Introduction

DANCING WITH DEATH

We talk about the people who are dead a lot but we don’t talk about the people who are alive and living this every day; because they don’t value our lives.

—Kiera (pseudonym), resident of Pagedale, Missouri

In the suburbs of North St. Louis County, city governments discipline and police Black residents as a source of steady revenue.1 The same city governments that fine residents simultaneously fail to provide many basic services to the community, except for an ever-expanding police force. To put it in the way many residents do, municipalities view poor Black residents as “ATM machines,” to which they return time and again through multiple forms of predatory policing, juridical practices, and legalized violence. As part of this system and to hold on to the coveted yet hollow prize of local autonomy, Black leaders invest mightily in the white spatial imaginary of the suburbs by adopting a rhetoric of producing good citizens, promoting safety, protecting private property, and upholding norms of respectability.2 Narrated through questions of rights and suburban citizenship, the double bind of living as Black in North St. Louis County means that Black residents both suffer from, and pay for, the loss of economic and political viability that occurs when they simply occupy space.

Risk

The systems that create and profit from this double bind rely on tropes of Black deviance, honed over the course of centuries; the illegibility of Black suffering; and questions concerning Black personhood. These systems confirm new and old claims that racialism, which is rooted in antiblack logics of thought and policy, is ever-changing yet no less with us now than ever. Ironically, the quest for Black political empowerment in North St. Louis County utilizes and perpetuates the same attachments of risk, precarity, and fungibility that followed Black families into the suburbs and left tiny cities—that quickly became majority Black—with few options for remaining economically solvent.3

In addition to experiencing traffic stops for every possible vehicular and driving infraction, residents throughout North St. Louis County are policed for the number of people around their barbecues, the types of music they listen to, the coordination of their curtains, the way they wear their pants, where they play basketball, how they paint their back doors, where their children leave their toys, who spends the night at their houses, who parks a car in their driveways, and how they use their front porches.4 Although these low-level infractions may appear trivial relative to the scope of mass incarceration in the United States, they follow a similar pattern of catastrophically entangling residents in the legal system for decades. Since many residents cannot pay the high fines and fees for the inordinate number of citations handed out across this geography, tens of thousands of residents face warrants for their arrest and jail time, which impose even more fines and fees, not to mention numerous other impacts on their lives and livelihoods.5 In some municipalities, residents justifiably fear the city will take their property and demolish their homes if they are unable to fix aesthetic yet non-safety-related issues with their dwellings.6 Cumulatively, this has led to what many residents express as a lifetime of indebtedness and fear, and a feeling of being trapped in a place they do not have the means to leave.

The policing of minor infractions occurs in municipalities across the United States and is a primary method used by the broken-windows policing policy made famous in New York City and developed by the then police commissioner Bill Bratton in 1994.7 However, the specific and extreme forms of cultural and spatial politics used to implement policing practices at an intimate scale in North St. Louis County occur at the intersection of discursively produced urban (Black) residents in historically produced suburban (white) space. And, while broken-windows policing is also known to target nonwhite people across the United States, the implementation of practices in this area keenly demonstrates the interdependencies between race and space and the powerful role spatial imaginaries play in producing racialized bodies in and through space—how bodies code/de-code space and how space codes/de-codes bodies.

This case also illustrates how metropolitan space and local governance are critical instruments in the remaking of the modern racial state and processes of subject-making (and subject-unmaking).8 Municipal officials have become the authors and administrators of urban austerity policies and increasingly act as gatekeepers of citizens’ rights in what Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore describe as geographies of “actually existing neoliberalism.”9 Borrowing from well-developed discourses of propriety, risk, and property rights perfected by much larger cities, administrators of tiny majority-Black municipalities in North St. Louis County write, pass, interpret, and justify laws and policies that discipline residents and extract revenue through formal and informal policing and real and perceived forms of oversight and surveillance that appear rational and routine.10

Racialized policing and governing practices in North St. Louis County shocked many people who live elsewhere when these practices were exposed in 2014 by people protesting the killing of Michael Brown Jr. in the city of Ferguson (which sits in this geography). This book, however, documents how cities across this area have been carrying out similar practices for decades—practices that were unnoticed or ignored by all except those who experience them daily.11 As modes and motivations of policing were made public, revealing that some cities fund as much as 48 percent of their municipal budgets through fines and court fees, residents and outside observers alike accused Black leaders of coveting power, mismanaging city funds and budgets, and practicing what some understood as Uncle Tom politics—using the “tools of the master” to gain political clout and oppress other Black people.12 At first glance, there is evidence to support some of these claims. However, none of these public assertions considers how or why these cities and their leaders were put in the position of relying on predatory policing in the first place, nor do they recognize the obstacles that many leaders, especially Black women, have consistently overcome in order to reach and hold on to leadership positions. Taking an expanded view of these factors brings a much more complicated story to light.

When Black women, who today hold the majority of elected offices in North St. Louis County, began to win hard-fought municipal elections in the 1970s, the risk historically attached to them and their Black constituents was already driving investment and resources out of their historically white jurisdictions. This trend, described later in this book, accelerated quickly as more and more Black families moved to this area of suburbs from the City of St. Louis throughout the 1980s. As a result, public and private investment declined, redlining practices and Home Owners’ Loan Corporation guidelines blocked lending in many neighborhoods, blockbusting tactics and racial steering by real estate agents lowered property values and sent white families to outer suburbs, and growing majority-white municipalities on the metropolitan periphery poached resources (such as state, federal, and private development dollars and amenities such as groceries stores) out of cities left behind. Nevertheless, elected officials across North St. Louis County needed to keep municipal budgets solvent and provide basic services to residents or face disincorporation. Driven by a fierce desire to hold on to real and perceived political gains made in the 1960s, Black leaders turned to what were already well-established practices of using suburban norms to police residents, and further capitalized on perceptions of Black criminality and social deviance in order to fill increasing gaps in city budgets. The same historical forces that drained resources out of North St. Louis County—through the linking of Black people to risk—proved highly effective for generating new “legitimate” sources of funding to maintain political autonomy, albeit as a hollow prize symbolically awarded to Black enfranchisement.13

The complex and often paradoxical motivations behind Black leaders’ seeming propensity for preying on poor Black residents are also evidenced in various forms of respectability politics used both by and against Black women who hold leadership positions in North St. Louis County. The Black women in elected office I spoke with throughout this study vehemently denied that a need for revenue drives policing practices. On the basis of these interviews, it appears that most Black women in leadership truly believe they are simply claiming their right to live in an aesthetically pleasing, safe, and economically viable environment where people care about their property and abide by basic codes of conduct—a right that they also recognize as providing a much-needed funding source. Leaders additionally claim that policing residents is not an issue of race or class. As one leader put it, “we’re all Black and we’re all poor,” although degrees of poverty between leaders and some residents could be argued. Complicating the narrative of predatory governance, it became clear in speaking with these women that they have for decades pushed back against racialized, gendered, and sexualized stereotypes specifically attached to visible Black women and have overcome a multitude of oppressions waged against them. Interviews with residents, however, revealed that these same leaders utilize racialized and gendered tropes of Black male masculinity and female promiscuity, in addition to perceptions of urban incivility, to implement and justify policing practices that in turn fund city services. Thus, Black women in both formal and informal leadership roles in this area simultaneously embrace and resist practices that are deeply rooted in constructions of blackness, class, gender, sexuality, and suburban space. Black women are in fact central to the two critical stories told by this book—the story of extreme practices of policing and the story of radical practices of freedom.

Freedom

Although Black residents across the St. Louis region have resisted oppressive and antiblack practices for centuries, this resistance recently became visible to a world audience when protestors, especially young Black women and Black queer individuals, used their “out-of-place” and “in-the-way” bodies to disrupt racialized, heteronormative, and gender-compliant constructions of regional power. This book argues that although it was not specifically named by Ferguson protesters, the history and contemporary use of suburban respectability rooted in risk to police residents for profit in this area, as well as particular histories of racialization in St. Louis, heightened the degrees of performance, visibility, and efficacy of blackness, and the imaginative capacity of embodied Black resistance. Ferguson resistance resonated with people suffering multiple forms of violence and unfreedom across continents and did much to launch a sustained critique of antiblackness at local, national, and global scales. What came to be known as the Ferguson Protest Movement revealed how the same visibility that registers death—the image of Michael Brown’s slain body lying on the hot blacktop for hours on a hot summer day as his parents pleaded with officials—can also expose the unique capacity of blackness to embody freedom in the face of death and to imagine other worlds, other futures. This type of embodied freedom, what I call an ethics of lived blackness, or blackness-as-freedom, not only holds the potential to liberate those suffering the legacies and realities of physical, emotional, and economic bondage (colonial pasts and presents) but also offers hope to a larger society that is unaware of its own condition of unfreedom: a world that currently faces a shared lack of a future.

In North St. Louis County, dynamics of place and people specific to the experience of this region converged to shape a social movement that leveraged and connected particular histories and experiences of blackness while simultaneously drawing from a shared diasporic belonging and struggle. This reckoning with the intimacy of alterity, as Nadia Ellis observes, is part of Black experience found in different modes of diasporic belonging, all of which are haunted by ghosts of the historical past and present.14 The body of Michael Brown lying in a street in North St. Louis County released another form of “flesh in the street” that, unlike Brown’s victimized flesh, demanded the reconfiguration of how blackness is understood, claimed the right to live without fear, and revealed the radical futuring work of Black people, particularly those who also identify as women, queer, and trans, in the advancement of liberatory projects. Although this movement emanated from the specificity of this geography, it required a deterritorialization of gendered bodies and a forced reckoning with the risk associated with the same racialized, gendered—dehumanized—bodies that keep municipal governments across North St. Louis County economically desperate and financially solvent.

The ephemeral space of violence that displayed Brown’s desecrated body and the space of resistance that was opened up by a very different form of visibility in the suburbs of St. Louis became worldwide symbols of how both profane and sacred spaces can paradoxically exist within the same place. The bodies that appeared in North St. Louis County connected diaspora subjects in both horrific and beautiful terms, linking Black experience, Black people, indeed blackness, across time and space—what Ellis describes as a “territory of the soul.”15 According to authorities in Ferguson, racist or racialized policing practices, formal or otherwise, did not lead to Michael Brown’s death. The bodies that continued to show up night after night, month after month, however, haunted these claims like specters and ultimately connected practices of extreme violence, which residents across this region had lived with for decades, to historical violence that seeks to order Black (gendered) bodies. In this way, haunting moved beyond trauma and practical interventions such as body cameras on police officers, and into the realm of a something-to-be-done that imagines, and thus demands, alternative futures.16

What followed in the days after August 9, 2014, revealed a rupture in the status quo. Blackness—as an intentional praxis, rather than a conferred identity—was reconfigured as a register of freedom in this space, and it held, even if for a moment, the possibility to shift defuturing paradigms. For those able to see these ghosts, the short stretch of Canfield Drive where Brown died may just as well have been the hold of a ship traveling the Middle Passage. The tree that hung over Brown’s body in the street could easily have been the tree where a Black body hung just a few decades prior. The visibility of the body on that particular day had distinctive resonance in a place where violence, as an act of control, exploitation, and desperation is not exceptional but mundane—violence that many deemed necessary in order to compensate for the outcomes of risk that follow blackness through time and space.

Producing and policing “disposable life” in and through space are what make violence for profit in North St. Louis County, or anywhere else, possible and invisible. This is an extension of biopolitics, the politics of life, and what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics,” a racialized politics of death.17 These practices rely on expectations of what can or should happen to populations that are racially differentiated by establishing who should live fully (those intended to flourish), and who could die (those who are disposable). These practices also rely on racialized and differentiated space—protected spaces where suffering is never tolerated and spaces of abjection where suffering is not only tolerated but expected.

Space

North St. Louis County was originally developed and promoted as a space for people who “should live fully.” It is a mix of turn-of-the-century garden suburbs where elite white families spent summers, and of post–World War II working-class suburbs where many European immigrants staked their claim to the American Dream and became unarguably white. The space where people should live fully, however, became occupied (or “infiltrated,” as policy briefs often described it) by people who could not, no matter where they lived, become white. Black families moved to the suburbs to participate in the American Dream but claiming or gaining the full benefits of suburban citizenship remained out of reach. Rather, they found that the space was recoded as urban because imaginations of suburban space precluded the presence of risky urban (Black) people. For reasons explained in chapter 2, the demographic inversion (from majority-white to majority-Black) in North St. Louis County was swift. The spatial dissonance that resulted from the intersection of opposing spatial meanings—space that requires protection and space where suffering is expected—produced the double bind of living as Black in the historically white suburbs of St. Louis County.

The historical and perpetual tolerance of Black suffering and acceptance of premature Black death create the spaces where suffering is expected and where death is considered routine. The space of the “ghetto,” understood today as Black urban space or the inner city in the United States, represents, and is, a place where suffering is normalized and life is viewed by those on the outside as having comparatively little value. The mythical space of the suburbs was and is imagined and produced in contradistinction to, and is necessarily dependent on, imaginations of dark urban space, even though suburban space has always had levels of diversity. This is a biopolitical dialectic whereby the white spatial imaginary of making live in the suburbs is dependent on the very real possibility of letting die in the inner city. Of course in reality the suburbs are not a panacea, for reasons many people have identified. A collective imagination of space, however, is a powerful thing. As described later in this book, North St. Louis County is rhetorically represented as suburban when referring to its white past and definitely described as urban when confronting its Black present. Throughout North St. Louis County, Black residents themselves simultaneously embrace and reject representations and identities of urban and suburban people, and their contingent and often contradictory expectations and definitions of urban or suburban space reflect their experience of feeling both in and out of place.

Hortense Spillers conceptualizes the expectation of suffering as the basis of exploitation of gendered Black bodies, which she describes as “pornotroping.”18 The pornotrope is that which is exploited on the basis of the expectation, normalization, and tolerance of sustained suffering. For Spillers, the gendered Black body, like the object of pornographic desire, occupies a unique position between subjectification and objectification, between revulsion and desire, in ways that perpetuate perceptions of deviance and the less than human, yet also create unspoken and forbidden desire and intrigue through processes of objectification. The representational humanity, freedom, and protected life of the “selected” white male subject was critically dependent on the dysselected slave object understood as subhuman, unfree, and necessarily exposed to death. These mutually dependent binaries—human/subhuman, free subject/bound object, life/death—construct whiteness in contrast to blackness in all subsequent iterations of racialization, what Saidiya Hartman describes as the afterlife of slavery.19 These same binaries construct the imaginations and, in many cases, the realities of urban and suburban space. In the same way Black people are dehumanized, subjugated, denied, and rendered deviant, yet consumed through othering and objectification, pornotopologies represent deviant and risky space where suffering is expected and illicit desire is fetishized, commodified, and consumed by popular culture (i.e., in clothing, music, dance, visual arts, and other representations associated with “ghetto” and urban space).20 North St. Louis County is a libidinal geography where “the virtual absence of prohibitions or limitations in the determination of socially tolerable and necessary violence sets the stage for the indiscriminate use of the body for pleasure, profit, and punishment.”21

Pornotroping is integral to the perpetual tolerance of Black suffering and the acceptance of premature Black death. Likewise, pornotopologies are spaces where it is not just acceptable but expected that the indiscriminate policing of residents for revenue occurs and where events like the “justified” death of an unarmed Black teenager and the prolonged terror inflicted by the public desecration of the corpse are considered routine. Hartman asks, “What does the exposure of the violated body yield? Proof of black sentience or the inhumanity of the ‘peculiar institution’? Or does the pain of the other merely provide us with the opportunity for self-reflection?”22 For those who do not live in North St. Louis County, self-reflection can provide an opportunity to be glad one has the means to live elsewhere. But in these historically white suburbs the exposure of the violated Black body also poses a problem in that it provides proof of suffering where suffering was not tolerated, proof of a peculiar institution in a society that claims such things are over and done with. A particular visibility of the violated body in a place of extreme violence, and the subsequent work of sentient bodies—as an embodied blackness—gave rise to a movement that forces a different type of self-reflection. A reflection that asks, “Where does inhumanity lie relative to this peculiar institution?”23 Whether or not we are moved to reflect differently remains to be seen.

The pornotopology is an important conceptual framework used in this book to understand space where thresholds of the intolerable are constantly in flux and where subjectivities and identities of oppressor and oppressed collide and become blurred. The pornotopology is the space produced and controlled through the repetition of justified violence, seen and unseen. It is a container of risk attached to dark gendered bodies, but it is also fetishized as a place where opportunity and freedom are said to exist for all yet are available to a few. North St. Louis County is not the ghetto or Black urban space. Nor can it be understood as the suburbs, or even a simple relocation of the ghetto to the suburban context. Rather, it is a pornotopology where life is consistently and ruthlessly mediated through the signifiers of protected suburban space and precarious urban bodies. Importantly, it highlights how differentiated rights and differentiated expectations of life and death are produced and maintained in and through space.

A Note on Methods

Long before Michael Brown’s body lay on a street in North St. Louis County and before most people had heard of a place called Ferguson, I began the research that would become this book. In 2002, as a faculty member at Washington University, I set out to develop a pedagogical approach to teaching and research that would challenge conventional service-learning models by tying all components to two overarching questions: How can place-based teaching and research shift the assumptions of future decision makers regarding places and people? And how can engagement facilitate community-driven outcomes? Having seen and been involved in service-learning teaching that expected time and energy from communities and offered nothing in return, I did not want to replicate that approach. Consequently, I pursued a relationship with a nonprofit agency that worked in North St. Louis County and was willing to be a partner in efforts and help find funding for projects. Eventually the initiative evolved into a series of interdisciplinary graduate seminars, symposia, design-build studios, and funded research projects I oversaw and cotaught between 2002 and 2010.24

As I spent more and more time in North St. Louis County, I became aware of vast discrepancies between the stories told by residents regarding this area and those told by elected officials. Resident after resident relayed various versions of the same story: of seemingly unimaginable harassment and exploitation carried out by municipal police, inspectors, administrators, and judges in the form of traffic and nontraffic violations and associated fines and fees. As residents described it, these low-level infractions, such as “failure to secure a trash can lid,” often led to increased economic hardships and jail time, and they almost always led to deep feelings of resentment and hopelessness. The everyday experiences of fear and loss associated with economic exploitation, physical harassment, confinement, and even death seemed to permeate residents’ lives, and people often made connections to slavery, indentured servitude, and intimately lived experiences of segregation and second-class citizenship. Most residents I spoke to believed that the types of harassment and exploitation they experienced occurred because the neighborhoods in which they lived were majority Black and, for the same reason, regional decision makers either did not notice or did not care about what was going on. Many longtime residents who moved to what were then the white suburbs of North St. Louis County in the 1970s and 1980s explained that predatory policing was not new; however, they, as Black citizens, felt increasingly targeted as time went on.

The municipal leaders I spoke with told a very different story. Administrators and judges alike downplayed policing practices and blamed nonconforming residents when asked about residents’ claims regarding high numbers of traffic and property violations and warrants issued across this area. Leaders consistently brought up the rights of the city to create “a nice environment,” whereas the rights of residents were framed as conditional and tied to one’s ability to “live as suburban.” Leaders from the nonprofit agency with which the university was partnering repeated narratives that focused on personal responsibility and property maintenance, citing things like community asset building, neighborhood pride, and broken-windows policing to justify city practices. This was confusing to me because the agency was doing much to help poor residents secure housing and resources they needed to stabilize their everyday lives, but it also appeared to be straddling a line that separated the “undeserving” poor from those who could succeed in their programs.

Throughout the first two years of working with residents and leaders, I was struck by what appeared to be a locally scaled yet fully functioning police state justified and naturalized by Black municipal leaders using a cultural politics rooted in well-honed tropes of suburban respectability, white spatial logics, and Black deviance. Unlike people caught in what is conceptualized as “the prison pipeline,” which ties disproportionate incarceration rates of nonwhite men and women to systems designed to permanently remove people from society, it appeared that residents in North St. Louis County were caught in a “catch-and-release” policing strategy that depended on the ability to derive a steady stream of revenue from the same people over and over again.

By 2005, my research turned toward exploring the specific histories and conditions that led to extreme forms of predatory policing. I was particularly interested in the work that culture, race, and space seemed to perform as means to enact and justify practices that appeared legal and allowed cities to differentiate and exploit residents in the name of the public good. Between 2006 and 2009, I actively worked at applying design-thinking—the way I was trained to see the world—to my research in North St. Louis County. This approach intentionally expands rather than limits variables and it blurs disciplinary boundaries, what Arturo Escobar has since called the accommodation of “radical relationalities.”25 It meant that next steps in the process were always determined in response to deeper forms of knowledge and emergent questions stemming from interactions with people and place; it required me to broaden the spectrum of scholarship and disciplinary fields by engaging with discourses outside of design and urban studies. As I continued to work in and with communities, I expanded the interdisciplinary initiative by coleading several funded community-focused research projects examining relationships between health (broadly defined) and spatial equity. During this time, I became increasingly aware of the inherent limitations of my faculty position in architecture and urban design, which included explicit roles and presumed ways of approaching education and practice. As the multi-year research project—a health impact assessment of a proposed development in North St. Louis County for which I was a principal investigator—began to wind to a close, the university’s commitment to place-based teaching also seemed to be at a crossroads. For me to see this project through to its most ambitious conclusion, a change was needed.

In 2010, I made the difficult decision to leave my position at Washington University, uproot my family, and enter a doctoral program at University of California, Berkeley with the specific purpose of completing my study of North St. Louis County. Beginning the doctoral work in architectural history, I quickly transferred to the little-known interdisciplinary PhD program designed for projects that do not fit within any disciplinary home. Through this program, I worked between five departments and several more fields, including anthropology, geography, African American studies, law, history, sociology, English, ethnic studies, architecture, and city and regional planning. While North St. Louis County was the location of embodied research through which I encountered people, places, and events, this period provided the intellectual space and time to look deeply at the data and determine additional routes of historical research and conceptual frameworks needed to see underlying forces and relationships. Working outside of a department allowed me freedom to pursue mentors, interlocutors, and perspectives across many disciplines at critical points in the project. I was fortunate to work with a committee of distinguished scholars, each coming from a different disciplinary background, who supported my ethical commitment to an undisciplining methodological approach, while holding me to the highest standards of research. This strategic undisciplining of the work is evident throughout the book and does not mean that I do not deeply engage with disciplinary frameworks and perspectives; however, the overall project and this subsequent book do not follow singular disciplinary norms.

I was well into the writing phase of this project when the previously anonymous geography I had long struggled to explain to anyone outside St. Louis exploded onto the front pages of newspapers around the world. Sitting in California, I initially watched events in Ferguson unfold from a distance and saw the response of people with whom I was intimately connected. Many people advised me that a good social scientist keeps writing, ignores the noise, and regroups later. While I did not relish extending the time or the boundaries of the project, I was too deeply committed to a methodological process that foregrounds people, places, and events to ignore what was happening. I returned to North St. Louis County in September of 2014 for another six months of ethnographic research. As a result of that decision, this book took a completely different turn. In addition to adding many more voices, it was necessary to engage entirely new disciplines and bodies of literature in order to consider and contextualize the emerging resistance movement. These new engagements and concerns broadened the dimensions and the scope of the work but further muddied the intellectual waters—something I learned to embrace throughout this process.

As with many ethnographers and researchers, there is a gap between my own subjectivity and experiences, and those of residents and leaders in the communities I work with. Having begun my time in this area as part of a pedagogical praxis designed to challenge the assumptions and identities of my students and myself, as well as challenging accepted paradigms for publicly engaged teaching, I was prepared for some aspects of navigating this gap, though there were still many instances in which I was not well equipped. I had the benefit of having invested much time in the area and had produced tangible work with residents and leaders in the form of reports and policy briefs linking health disparities to policies and the built environment, as well as physical amenities my students had built in several neighborhoods in response to residents’ input and requests. As a result, I was able to forge connections through established networks and a record of completing projects with mutual benefit. I found that middle-aged and older residents, regardless of gender or race, were more or less willing to talk to me at length about their experience and assessment of North St. Louis County. Conversations were further facilitated through a program for seniors my students initiated that helped older residents by fixing property-related issues, which resulted in many close relationships between myself, my student researchers, and elders. I also found that children under the age of sixteen routinely volunteered their unfiltered impressions of, and solutions for, their neighborhoods, and my students had worked for several years with after-school programs in order to better understand the experience and views of young people. Human subjects reviews at both Washington University and University of California, Berkeley understandably made the collection and use of data from this particular group challenging, however, which limited what was available from this group for formal analysis.

It was residents between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five who were generally uninterested in speaking to me. Their skepticism of a forty-something white academic who claimed to do research on race and space in North St. Louis County could not be faulted. In order to include youth perspectives in my project, I relied on three paid research assistants from the area who were young and identified as Black women. These three women, Angel Carter, Adrian Smith, and Brandice Carpenter are deeply rooted in North St. Louis County and the region. All three went through human subjects protection training and were trained to conduct interviews. They were absolutely essential to the reflexive process of checking me and my assumptions regarding observations, analysis, and findings. Their impact and contributions to the project were great.

The reader will notice that throughout the book and particularly in part II, I include many direct quotes from those who shared their stories. These voices are often curated, or choreographed, as groups, some of which take up a page or two. These passages are a very intentional part of my methodology, and I include these voices when what they say does more justice to the emergent arguments than I could ever do. I also do this to include as many of the voices as possible, although there were many important things said that I simply was not able to include because of limited space. Some readers may be tempted to skip over these excepts because of their length, or believing that they are included to support a point that I am making. This would be unfortunate, since there are many things expressed in these excerpts that are not conveyed through my analytical text.

Reading This Book

Many people learned of this area through media coverage of Ferguson unrest in 2014, and this book will likely be categorized with those that directly emerged from those events. As I describe above, however, I began this research long before 2014, and the book would have been written, albeit in a somewhat different form, had Ferguson remained an obscure suburb somewhere in North St. Louis County. Although the forces examined in great detail throughout these chapters are the same forces that led Darren Wilson to stop and kill Michael Brown and also precipitated the events that followed, readers expecting a book about Ferguson will be disappointed. Rather, this book provides a backdrop against which to read events in Ferguson, as well as racialized practices across the globe.

Although it is not about Ferguson, this book does problematize many of the narratives that emerged “post-Ferguson.” For example, in the months following the death of Michael Brown, reporters, as well as scholars writing op-ed articles and blog posts, often pointed to the majority-white leadership and police force in majority-Black Ferguson to explain degrees of the sustained unrest that was unfolding. A racial mismatch between those in power and the community, it was said, led to extreme predatory policing practices in this area, which were gaining public attention through the work of protesters.26 Initial responses called for the election of Black leaders and the hiring of more Black police officers as primary means to remediate oppressive practices said to fuel anger and actions. This position assumed that Black residents in the many majority-Black cities in North St. Louis County with all-Black leadership and a greater percentage of Black police officers experience less predatory policing and racialized exploitation than in cities where Black residents are represented and policed by majority-white administrators and police officers.

The findings presented in the chapters that follow do in fact support the claims that predatory policing led to the circumstances of Michael Brown’s death and, I argue, extreme forms of exploitation found in North St. Louis County did produce a particular and sustained form of resistance. The data, however, contradict the assertion that racial imbalances between leadership and residents are at the root of predatory policing practices. Majority-Black cities in this area with all-Black leadership and significantly higher numbers of Black police officers in fact carry out even more extreme predatory policing practices targeting so-called Black behavior than those seen in Ferguson.27 As these statistics eventually came to light through the efforts of protesters and activist organizations, many people were quick to throw Black leaders under the proverbial bus, depicting them as greedy, power hungry, and incompetent. While it is hard to have empathy for leaders shown to prey on their own citizens, these simplified versions follow a long history of blaming Black leaders for conditions they did not create, attacking the character of Black officials, and categorically ignoring the root causes that place Black communities in catch-22 situations. In fact, as chapter 3 reveals, there is a direct correlation between degrees of resource poaching (out of majority-Black cities and into majority-white areas) and degrees of predatory policing (of residents in majority-Black cities), both of which trend upward as the percentage of Black citizens increases. As the data clearly show, poaching and predatory policing are not dependent upon the race or gender of elected officials. They do however rely on the logics of antiblackness, and in the case of North St. Louis County, these practices are contingent upon the percentage of Black people that occupy historically white space. Ultimately, these practices are both cause and consequence of the risk attached to Black residents.

At its core, this book is about two powerful sets of practices—the cultural politics of race and space that attaches risk to Black people and Black space, and the politics of possibility that reaffirms blackness as a unique site of imagination and freedom. My methodological approach was iteratively determined through encounters with people, places, and events over a fifteen-year period, and the organization of the book directly reflects this process, in that each chapter represents a different path taken and different disciplinary orientation. By including what could be considered disparate studies within the same book, it is my hope that readers will see relationships and draw conclusions beyond those presented—in light of their own experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives.

The chapters are organized into two parts with a break in between. Part I provides the intellectual, historical, and experiential context for understanding the place of North St. Louis County, and it focuses specifically on how risk is attached to blackness and the outcomes produced through these processes. Part II shifts in both style and emphasis to look at the radical imaginaries deployed by people who became visible in North St. Louis County and who demonstrate practices of freedom embedded in blackness itself. The change that mobilized radical imaginaries of what could be in the face of what is in North St. Louis County was dependent upon the visibility of Black and nonconforming bodies, and it resonated because of the implausibility of the modern state’s representational claims. In this case, it was the implausibility that the liberal state would deliver justice (for specifically Black individuals) under and through the law. Set between these two parts in the form of an interlude is a brief recounting of August 9, 2014, which represents a theoretical shift in the book and a practical shift in space and time.

Chapter 1 traces the ways by which culture is used to produce, police, study, and represent blackness specifically in conjunction with racialized metropolitan space in the United States; the cultural politics of race and space. This chapter is particularly intended for readers who may be unfamiliar with how contemporary urban policies and practices are rooted in the long arc of history that conflates culture, race, and space. Cultural politics is the scaffold for modes of informal disciplining, and it establishes the conditions of possibility for formal policing. When Darren Wilson said during questioning that Michael Brown looked like the Hulk because of his size and his face looked like a demon, adding that the community in which he was killed was a hostile community where nobody wanted to go, he deployed the cultural politics of race and space and did not need to explain what he meant. Chapter 1 outlines some of the contours of the cultural politics of race and space that are important for understanding the practices and phenomena in North St. Louis County. Because scholarship produces powerful discourses that reveal, obscure, and sanction violence in and through space, chapter 1 also considers the ways in which culture, race, and space have been historically conflated in different spaces of scholarship.

In chapter 2, I highlight some of the moments and patterns that are illustrative of the particularities and peculiarities of this region and are therefore important for understanding North St. Louis County. In many ways, the history of St. Louis in the latter part of the twentieth century closely follows the histories of most cities in the rust belt of the United States—in terms of de jure and de facto segregation in housing, education, and the labor force, as well as histories of suburbanization, discriminatory lending, and white flight. Chapter 2 pays particular attention to entanglements of race, space, and culture, and to the social, political, and geographic fragmentation that are unique to experiences in this region. In Hartman’s words, “a history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past, and to imagine a free state, not as the time before captivity or slavery, but rather as the anticipated future of this writing.”28 Chapter 2 lays the groundwork for understanding how risk is attached to the lives of the dead and intimately connected to the lives of the living.

Much of the time I spent researching this book was focused on documenting the means, motivations, and extreme experiences of predatory policing practices in North St. Louis County. Chapter 3 brings this research together and provides a vivid account of the racialized methods that are used in North St. Louis County to extract money and resources from citizens. Foregrounded are the specific impacts these practices have on residents. By juxtaposing the stories of residents and leaders with statistical evidence of racialized municipal practices, I argue that many cities in this geography operate as localized racial states where one’s access to rights and the ability to live freely are determined at the most intimate scale of governance. This chapter provides extensive evidence that the predatory policing of Black citizens is not tied to the race of leadership, as has been suggested. Rather, these practices are directly relational to the perceived risk and illegible suffering attached to the blackness of constituents. Adding an important layer of complexity to the larger story, the chapter goes on to consider how racialized regional practices and codifications of space led to circumstances that left municipal leaders with seemingly few options for remaining incorporated. From this standpoint, the book raises critical ethical questions regarding how these practices are framed in debates, where responsibility lies, and what rights tiny majority-Black cities have with regard to economic viability, beyond policing their own residents for revenue.

Looking at the detailed evidence of policing practices in North St. Louis County led me to study what makes these practices possible and invisible. Chapter 4 examines the discursive regimes—the making and unmaking of truth—upon which cultural politics in North St. Louis County relies. The cultural politics of space deploys culture as a regulatory discourse to produce spatial imaginaries and social meanings that explain disparity as a “natural consequence” of inferior Black culture. Using a discursively produced cultural politics of suburban citizenship and capitalizing on expectations of suffering in spaces qualified as urban, leaders, administrators, and judges police residents. This policing has cultural, spatial, economic, and embodied iterations, and is often neither measured nor checked. Additionally, contradictory identities (suburban and urban) that result from powerful spatial imaginaries are both claimed and deployed by leaders, residents, and law enforcement, sometimes interchangeably, in and about North St. Louis County, depending on the work these identities perform, the polities they mobilize, and the distinctions they are intended to make. This results in complex and nuanced relationships of race, space, and power that cannot be reduced to simplified readings of economic rationalism, identity politics, or racial imbalances in the police force.

Chapter 5 looks specifically at the City of Pagedale, which is an extreme example of how the white spatial imaginary of suburbia is deployed. This small municipality aggressively passes and enforces “quality of life” and “nuisance property” ordinances targeting circumstances of poverty and so-called Black behavior by criminalizing such things as hanging mismatched curtains, installing a basketball hoop, and wearing sagging pants. Pagedale, which made history as the first municipality in the United States to elect an all-Black, all-woman leadership in 1982, troubles many of the popular explanations for the “Ferguson uprisings” and complicates the idea that predatory policing by Black leadership is simply a result of power, greed, or corruption. As this chapter details, the Black women leaders who came into power in the 1980s used visibility to push back against the limits placed on their bodies—as Black and female—yet worked within the terms that had been set by previous administrations and the historical structures of racism and sexism that construct blackness-as-risk.

Part II makes an important shift toward the modes of resistance that arose in response to everyday policing after the exceptional yet routine event of Michael Brown’s death. As the first chapter in part II, chapter 6 uses a framework of queer theory to argue that the particular aesthetic and affect of resistance in North St. Louis County made visible the extreme violence of the state in addition to exposing the inherent contradictions within masculine and heteronormative spaces of Black struggle. This is a critical component of queer of color critique. Similar to an Afro-pessimistic perspective of blackness, which locates Black life as a site of ontological death, this chapter argues that “the problem posed by blackness” is an antagonism rooted in the historically naturalized logics of society, including physical space, and is not a conflict that can be rectified through legal means. Through a more optimistic lens, this chapter also highlights the various ways Black women and gender nonconforming individuals practiced a choreopolitics—of bodies in space—that demanded the terms of visibility be set by those “in view.”29 This particular practice of visibility and an insistence on simply living as an act of protest illustrate the capacity and power that Black lives and life hold in revealing the truth (of who and what are actually inhuman) and thus reconfiguring the metrics of living as fully human.

Chapter 7 details the conflicts that arose between Ferguson protesters and local and national activist organizations, as well as the misrecognitions concerning relationships to, and alliances with, the Black Lives Matter organization and subsequent movements. These contestations of meaning, belonging, and territory, as well as concerns regarding who may speak for whom, reveal the multivalent and fluid conditions and constructions of blackness and gender. The Black diasporic subject (or nonsubject, as Frank B. Wilderson, III argues) is fundamentally shaped by shared loss, displacement, trauma, and forms of political death. But the ways individuals and groups generatively (and differently) practice sociality and antagonize beliefs about “civil society” are creative acts that draw from particularized experiences across space and time. In this way, blackness is “the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space.”30 The resistance that emerged in Ferguson interrogated the boundaries of Black intelligibility and exposed the tensions and contradictions that simultaneously exist within what Cedric Robinson called the ontological totality of Black struggle.31 This chapter looks at some of those tensions in order to foreground the complexity and contradictions of an ontological blackness, which could also be understood as all that celebrates a location outside, or beyond, the world as we know it.

Taken together, the chapters that follow are a call to reconsider the epistemic violence that is committed when scholars, policy makers, and the general public frame Black precarity as just another racial, cultural, or ethnic conflict that can be solved through legal, political, or economic means. The historical and material production of blackness-as-risk is foundational to the historical and material construction of modern society and, as a critical component of antiblackness, it provides fundamental systems that order contemporary metropolitan space. Although the logics of antiblackness transfer across spectrums—of gender, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation—to create difference in relationship to power, these logics of differentiation absolutely rely on the historically contingent fungibility of the Black dispossessed person.32 The positionality of blackness, as Wilderson (following Franz Fanon) has argued, is critical to understanding and intervening in processes of subjugation. Wilderson succinctly makes this point when he states, “Blackness cannot become one of civil society’s many junior partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons.”33 The propensity of liberal politics and even radical social movements to misunderstand intersectional oppressions and represent Black abjection as but one problem facing civil society “cannot be called the outright handmaidens of white supremacy,” but “their rhetorical structures and political desires are underwritten by a supplemental anti-Blackness.”34 The failure to understand blackness as violently, necessarily, and generatively located beyond the map of our current world forecloses the potential insight and access that an unmappable blackness may provide for imagining different worlds.

An ethics of lived blackness—living fully and visibly in the face of forces intended to dehumanize and erase—recognizes its location outside privileged positions of power, but it also recognizes this position as a powerful counterpoint to the current logics that order bodies and space. This embodied and emplaced praxis of blackness-as-freedom is an enduring response to places and systems built on the expectation and tolerance of Black suffering and premature death. While I do not argue for abandoning pursuits of legal, political, and economic solutions to vastly uneven distributions of resources across the globe, we will continue to reproduce structural and physical violence if we do not recognize how the logics of antiblackness undergirds every mode of injustice we seek to remediate. Likewise, efforts to fight against the many manifestations of unfreedom will be limited in their efficacy if we do not learn from the embodied and emplaced practices that reorient blackness as a fundamental location of freedom. As Wilderson also argues, “we must admit that the ‘Negro’ has been inviting whites, as well as civil society’s junior partners [the nonblack worker, the immigrant, the woman], to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. . . . This is not to say that all oppositional political desire is pro-white, but it is usually antiblack, meaning that it will not dance with death”35—the death (social, political, physical) that is conferred on Black life.

The ethics of lived blackness relies on the claimed visibility and location of Black life (as outside). It is lived through bodies that span physical, psychic, representative, and temporal identifications within and through blackness yet share in the ability to haunt historico-racial constructions of systems and spaces of gendered white heteronormativity. If ethics is, as Michel Foucault insisted, the practice of freedom,36 then the persistent visibility of unapologetic blackness in the form of fully lived, fully desiring, fully outside Black flesh in the historically and violently constructed white gendered space of suburban St. Louis was and is a futuring dance of freedom in the midst of a defuturing world. Those who wish to learn the steps toward alternative futures must first be willing to dance with death.