as-risk in the context of space, specifically the space of metropolitan St. Louis. It is therefore useful to begin by considering some of the ways culture, race, and space have been discursively conflated and deployed and how cities in the United States directly reflect and reproduce these legacies. For readers who may be unfamiliar with discourses of race and/or space, it is additionally helpful to review some of the ways scholarship codifies space in relationship to culture and race and how these codifications are used to advance political projects. Because this book is an interdisciplinary project rooted in a design-thinking methodology, this chapter also provides insight into the genealogy of concepts and disciplinary engagements informing the early stages of the research while drawing parallels to what I found in North St. Louis County.

Mapping Race

Although varying constructions of race linked to city-states, tribes, citizenship, and degrees of humanity appear in ancient texts, late seventeenth-century philosophers discursively established an ontological dualism by which reason and civilization were understood as synonymous with European culture, geography, and constructions of race. Simultaneously, unreason and savagery provided a culturally and territorially linked counterpoint embodied and emplaced in nonwhite populations and locations that were understood as reflective of an unevolved proximity to nature.2 This is a critical legacy of Enlightenment thinking because it established Europe as the dominant frame of reference in Western philosophy and the arbiter of truth, effectively writing off non-European people and societies. The ontological binary of civilization and nature was the consistent racializing device employed by Enlightenment philosophy to order the world (and bodies) for its own purposes. Degrees of culture and savagery were mapped first to geography and national identity and then to bodies explained through climate. Many discussions sought to reconcile aberrations of skin color, skeletal features, and ingenuity of people originating outside of the “temperate zone” (of Europe) with reference to groups such as Asians, Native Americans, or displaced Africans.

Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, used culture to famously write Africa out of history, linking “civilized” culture to geography and climate.3 According to Hegel, Europeans, who were conveniently located in the temperate zone, “must furnish the theatre of world history” and had a responsibility, through slavery and colonization, to oversee and civilize supposedly uncultured non-Europeans. Hegel held little hope for the education of Africans, stating, “The condition in which they live is incapable of any development or culture. . . . In the face of the enormous energy of sensuous arbitrariness which dominates their lives, morality has no determinate influence upon them. . . . We shall therefore leave Africa at this point, and it need not be mentioned again.”4

Intentionally linking European culture to a construction of “the human,” Hegel acknowledged philosophically that slavery should not exist within humanity, since “humanity is Freedom,” but he used the same logic to argue that the “Negro” must be matured into humanity. Thus he solved the problem slavery posed to the human by using enlightenment culture to locate Africans in a zone of “pending humanity.” While indigenous and colonized peoples were mapped to locations said to possess uncivilized savage cultures, blackness, as represented by “the Negro,” was conceptualized as lacking the capacity for culture and deterritorialized even from the map of Africa, commodified as labor to be bought, sold, and reproduced with no ties to geography or history. Through this cultural logic linked first to territory and then (very importantly) to deterritorialization, Hegel helped to establish the primary tenets from which contemporary racisms would evolve. These include the following (enduring) beliefs: slavery, unfreedom, or quasifreedom constitute an improved state for Black “beings”; white Europeans have a responsibility to manage “a race” whose humanity is in question; Africans, through no fault of their own, are devoid of culture and possess only a sensuous arbitrariness that lacks a moral capacity; and since Africa is erased from any hierarchy of world order, Black “bodies” no longer belong anywhere. The result is a stateless bare life.5

Racial logics that link culture to basic rights and freedoms (or lack thereof) persist today and are clearly seen in North St. Louis County, although manifested differently. For example, many municipal leaders in North St. Louis County argue that any circumstance in their jurisdictions is an improved state from that of the “urban ghetto.” Many also argue that they have a responsibility to manage and teach a so-called urban population that does not know how to act in the suburbs, and the cultural inferiorities and uncivilized nature of people they describe as “moving from the projects” are justification for extreme policing practices.6 As Sylvia Wynter theorizes, the attachment of a discursively constructed civilization to the Enlightenment construct of Man results in the conflations of Man, the human, and the white European in contrast to “the other,” “the less than human,” and African and nonwhite peoples.7 In the case of North St. Louis County, the historically white suburbs are imagined as representative of civilized humanity, and the humanity of those moving from the “urban ghettos” is conveniently called into question, citing cultural and moral deficiencies rather than using overtly racist language. The same logics link a so-called cultural inferiority to economistic rationales for policing and harassment—“These folks don’t know how to act in the suburbs, and that brings everybody’s property values down.”8

Roughly a century after the beginning of the French Revolution, which many scholars cite as the end of the Enlightenment era, a critical period emerged in the United States in which race, culture, and place were visibly reconfigured in metropolitan space. As the nineteenth century came to a close, the failed Reconstruction era denied benefits of full citizenship and personhood to Black Americans, and white backlash to Reconstruction policy produced new and virulent forms of everyday racisms based on old racial tropes as a means to assert white privilege in a postslavery society.9 While cities across the globe have always been a location of exclusion and assimilation, the shaping of twentieth-century US cities reveals the specific work that space performs as a tool of racial exclusion, on one hand, and of ethnic assimilation on the other. This relegation of different races and ethnicities to different places developed at a certain moment in history when formal racial codes were threatened and increasing numbers of European immigrants were entering the United States. Working in tandem with frames of culture and fitness for citizenship, metropolitan space and spatial practices sorted populations, separating those that could be safely absorbed into white society and white space, those that posed a threat and must be contained in and through space, and those that occupied the marginal spaces in between. For example, the space of the ghetto, which was originally produced as a space of ethnic containment (most specifically the containment of Jewish residents within European cities) to minimize cultural and biological “contamination,” was racialized in the United States according to evolving spatial logics aimed at undermining freedoms granted to Black citizens. In this way the space of the ghetto evolved into the urban container of risk, which was said to be posed by populations of color, with blackness occupying the furthest end of the risk spectrum.10

At the same time that racial meanings were shifting within the space of US cities, the boundaries of white citizenship were broadened to encompass ethnic Europeans through the occupation of equally racialized white space—especially within the space and imagination of the suburbs in the late 1800s and into the first half of the twentieth century. The imagined space of the early twentieth-century suburbs was developed in contradistinction to the dark spaces of the city and indeed relied upon this binary. While the ghetto was always viewed as a space of containment—an urban form of incarceration—the suburbs offered protection as a place that could only be penetrated by those who were perceived to pose no threat. The power of spatial imaginaries to link culture, race, and people is easily understood when we consider the layers of racialized meaning attached to simple codifications of metropolitan areas in the United States. Indeed, as the next chapter explains, the suburbs of North St. Louis County were originally marketed to elite St. Louis families as a place to escape the chaos, grime, and questionable humanity of the city between 1880 and 1930, and tracts of smaller single-family homes built after 1940 became a place where European immigrants claimed the full benefits and status of white citizenship. When Black families moved to this area beginning in the 1960s, spatial qualifications were necessary as the area became majority Black, such as the “suburban ghetto” and the “Black suburbs” of North County, indicating that space described as simply suburban is imagined as white and rarely needs qualification.

While culture has been fundamentally part of racialized difference for as long as race has existed as a concept, new forms of cultural politics in the United States were necessary to maintain racial hierarchies when legal policies that relied on inherited markers, such as skin color, were challenged. The fields of sociology and anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century did much of the work to locate racial difference more formally within the fluid realm of culture rather than fixed biological difference, although anthropology was in many ways founded on describing and sorting biologically defined groups. Lee Baker points out that “an obvious division of labor emerged in social sciences in the United States that enabled anthropology to specialize in describing the culture of out-of-the-way indigenous peoples while empowering sociologists to specialize in explaining the culture of the many in-the-way immigrant and black people.”11 Scholars contributing to the early field of cultural anthropology developed a rhetoric of racial apologia, which in turn created new cultural hierarchies linked to race. Franz Boas, for example, categorically dismissed evolutionary hierarchies and argued for a cultural relativism that did not qualify different cultures as necessarily better or worse. Boas, however, managed to provide the intellectual landscape of cultural hierarchy by which Native American culture (mapped to tribal locations) was deemed worthy of preservation while African American culture was reinforced as disposable.12 Similarly, Boas’s student Ruth Benedict, who focused her career on debunking biological racism and showing how race is constructed for the sake of power, used cultural citizenship as a metric, stating in 1940 that “great numbers of negroes were not ready for full citizenship.”13

Some scholars working on antiracist projects from a sociological perspective also sought to debunk phenotypical markers by shifting discussions to that which could change—culture and rights of citizenship—as opposed to that which was represented as a given—biology. For example, W. E. B. Du Bois used the frame of fitness for citizenship in his early speech “The Conservation of Races,” which argues against biological differentiation of “the Negro” while also suggesting that Black people at the turn of the twentieth century were not ready for full citizenship.14 In this early work, Du Bois is still tied to Enlightenment concepts of civilization as he debates the degree to which the dark race contributed to civilized culture. Following Herder, from the standpoint of culture, nation, and citizenship, he discusses both the extent to which “the Negro” is American and the limits to that identity. Du Bois’s conceptualization of double consciousness is important in that it operates at the level of a subjective self versus the objectified other, in addition to theorizing dual national identities—that of the American and, more importantly, the Pan-Negro, which he remaps back to Africa. The emphasis Du Bois places in the second half of the essay on racial uplift and the sociological vices of “the Negro” also responds to popular iconography of cultural degeneracy in the late Victorian era.15 Similar ideologies that espouse notions of racial uplift and blame supposed cultural inferiorities for racial disparities form the basis for policing indi...

Table of contents

• A Note on Figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Voices
• Introduction: Dancing with Death
• Part I BLACKNESS AS RISK
• Part II BLACKNESS AS FREEDOM
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index