4

DISCURSIVE REGIMES AND EVERYDAY PRACTICES

In every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.

—Michel Foucault, The Order of Discourse

There is no racial divide in the city of Ferguson—that is the perspective of all residents in our city—absolutely. This community is absolutely supportive of what we’ve been doing and what we’re doing moving forward. . . . Black or white, we’re all middle-class citizens who believe in the same thing.

—Ferguson mayor James Knowles, August 19, 2014

Stories like those of Evelyn and Patrice, described in the last chapter, illustrate the degree to which race, space, and identity are mutually constituted and policed in metropolitan space and the disparate outcomes that are produced. The debates over how to define and study urban and suburban space, as well as whether North St. Louis County is urban, suburban, or something in between, go beyond simply qualifying physical geographies or mapping demographics, and beyond the relentless need scholars have to codify space. These distinctions reveal how space—as imagined, represented, and lived—is highly political and carries out specific types of work.1 The fact that suffering is tolerated, or even expected, within certain spaces yet deemed intolerable in others illustrates the interdependencies between racial and spatial meanings, as well as the ways in which the intelligibility of race and differentiations of the value of life—those who must live and those who could die—are produced in and through space. As this chapter shows, space can be recodified over time or overnight, depending on the intended work spatial distinctions perform and the discursive processes used to link social and cultural practices to race and space.

The practices of policing residents for revenue in North St. Louis County rely on specific deployments of the suburban imaginary—producing respectable middle-class citizens, protecting private property, and upholding the aesthetic and cultural norms of suburban space. The discursive regimes at work in North St. Louis County determine what is known and what remains unknown about it, as well as what can and cannot happen within these boundaries. When the mayor of Ferguson stated that “we are all middle-class citizens who believe in the same thing” five days after Michael Brown died, he erased approximately half his constituency by coding “we” as middle-class and gesturing toward a whiteness that accompanies middle-class “beliefs.” Michel Foucault points out, “each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true.”2 In the months following August 9, 2014, Mayor Knowles practiced a general politics of truth that appealed to a white spatial imaginary of Ferguson—as white and middle-class—in spite of the changes that had occurred. It was the same politics of truth used to extract thousands of dollars from residents and it was the politics that led to Brown’s death. Although the discursive regime overseen by Knowles in Ferguson reflects practices everywhere, it illustrates the multiple scales of society in which regimes of truth operate. It also illustrates that “truths” occupy space and what is true can become false by simply relocating what we are talking about. In this way, North St. Louis County demonstrates Stuart Hall’s observation that “each regime of truth makes difference function discursively,” and, “by making difference intelligible in this way, each regime marks out human differences within culture in a way that corresponds exactly to how difference is understood to function in nature, that is ‘naturally.’”3

Discursive power extends well beyond language. Discourses are the historically and contextually specific ways people interact with the world, view the world, and conduct themselves with other people.4 Discourses of space are always discourses of race. Foucault underscores this point when he states that discourse is “a battle that has to be waged not between races, but by a race that is portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and [feels] entitled to define the norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage.”5 The processes that lead to racial formations (as conceptualized by Michael Omi and Howard Winant) constitute discursively determined regimes of truth.6 This is an important point made by Hall when he argues that “what is at stake is not whether there is some ultimate or final truth about the meaning of race to be found in the knowledge produced by science, but that our object of investigation shifts to examine the historical forms of knowledge that produce the intelligibility of race.”7 P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods remind us, however, that “the originating and grounding name of racism is ‘black’ and yet the critical scholarship on racism persistently asserts otherwise.”8 In this way, generalized racial formation theory that misidentifies antiblackness is yet another regime that inflicts racialized trauma. In North St. Louis County, the historical association of blackness with risk rooted in the afterlife of slavery establishes the discursive grounds (and physical ground) that determine degrees and rights of citizenship.

An emphasis on “good suburban citizens” is clearly part of the politics of truth used by leaders in North St. Louis County to justify state violence. Antiblackness, which is historically dependent on a dialectical construct of civilization and its other, as discussed in chapter 1, is thus embedded in a localized understanding of citizenship and the terms for belonging. Modern interpretations of good citizenship based on capital accumulation further set the terms for good suburban subjects as functions of self-reliance and consumption that reinforce a self-perpetuating cycle of capitalism (which, following Cedric Robinson, is always racialized).9 As Aihwa Ong observes, being a good citizen of a capitalist society means reducing one’s burden and, therefore, it is one’s civic duty to be economically productive and a good consumer.10 The discursive qualifications of space are similarly dependent on the logics of development and capital such that the space of North St. Louis County, which is associated with subsidization, disinvestment, and loss of population, is inherently coded as inferior.

The Normandy Schools Crisis

In the fall of 2013, the residents of suburban North St. Louis County found themselves in the crosshairs of the urban schools debate in Missouri when the Normandy School District (NSD) lost its accreditation after eighteen years of provisional status. Both state and school officials explained the district’s demise as stemming from its inability to deal with unfortunate “urban problems”—or, in less polite terms, “the ghetto mentality that plagues the area”—to quote the language used to refer to things such as a high proportion of female-headed households, violence, and supposedly rampant drug problems (although statistics show that rates of violence and drug activity in the area are comparable with those in South St. Louis County).11 Due to housing insecurity caused by multiple intersecting factors, discussed in chapters 2 and 3, mobility rates of residents and functional homelessness, which are often represented as problems of urban space, are two of the biggest challenges faced by the district. The superintendent at the time embraced the urban identity and repeatedly called for the use of alternative metrics in evaluating teacher and school performance in “an urban district that has many external challenges.”12 Referring to the NSD controversy, the executive director of the group hired by the Department of Education to analyze statewide transfer laws stated, “We don’t have any urban school districts in America that serve all of its kids well.”13 This statement identified the NSD as an urban district and reinforced that “urban” is how education officials describe failing schools regardless of their location.

When officials on the Missouri State Board of Education met to decide the accreditation status of the district, deliberations failed to bring up the fact that only three years earlier the same board had merged a failed district into the then-failing NSD. When the board dissolved the Wellston School District in 2010, it was 100 percent African American, and more than 95 percent of its students came from impoverished families. The question at that time was which district(s) would receive the “urban” student population made up entirely of poor Black children from North St. Louis County. Rather than face political pushback by sending students to thriving majority-white districts throughout the county, the board opted to send all of Wellston’s children to the Normandy School District, which both Stanton Lawrence (the NSD superintendent at the time) and the board said was just beginning to see significant improvements in student achievement. Given the overwhelming data regarding the performance of impoverished Black children in highly segregated and underfunded schools, it is difficult to imagine that the board actually believed that combining two failing districts composed of poor Black children was going to improve the educational opportunities for the children involved or help the NSD reach accreditation. Many would later argue that the board was fully aware that the NSD would not survive the merger.

In spite of the unprecedented decision by the state board of education, which passed up any opportunity to partially desegregate St. Louis County schoolchildren, the merger of two failing and virtually all-Black districts did not result in any lawsuits filed by civil rights advocates or federal intervention, which is likely what the board was banking on. The NSD attempted to welcome the Wellston students into its schools, but the decision to merge the Wellston district with Normandy sealed the fate of children in both areas and cleared the way for the board’s action two years later, when it declared the NSD nonaccredited and set in motion a state take-over. This, according to Lawrence, who resigned upon the board’s decision, is the “school reform of punitive disparity.”14

Shortly after the NSD and the Riverview Gardens School District—also in North St. Louis County—lost accreditation in 2013, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the state’s Student Transfer Program, requiring unaccredited districts to pay transportation and tuition costs set by the receiving districts (ranging from $9,500 to $21,000 annually per student) for any student requesting to transfer to an accredited district. In this way, the Student Transfer Program encourages students to desegregate themselves yet forces already failing districts, rather than the state, to pay for it, taking much-needed resources away from the students left behind. More than one thousand Normandy students (approximately 25 percent of the district population) transferred to schools in what were rhetorically represented as the “authentic suburbs”—according to media reports of the transfer process and public hearings.15 Consequently, the NSD ran out of money in the spring of 2014. A hotly contested emergency funding bill was passed by the Missouri legislature in March 2014 in order to keep the district open through the academic year. The battle over funding was largely framed as a debate about whether Missouri taxpayers should be responsible for bailing out “failing urban schools,” which happened to be located in historically white suburban space. As a bankrupt district, it was subsequently restructured by the state board of education, which suspended all contracts, temporarily placed it outside accreditation standards, and renamed it the Normandy Schools Collaborative. This prompted a new set of court actions and student transfer debates because it was technically (and strategically) no longer a district and therefore did not have to pay for student transfers or follow other requirements set for Missouri school districts. Prior to taking over the district, the state argued that students should be allowed to transfer and that the Normandy and Riverview Gardens districts had to pay any range of tuitions demanded by receiving districts. After the state takeover, however, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education successfully argued that only students that had transferred in the prior school year would be allowed to remain as transfer students. Tuition for those students was negotiated at a lower rate by the state.

Race, or more accurately, racism—whether couched in euphemisms or actively invoked—was unequivocally at the center of both formal deliberation and ad hoc discussions regarding the NSD, including who would be blamed, who should determine the district’s fate, who should pay for actions taken, and whose responsibility it is to educate “poor, urban kids” inconveniently located in St. Louis County.16 The reactions of parents and other residents in North County, which were divided between those choosing to leave the district and those choosing to stay, as well as the reactions of residents in the receiving districts, were highly racialized. After attending a public hearing in the majority-white Francis Howell School District, which was slated to receive most of Normandy’s transfer students via busing, one Normandy resident commented, “When I saw them screaming and hollering like they were crazy, I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, this is back in Martin Luther King days,’ they’re going to get the hoses out. They’re going to be beating our kids and making sure they don’t get off the school bus.”17 The statements by white parents that this resident was responding to included, “I now have to worry about my children getting stabbed? Or taking a drug? Or getting robbed? Because that’s the issue”; “We don’t want [these kids] at Francis Howell.”18 Ironically, prior to the transfer program the Francis Howell School District reported seventeen incidents in which a student had a weapon in 2013, as compared to six reported by NSD, and Francis Howell had ninety-six drug incidents compared to eleven at NSD.19

In discussions that took place in the NSD area, the topic of racism was highly vocalized by residents and played down by state administrators. At the public hearing held by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to introduce and defend the choices “under consideration” for the district, a long line of parents and students waited their turn to voice frustration and anger for “being set up to fail.”20 The history described in chapters 1 and 2 was here invoked by residents who opposed the educational policies of the districts. Speakers accused the department of “putting chains around our ankles,” perpetuating separate and unequal education, and intentionally splintering the Black community, since those choosing to transfer were pitted against those choosing to stay in the district. Several speakers compared putting the fate of the all-Black district in the hands of mostly white state officials to slavery, with one stating, “All that’s missing is the whip,” and several residents compared their grandchildren’s experience in North St. Louis County to their own experience growing up in the Jim Crow South, based on similarities of forced segregation and being put in situations that guaranteed failure.21 In the audience impromptu arguments broke out between Normandy residents regarding whether the district should be taken over by the state or absorbed into other districts through busing. Parents and administrators from Francis Howell School District also felt compelled to show up and voice opposition to “urban kids” being bused to suburban schools, citing support for community schools and forming unlikely alliances with Black residents advocating for keeping their kids in their own communities. Local and national media picked up the controversy, including a New York Times article and slide show focused on the racial conflict and a PBS web series that featured the debate in a segment asking what had changed since Brown v. Board of Education and the March on Washington fifty years ago.22

Controversies in the Missouri state legislature and in public debate over how to define and deal with underperforming schools are ongoing, but North St. Louis County has lost its suburban status, except when representations are intended to either lament that which was lost or highlight bodies-out-of-place . The physical space of this area has remained unchanged, so it is clear that the processes by which suburban space becomes urban and the work these spatial distinctions perform exist more within the realms of discursive and representational space than in physical space itself. Discursive and representational space would come to play an even bigger role a few months after the state take-over of the Normandy School District.

“Riots” in the Suburbs

Michael Brown was a student at Normandy High School during all of the events described in the preceding section. He graduated on August 3, 2014, after the highly politicized 2013–14 school year ended and immediately after the Normandy Schools Collaborative took over as a state-run entity. According to media accounts of the Normandy schools crisis and Normandy High School, Brown graduated from an urban school with urban problems. Five days after he graduated, however, Brown lay dead on what was reportedly a suburban street in the same geography, shot by a white police officer in front of Canfield Green Apartments in Ferguson. Many of the same media outlets that had cast the Normandy and Riverview Gardens school districts as urban suddenly referred to the area as “a quiet suburban community in greater Saint Louis” or described “riots in a St. Louis suburb” when covering protests and militarized police responses that followed Brown’s death. The rhetorical transformation illustrates the work of space and how certain things are expected to happen in some places but not in others. The fact that people had taken to the street and were met by a fully militarized police force had to be explained by something’s being out of place. As with the coverage of the schools crisis, representations of events in Ferguson relied on well-understood spatial signifiers—such as riotous (Black), quiet (white)—to evoke a contrast of differentiated racialized stereotypes, often without mentioning race. Articles published in national media outlets mused about how something so good (Ferguson in its so-called heyday) had gone so bad. Some cited “urban decay” and “ghettoization” as the reason “rioting” had moved to the suburbs, insinuating that Black people, and not the disinvestment and disparity that follows Black people, ruin nice suburban places and enact violence, even though most violence in North St. Louis County is enacted by public institutions.23 An article in Time magazine titled “How Ferguson Went from Middle Class to Poor in a Generation” appeared on the same day Governor Nixon ordered the National Guard to Ferguson and just a few days after Mayor Knowles had claimed middle-class status for all residents. Lamenting “the demise of suburban Ferguson,” and warning that something similar could be coming to a community near all Americans, the journalist stated, “In 1990, Ferguson, Mo. was a quiet middle class suburban enclave north of St. Louis with a population about three-quarters white. In 2000, the town’s population was roughly split between black and white with an unemployment rate of 5%. By 2010, however, the population was two-thirds black with unemployment exceeding 13%. . . . Demographic transformation came fast and stark to Ferguson, Missouri. So what happened?”24 The journalist identifies “fast and stark” demographic transformation as the answer to his question, “What happened?” to the “quiet middle class suburb.” He does not reference fast and stark disinvestment in the community. Nor does he correlate its “demise” with relentless and often violent hyperpolicing of Black residents for lost revenue. Instead, he equates decay and unemployment with the mere presence of Black people and presumably their culture.

The discursive regimes at work in the Normandy schools crisis and the media coverage of Michael Brown’s death establish the norms and hierarchies that “orchestrate, delimit, and sustain that which qualifies as ‘the human.’”25 As Judith Butler argues, the construction of the human is not a simple dialectic. Rather, it is produced “through a set of foreclosures, radical erasures, that are, strictly speaking, refused the possibility of cultural articulation. Hence, it is not enough to claim that human subjects are constructed, for the construction of the human is a differential operation that produces the more and the less ‘human,’ the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable. These excluded sites come to bound the ‘human’ as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation.”26 The sets of foreclosures, radical erasures, and policing of cultural articulation, which create urban subjects in suburban space, operate in relationship to relative proximities to blackness and thus determine degrees of the human, the inhuman, and the humanly unthinkable in and through space. The constitutive outside, however, does indeed haunt the boundaries of space in North St. Louis County and it did disrupt foreclosures and rearticulate possibilities in this area and beyond.

Imagining Suburbia

Dianne Harris, in her book on postwar suburbia, shows how the perceived and actual development of post–World War II US suburbs for a specifically white middle class was not only highly orchestrated by institutional policy and real estate markets but also seared into the psyche, imagination, and normative assumptions of the US public through calculated promotion and representation that both produced and maintained normative middle-class ideals as synonymous with white culture.27 In this way, the suburbs became defined as white space in opposition to “dark urban space,” in spite of the fact that US suburbs have always maintained surprising diversity. Extending this argument, Margaret Garb, in her book on housing reform in Chicago between 1871 and 1919, uses historical data to convincingly argue that the link between race and cultural perceptions of home ownership began much earlier than the post–World War II era: “Even at the turn of the [twentieth] century, a single-family house set on a tidy yard was fast becoming a mark of household health, respectability, and morality,” where perceptions of respectability worked in relationship to whiteness.28 The obsession with the single-family house and the importance of property was institutionalized by New Deal–era housing policy and instilled over time in US culture, which viewed home ownership as a fundamental right of white citizenship and a distinguishing factor of white culture. The systematic denial of home ownership to nonwhite citizens through both exclusion and lack of facilitation resulted in vast disparities in individual and family wealth since property ownership and appreciation are fundamental tools for passing assets between generations.

In fields that study metropolitan space, scholars’ recent coinage and frequent use of the term suburban ghetto, which was subsequently picked up by popular media, is intended to describe what happens when the suburban imaginary (as opposed to the actual suburbs) loses its middle-class white status and becomes a container of poor nonwhite people or specific ethnicities—as the ghetto has been theorized.29 This illustrates the need scholars feel to qualify low-income nonwhite suburbs as something other than authentic suburbs.30 In fact, anytime suburban space does not fit the imagination of white middle-class space, qualifications follow within scholarship and the popular media: for example, working-class suburbs (white but not middle class), affluent suburbs (white and upper-middle class), Black suburbs (middle class but not white), immigrant or ethnic suburbs (meaning non-European ethnic immigrants, since European immigrants overwhelmingly settled the first US suburbs), suburban ghettos (Black and poor), and barrio suburbs (Latinx and poor).31 In the same way that whiteness is the invisible “unraced” racial norm, the nonqualified suburbs are assumed to be white and middle class. A quick review of the table of contents of the first and second editions of The Suburban Reader, which is organized chronologically, correlates to what a literature review of suburban space reveals. That is, the economic qualifications of the suburbs entered the discursive space in the late 1800s, whereas ethnic, racial, cultural, and often racist qualifications appeared around the 1940s, when challenges to housing discrimination and opposition to racial covenants were gaining political traction.

In addition to defining the suburbs as white, the suburban imaginary is also a gender-conforming situation. Feminist scholars have shown how the suburbs produce and reproduce heteronormative assumptions about families and patriarchal hierarchies concerning the place and role of women.32 Therefore, areas with majority-female heads of households cannot be “the suburbs.” As Mary Jo Wiggins has shown, antiblack assumptions concerning non-white inferiority are also reinforced in Black suburbs because Black suburban residents lose real benefits and perceived status when investment and amenities go elsewhere.33 In this way, Black people, as opposed to other factors, are held responsible for the risk associated with Black space and the “rational” disinvestment that rhetorically recodes Black suburbs as something other than suburban. Journalists, politicians, and those speaking out within the public sphere, such as attendees at the forums held to address the ongoing Normandy schools crisis, join urban scholars in attaching the connotation of “subpar space” to Black people by requalifying suburban space as suburban ghettos or as urban space. By linking the loss of suburban status to the departure of white people, to new cultures of poverty, and to supposedly natural processes of “benign neglect,”34 spatial imaginaries are constructed and maintained that assume (1) authentic suburbs cannot exist without the presence of white people; (2) authentic suburbs cannot coexist with Black culture; (3) authentic suburbs cannot exist without heteronormative families; and (4) policy naturally redirects resources to other areas by way of color-blind capitalist logics (although capitalist logics are inherently raced). The race-making situation of the suburbs, as evidenced in North St. Louis County, supplies an exemption to antiblack spatial practice and policies through a discursively produced cultural politics that trades in the criminalization of Black residents, tropes of respectability, and policies that intentionally diminish the basic rights of Black citizens. In turn, leaders who find themselves charged with local governance in the unfavored “urban” quarter of suburban St. Louis County avoid dissolution by exploiting powerful racialized imaginaries concerning suburban and urban space.35

Imagining North St. Louis County

The recodification of North St. Louis County—from suburban to urban, and sometimes back again—relies on geographical imaginations directly tied to discursive representations. An imaginative geography, as Edward Said explains, “legitimates a vocabulary, a universe of representative discourse peculiar to the discussion and understanding” of a place.36 Imaginative geographies establish and maintain difference—familiarity and otherness—of bodies in space and are integral to forming and understanding identity as well as power. Through the stories told about places, dramatic boundaries are constantly drawn and redrawn on physical space at multiple scales through imaginative processes.37 The his tory of development in St. Louis is an excellent example of how individuals are expected to be in some places but not in others, and disciplinary means are necessary to keep individuals and groups “in place.”

As civil rights legislation opened up neighborhoods and schools to Black families, new discourses of certainty needed to be produced in conjunction with official antiracisms and emergent global political economies appearing in the wake of global postcolonial restructuring. Jodi Melamed observes that “in contrast to antiracist struggles led by social movements, official US antiracisms since World War II” (such as the desegregation of neighborhoods and schools) “have disconnected racism from material conditions” through control over constructions of rationality and discourses of certainty.38 The prevailing viewpoint became that if something appears to be economically rational, it is not racist. A case in point is a statement such as “I don’t dislike Black people, I just don’t want my property values to go down.”39 This is the reframed, race-neutral racial order that establishes the discursive terrain by which Black residents moving to St. Louis County were and are denied the full benefits of suburban citizenship through the reordering of material resources in St. Louis County in ways that are considered rational and routine.

Although the initial rhetoric and subsequent reports published in the early 1970s regarding what was happening in North St. Louis County demographically referenced race by referring to “Negro” populations, these arguments and representations assumed, without specific explanations, that “Negro” space, regardless of class, was risky space.40 Clearly it had to do with numbers. If only a few of the most highly qualified and “best-behaved” model “Negro” families moved into the suburbs, the inevitable desegregation of space could be said to have occurred successfully with limited consequences to the white spatial logic. In fact, this is how the idea was promoted by white liberals who helped pass the Fair Housing Act of 1968.41 However, the statistical threshold of this logic was extremely low. When many blocks in North St. Louis County quickly became majority Black, a new logic swiftly took its place. The historical link of blackness with risk was critical to maintaining racial hierarchies because it depersonalized and obscured antiblack practice—again, the refrain “I’m not racist. I’m just practical.” The idea that Black space is something to be feared and avoided did not require explanation, and representations of the dark ghetto conveniently provided an imaginative geography that linked Black culture to what was occurring in North St. Louis County. As Derek Gregory points out, the ways in which anxiety, fear, and fantasy produce, reproduce, and transform imaginative geographies through discursive practices go beyond simple classifications or reclassifications of space.42 In North St. Louis County, economic “considerations” and demographic “transition” provided a common narrative regarding the struggle over space; however, the discursive use of anxiety and fear created the fantasy that fundamentally transformed the everyday lives of all residents across this geography.

Anxiety, fear, and fantasy were certainly documented by a frenzy of academic research and reports published between 1973 and 1976, outlined in chapter 2. As municipal leaders attempted to control narratives, curb white panic, and slow what they believed would be an inevitable social and physical decline of the area, academic studies in the 1970s employed the same vocabulary of war used to promote racial zoning laws in St. Louis city in 1915 and describe the area as “falling” quickly to “Negro invasion.”43 The Federal Housing Administration and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation guidelines that established risk ratings for lenders perpetuated the war analogy. With racial homogeneity at the top of the risk assessment list, documents stated that neighborhoods “invaded” or “infiltrated” by African Americans had lost, or would lose, all value and succumb to the presence of a “Negro colony.”44 Subsequent writing on this area continued the narrative regarding the “fall” of communities brought about by “racial tipping”—the ratio of Black residents that guarantees an area will eventually become all Black.45 Using terms that appeared again in the 2014 article in Time magazine (quoted above) on the “fall” of Ferguson, a local observer remarked that by the end of the 1970s, “Ghetto spillover (stretched) almost all the way across the county in a northwesterly direction.”46

By the 1970s, the urban core was no longer the perceived sole container of Black space in St. Louis, although, as shown in chapter 2, Black people had lived and formed communities in St. Louis County since before St. Louis city was founded.47 The rapidly changing “demographic makeup” distinctly challenged the local suburban imaginary and spatial identity of many people who had grown up in North County. Where did you go to high school? is a question famously understood in St. Louis as a way to locate a person’s social and economic status, and St. Louisans place particular emphasis on spatial identity, a concern that harkens back to the area’s history of physical, political, and economic fragmentation. Three people interviewed for this research who graduated from Normandy High School in the 1950s, at a time when the school was virtually all-white and academically outperformed every other high school in the region, described the ways by which they had recalibrated their attachments and decoupled their identity from the space in which they had grown up. “I don’t tell younger people that I went to Normandy High School because I just don’t want to have to explain that it was a totally different school. It was a different universe,” a white woman stated. “Older people get it—get the history,” she went on, “so I might tell older people.” The two men (both white) I interviewed also described the area as “unrecognizable” because “you know, it’s just not a place you’d want to go now,” one of them explained. “When we have class reunions there’s always the question, Do we even go back to the old neighborhood?” All three people described an initial fight for, and subsequent relinquishment of, space in terms of imagined geographies of “our space” and “their space.” All three also expressed the ways in which anxiety, fear, and fantasies of what might happen discursively unified many people as “us” as opposed to “them.” As one man stated, “A choice had to be made by every one of us. Either we maintained what we had created for ourselves in spite of them, or we left. In the end we had no choice. It was now their place.”48

The white spatial imaginary is not just policed by white individuals, as chapter 3 has shown. Many of the Black mayors interviewed for this research made distinctions between suburban space and urban people, consistently citing suburban norms as the reason people and space must be policed.49 With statements such as “People from the projects must be taught how to act in the suburbs,” and “People who don’t know how to mow their grass have no business living in the suburbs,” Black leaders employ a form of suburban respectability politics that is specifically spatial. In addition to municipal autonomy, the incompatibility of people and space came up repeatedly as the reason for excessive numbers of citations issued in this area and the reason that nothing needed to change. Variations on the argument that “people who can’t act right in the suburbs need to go back to the ghetto” are common refrains that reinforce the racialized dialectic of urban and suburban space.50 Discursively deploying spatial signifiers, mayors and alderpersons, when asked to describe their cities, most often said something like “We are a small suburb with big urban problems.” Expectations of home ownership and property rights were also commonly cited. Patrick Green, who identifies as African American and is the mayor of Normandy, used cultural politics from both a white and Black perspective when he explained,

People can use their house as a weapon by not doing what they’re supposed to. Having a place to live is a privilege. A home is a privilege. It comes with responsibility. Our laws and ordinances are intended to protect the city when people don’t uphold their responsibilities. . . . The question should not be, Why are police giving out so many tickets? The question should be, Why are so many people breaking the law? . . . The state says we can keep giving out all these tickets but now we’re supposed to turn the money over [to the schools]. That’s slavery, making you work for the land. . . . When they came to talk to us they accused us of being the number one city in the ticket scheme. That’s like calling us niggers.51

This statement reveals the conflation of multiple spatial and racial tropes and identifications used by municipal leaders to justify racialized practices for the purpose of meeting fiscal responsibilities. The concept that having a place to live is a privilege is derivative of the idea that homeownership is quintessential to the American Dream and the common trope that minority citizens expect to receive everything from the welfare state. The idea that the rights of property trump all other rights stems directly from the neoliberal concept that property rights and the right to protect “the city” are always elevated above personal rights; the responsibilities that come with having a place to live, in this case in the city of Normandy, fall under the unstated expectations of suburban citizenship. Equating the requirement (of Senate Bill 5) to turn money from fines and fees that exceed the legal limit over to the public schools with slavery is an interesting take on “working for the land” and also conflates the work of race and space in this area. Mayor Green and several other mayors in North St. Louis County consistently contend that being singled out or cited as a number one abuser of “taxation by citation” is due to the racial makeup of these cities and is motivated solely by racism. As chapter 3 illustrates, these claims have merit; however, they are significantly undermined by the suffering residents experience as a result of these practices, which rely on a generalized tolerance of suffering in Black space.

Spatializing Identity

Contradictory categorizations—suburban versus urban—are both claimed and deployed, sometimes interchangeably, by residents of North St. Louis County, depending on the work they perform, the identities they mobilize, and the distinctions they are intended to make. This is clearly evident in the attitudes, opinions, and spatial practices of residents in North St. Louis County. Residents interviewed for this research (N=105), who were randomly intercepted in various locations across the geography, were asked a number of questions regarding whether they perceive North St. Louis County as suburban or urban; how they define urban versus suburban; whether, and how, they see differences between Black experience in St. Louis County versus St. Louis city; what their experience has been with policing practices; and whether or not they support municipal consolidation measures.52 Among other things, these interviews show distinct differences with regard to perceptions of space—as urban or suburban—between Black residents (N=85) and white residents (N=20). Differences were also evident in the ways Black and white residents quantified and codified space and their perceptions of whether, and how, Black experience differed between St. Louis County and St. Louis city. While gender did not stand out as a significant factor, the age of respondents did appear to correlate with specific responses.

The distinctions respondents made about urban and suburban space were significant. When asked whether they believed North St. Louis County was urban or suburban, 65 percent of Black respondents stated that North St. Louis County is urban, while 100 percent of white respondents defined it as suburban. Interestingly, when white residents living outside North St. Louis County (but in the region) were interviewed in a separate study (N=16), most (78 percent) defined specific areas in North St. Louis County as urban.53 Regarding why North County is urban, one older Black man (aged 66–75) from Normandy stated what many Black respondents shared in various ways: “The neighborhood was suburban when I moved in, now it’s urban. It’s because the people have changed, and the diversity. There are more Blacks in urban places than whites.” Another respondent, a Black woman (aged 56–65) from Pagedale, like many respondents, equated urban and suburban with changing class status. She said, “This area is urban, it’s not suburban at all. In our neighborhood, people don’t have enough money to be suburban. . . . People in the suburbs do things because they want to while in an urban area they do things because they HAVE to.” A middle-aged Black woman from Ferguson associated suburban space with the quality of services and equated changes in services with racial changes: “I was the second African American on my block in Ferguson twenty-seven years ago. When I arrived it was suburban and the services were really high quality. As the racial makeup changed, the services got much worse.” A young Black man (aged 20–25) simply said, “This area is urban because no white people live here at all.”

These descriptions suggest that, in the perception of these respondents, space can easily change, or be recodified, from urban to suburban and back again, depending on who lives there and what they are doing. This supports the argument that space is codified depending on the messages being sent regarding class and race and that it can change quickly, depending on who controls the narrative. The data also showed that space is actively racialized and that Black residents view themselves as contributing to the reclassification of space (i.e., “Black people live here [so it is urban],” or “white people live there [so it is suburban]”). Furthermore, according to respondents, once an area is qualified as “the ghetto” or “the hood,” as many described North St. Louis County, it must be urban.54 This is an important finding because it corresponds with Black residents’ lowered expectations for the space in which they live.

Regarding definitions of suburban space, Black respondents across age and gender groups most often said things like “It’s quiet,” “It’s not as busy,” “White people live there,” “It’s wealthier,” “It’s cleaner,” and “It’s more close knit.” Similarly, regarding urban space, Black respondents observed things like “It’s busier/noisier,” “Black people live there,” “It’s poorer,” “It’s the hood,” and “It’s more crowded.” When asked to define and describe the differences between urban and suburban space, Black residents overwhelmingly cited experiential, demographic, and behavioral characteristics—things that can change quickly—rather than physical qualities of space, such as density, building typology, or green space.

White residents of North St. Louis County were more likely to base definitions of urban and suburban on physical definitions—things that do not change quickly—such as density, residential or commercial uses, and amount of open space. When asked to define suburban space, white residents most often said things like “There are single-family homes,” “It’s residential,” or “It has more open space.” Unlike Black respondents, none of the white respondents directly cited race in their responses. Regarding urban space, white respondents said things like “There are apartment buildings,” “Things are closer together,” and “You don’t need a car.” White residents interviewed for this research largely lived in communities that have recently shifted to majority Black, such as Ferguson, but live in predominantly white neighborhoods. These residents were also more likely to cite changes in the community and unrest as things they dislike about living there. They did not, however, describe the area as urban, presumably because they themselves still live in the community and identify as suburban citizens, citing more permanent features as evidence of suburban conditions. This hypothesis is based on the fact that whites living outside North St. Louis County were more likely to describe the area as urban, citing different types of physical evidence such as abandoned buildings, defunct commercial districts, and trash. While the sampling of white residents both inside and outside North St. Louis County was relatively small, responses suggest that once white residents had moved out of the area, they perceived it as urban rather than suburban. Age is also a determining factor, as older Black residents living in the area for more than ten years (N=15) were more likely to describe their community as suburban and to cite “outsiders moving in” as one of their dislikes. Black residents under the age of fifty-five overwhelmingly stated “the police” as the thing they disliked the most about living in North St. Louis County.55

Another significant distinction between Black and white respondents is the perception of Black experience in the county versus the city. Ninety-four percent of Black respondents across age and gender said different experiences did exist, and of those, virtually all stated that it is easier for Black people to live in the city than in the county. Black respondents cited better experiences with the police, not being stopped on a regular basis, not being harassed for everyday activities, and “blending in” as the most common reasons why this is the case. The specific question, Do you think African Americans have a different experience in the city versus the county? led to comments such as “Oh yeah, it’s definitely easier in the city,” “Yes, you don’t get stopped and harassed in the city,” “They leave you alone in the city,” and “Out here [in the county] you gotta watch what you do more. Just basic things like walkin’ down the street. It’s not that way in the city.” Many people went into detail:

Black man from Bellefontaine Neighbors (aged 18–25)

Young people in the city can walk around freely without being worried about being stopped because they look like they are up to no good. In the county, if you walk in a group with your friends you have to hope that there isn’t any cops around. They will stop you and ask you what you are doing and where you are going.

Black woman from Cool Valley (aged 46–55)

Black people in the city don’t have to deal with nearly as much as you would if you lived in the county. They are way more petty in the county. They have too many petty laws out here, whatever law they can make to get money out of you they will. In the city they just don’t care. Both experiences are tragic.

Black man from Northwoods (aged 18–25)

Definitely. I’ve been trailed by police in the county so many times I can’t even count. Not here in Northwoods because the officers know me, but in other parts. The county uses people for revenue. The city police watch for actual crime.

Black man from Ferguson (aged 18–25)

On a certain level, things are nicer in the county. Everybody wants to come to the county until they deal with the police here.

Black woman from Hanley Hills (aged 18–25)

The city is trying to maintain order. The county is trying to make money. In the city you are not treated as badly by the government.

The majority of white respondents (75 percent) stated that there was no difference for Black people living in the city versus the county. Of the 25 percent of white respondents who believed there was a difference, virtually all said it was easier for black people to live in the county, saying things like “It’s nicer out here,” and “There’s less crime.”56 One white man from Ferguson between the ages of forty-six and fifty-five, stating something similar to several other white respondents, said, “Yes, blacks definitely feel safer here. It’s safer for their sons and daughters. I’ve never met anyone who is unhappy. St. Louis city can be a terrifying place. You don’t have to worry about that here even over on Canfield. I hang out over there a lot.” Similarly, a white woman from St. John between the ages of fifty-six and sixty-five said, “I’m sure they feel safer here in the county than in the city. They can get a better education and they have all these nice parks they can use. St. John has its own police department but I’m also within walking distance to five other municipalities that all have their own police departments too.” I found it interesting that white residents felt they could speak so definitively regarding Black experience, despite the fact that their perceptions were more or less the opposite of those of Black residents on this topic.

In and Out of Place

In light of the answers of both Black and white respondents to questions regarding the relative difficulty or ease of living in the city and the county, as well as differing opinions regarding what they liked and disliked about living in North St. Louis County, the primary factor for differing opinions appears to be experiences with the police and expectations of behavior and norms between city and county (see table 4.1). Virtually all Black respondents described multiple forms of harassment by the police in St. Louis County that either they or people they knew had recently experienced. These experiences shaped their attitudes toward where they lived and the stories they told others and themselves about this place. Their experiences also shaped how they viewed what they had sacrificed versus what they had gained by living in the county and the expectations they had in both places. Many stated that they wished to move back to the city but could not, because of lost investment in their homes or their reliance on a friend or family member with whom they lived.57 Experiences with the police elicited the longest and most impassioned responses from Black residents. Some people were angry and some were shaking when they shared their stories. While there are many experiences included in this chapter, there were many more shared in the interviews that were not included.

While almost every Black respondent had a personal story regarding policing and their expectation of being stopped, white respondents in general had a positive view of the police. White residents stated that they believed leaders and the police had their best interest in mind and they said that public safety should be at the top of leaders’ priorities. White residents most often cited racial tensions and change as what they liked least about living in North St. Louis County. One white respondent who had lived in an unincorporated area of North County for forty-seven years said the thing she least liked about living there was “the perception that I live in the ghetto.”

Regarding leadership, Black respondents overwhelmingly disagreed that municipal leaders acted in the best interest of their community, while virtually all white residents said the leaders of their municipality were doing a good job. Black residents identified money and greed as the only reasons for the amount of citations and court fees handed out in North St. Louis County, while white residents largely agreed with the narratives of municipal leaders that public safety was the sole reason for the types of policing that took place.

Black woman from Woodson Terrace (aged 46–55)

I don’t buy into it when they talk about public safety. Hell yeah it’s about money. At any given time you can see someone pulled over, almost all the time. I’ve seen it for over ten years—they bank on it.

Black woman from Dellwood (aged 46–55)

Where is the danger to public safety all those leaders are talking about? All I see right now are bogus tickets being given to people in the area for crazy reasons. I believe they give these tickets to fund themselves, yes I do. How else are they going to get all that military equipment they use on us? WE pay for it.

White respondents generally agreed with the public safety argument that leaders repeatedly made. Echoing statements made by several other white respondents, a white woman from Pasadena Hills between the ages of fifty-six and sixty-five said, “I think the leaders are just interested in keeping the city safe. There are high standards for homeowners and they keep things real nice. They have all of our best interests at heart. You have to hit people in their pocketbook if you want to make an impact and get their attention. They use money to get people’s attention, but it’s all about safety and keeping this a nice place to live.” Similarly, another white woman between the ages of fifty-six and sixty-five stated, “I’ve worked with companies that have contracts with the police, so I have good experiences. I believe the policing is done for public safety or because someone is a suspicious person. I believe that it’s for public safety. Police seem to serve the public good. None of them are very well-paid, and the job comes with danger. I have to believe they want to make a difference. But you can have bad apples in every profession.” Unlike the many firsthand experiences shared by Black respondents above, this respondent’s opinions were based on what she “had to believe,” since that was what she most often heard. Another white respondent, a man in his sixties from Calverton Park, expressed his assessment, which, like many others’, used a cultural explanation. He said,

I’ve never been targeted because I’m not Black. I have a hard time believing it’s about hatred. It’s because they get more calls from those communities. I know police and they’re trained to take control, and sometimes force needs to be used. I was stopped with my son in his car and the officer gave me the opportunity to say why I was speeding. That impressed me. I ride a Harley, and when cops approach me in my leather it’s my role to put them at ease. Black culture does the opposite. They get belligerent immediately. If one guy has a knife and the other has a gun, you know who’ll win.

There were of course exceptions to how Black and white respondents answered, and some viewpoints of both Black and white residents did occasionally fall outside the polarized pattern that can be seen in the data. For example, when I asked a white woman from Bel-Nor between the ages of forty-six and fifty-five whether city leaders had motives beyond safety when policing residents, she stated, “I doubt their motives are all that conscious or stated. They don’t really think about it. I think the people setting policy don’t understand the context of people’s lives that are being affected. There’s a disconnect. The people affected are basically invisible to them.” Not surprisingly, Black respondents were overwhelmingly in favor of municipal consolidation while white residents were almost entirely opposed.58

TABLE 4.1 Selected questions and answers to survey conducted in North St. Louis County (N=104*)

Note: Respondents were randomly approached in public settings (light rail stations, markets, community events, etc.) and asked whether they would participate in the anonymous survey. The answers listed (or something similar) were offered by the respondents and were not multiple choice.

* Respondents self-identifying as Black N=79; respondents self-identifying as white N=25.

† Respondents’ first answers are listed.

‡ All respondents’ answers are listed.

The link between white people and imaginations of suburban space, and the requalification of space when Black people arrive, is clear from the responses of both Black and white respondents. Black residents clearly state this distinction in explicitly racial terms. While Black residents who do not experience the benefits of so-called suburban living view North St. Louis County as urban, as do whites who have moved out of the area, white residents who claim suburban identity view this area as suburban. Although white respondents never mentioned race, they tended to code this area as suburban until they moved, at which point the area became urban in their absence. In contrast to Black respondents, white respondents used many different ways to signify race without ever naming it. This careful use of language illustrates how color-blind racism and “postracial” discourse are practiced. It also testifies to the power of liberal humanism to narrate and obscure racialized conditions.59

While most Black respondents said North St. Louis County is urban, they also stated that it is easier for Black people to live in St. Louis city, which they also identified as urban. This reveals that recodifying North St. Louis County as urban has not made it easier for Black residents to live there. It also suggests that the recodification of historically white suburban space produces disruptions that lead to specific phenomena and experiences for Black residents that do not occur in spaces that are historically associated with Black people, since Black respondents clearly state that it is “easier to live” in St. Louis city. While Black urban space carries with it an expectation of suffering (as discussed above), so-called urban space in general has also been shown to have a higher threshold of tolerance for diversity and difference,60 and, as many respondents described it, Black people are expected to live there. But the intersection of urban people and suburban space creates a contradictory set of expectations, as well as varying degrees and experiences of suburban citizenship. The transformation of North St. Louis County, or at least parts of it, from suburban to urban space—in the discursive spaces of public debate and in the minds of the residents themselves—has meant a lowering of expectations for Black residents living under draconian practices, such as debtor’s prisons, which come to be viewed as normal. As a middle-aged Black man from Pine Lawn shared, “It was worse until the Mike Brown incident and then it became known what was happening to people. It shouldn’t have been happening in the first place—so much that people got used to it. But they did get used to it.”

This is an important observation, given that several reports, such as the one published by the Manhattan Institute in 2012, have declared spatial segregation to be essentially over.61 On one level, the fact that North St. Louis County is majority Black can be interpreted as proof that anyone can live in suburban communities. This interpretation of data assumes that space and spatial mobility are experienced and inhabited in the same way by all people and groups. Given the reality of experiences described above, North St. Louis County is an example of bait-and-switch policy in which urban residents claim benefits in the suburbs only to find that they are not only urban once again, but also held financially responsible for the losses municipalities incur when space is recoded.

Urban space, when it is deployed as the container of “dark” bodies, is understood as the disposable space of the city, the pornotopology, the native colony, inhabited by dark bodies and enjoyed by others—where anything goes but where residents are restricted and controlled. Under these circumstances, as discussed in the introduction to this book, discursively produced spatial imaginaries of white and Black space reinforce a biopolitical construct that works to divide the city into those who should live and those who could die.62

The recodification of space from suburban to urban means not only that Black residents expect that they will be treated badly, but also that administrators and policy makers can erase entire communities, and that people outside this area can ignore practices that would not be tolerated in other locations. In this way, physical and discursive spaces intersect to produce a cultural politics that rationalizes both “fast” and “slow” state violence.63 In North St. Louis County, discursive spatial regimes control, select, organize, and redistribute power relations, material outcomes, and identity based on the risk historically attached to blackness. These discursive regimes not only objectify residents but also critically influence how individual subjectivities of both leaders and residents are formed and re-formed.