1

RACE AND SPACE

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

—John Ehrlichman, adviser to Richard Nixon

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

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

Mapping Race

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races” closely coincided with his extensive sociological study of Black settlement, space, and experience in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899, is one of the earliest sociological studies to formally link race and space and to acknowledge that all Black people in the United States—indeed, even in one city—do not have the same experience.16 Using multiple datasets including household surveys, neighborhood audits and maps, and census data, Du Bois shows that differing experiences and identities are tied to location, environment, class, education, and family, and he illustrates a multiplicity of social structures across the Black community. As in the work of other Black intellectuals writing and lecturing at the turn of the twentieth century, the idea of racial uplift and moralizations based on class distinctions and behavior are evident throughout, with language concerning the “untutored race in whose hand lay an unfamiliar instrument of civilization.”17 While civilization is a prevailing frame, Du Bois links the problems of “the Negro” to physical and social segregation within the city. This precedent would establish the analytical tools for urban sociology several decades later, although Du Bois was not generally credited for this important work, nor were the complexities of Black culture that his work revealed taken up by white scholars at that time.

As culture and civilization continued as dominant reference points in early twentieth-century discourse and analysis of race and space, these frames were becoming increasingly important in the emerging fields of urban studies and urban sociology. The fetishization of Cartesian mapping and quantitative analysis of physical urban space by Enlightenment thinkers intersected with the growing subfield of urban sociology in early twentieth-century scholarship. Clearly using yet not referencing Du Bois’s observations and methodology in his study of Philadelphia, scholars began to conceptualize the city as an urban ecology of social interaction, assimilation, and exclusion. Most notably with regard to the early confluence of spatial and social studies, the Chicago school of sociology under the direction of Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess literally mapped race, culture, and ethnicity onto the physical space of Chicago as a way to analyze social relations in the city.18 This method identified areas where clear physical and cultural boundaries contained distinct racial groups that, because of markers of blackness, “naturally” defied assimilationist logics.19 Burgess also diagramed areas (figure 1.1) that formed concentric circles around the inner city where more porous boundaries allowed for the passage of ethnic Europeans out of the slums, which he describes as “the purgatory of ‘lost souls,’” and toward the “Promised Land” of normative white society and space beyond the city center.20

FIGURE 1.1 Ernest W. Burgess, “Chart II. Urban Areas,” diagram of Chicago, 1925. Burgess, “Growth of the City,” 55.

In 1937, the urban historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford published what would become a highly influential essay in the study of metropolitan space and spatial practice titled “What is a City?” Although Mumford was an ardent critic of modernist design, this piece translated what had become the mantra of modernist architecture, form follows function, into the urban scale.21 As a critic of modernism, Mumford believed modernist design brought about what he saw as the destruction of cohesive cultures and the dehumanization of urban space, although Mumford’s definitions of culture and human privileged white societal norms and racialized stereotypes. Mumford argued that the form of the city should respond to the social interactions and cultural requirements of its inhabitants. The success of his work and that of others who followed his lead, such as Jane Jacobs, did much to discursively link social space to physical space in urban policy and design. Ironically, however, modernists used such arguments to justify the clearing of nonwhite areas, which they claimed were ridden with pathological behaviors, to make way for infrastructure projects that facilitated suburban expansion and to build segregated urban housing projects that were said to solve urban social problems through design.22

A year after Mumford published “What is a City?,” the Chicago school sociologist Louis Wirth published another urban critique titled “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” in which he argued that space actively produces different types of social interactions and “personalities” within the city. Wirth believed that the modern city encourages individualism, anonymity, superficial relationships, and fictional kinships between people.23 The analyses of both Mumford and Wirth drew upon the Garden City movement and operated from an urban/rural binary, which tended to judge “good space” as closer to nature, whereas “bad space” existed outside the natural or the human.24 The discursive power of the suburban spatial imaginary that was developing at the same time used a similar frame and viewed the city as crowded, dirty, chaotic, and filled with questionable humanity. In contrast to the city, the spaces of garden developments and the new suburbs were celebrated for their low population density, their clean air, their orderly space, and the white “humanity” found within them. In all these examples, cultural norms were used to signify race (differentiating those who conformed from those who didn’t) and to distinguish between good and bad space, while also reinforcing connections between such spaces and the “more human” or “less human” people who occupied them. Contrary to Enlightenment constructions and contemporary tropes of race, whereby nature was equated with the uncivilized and closer to the “less-than-human” races and cultures, discourses that emerged from the Garden City movement resignified nature as pure and good and theorized suburban space as the “most human” environment, in order to promote settlements outside the urban core.25 Not surprisingly, these two contradictory frames of nature—as savage on one hand and unadulterated and pristine on the other—existed simultaneously and were deployed according to the work they were intended to do. The same advertisements for developments in North St. Louis County that evoked a lack of civilization and morality in the city utilized romanticized imagery that celebrated proximity to nature as a major selling point to both elite and working-class white families.

In 1939, soon after Mumford and Wirth published essays on the city, E. Franklin Frazier (also a student of the Chicago school) published The Negro Family in the United States, which, like Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro, more specifically linked race to space and culture and, unlike the work of Park and Burgess, went beyond viewing Black space in strictly pathological terms.26 Frazier intended the book as a historical analysis of forces shaping the domestic cultures of Black families migrating from the rural South to northern cities, and he attributed these forces to social rather than racial factors. Contrary to Mumford and Wirth, Frazier did not romanticize rural space; instead, he equated the rural with slave culture, which had in his view made Black migrants from the South less civilized than Black people living in northern US cities. As he saw it, southern “Negroes” were detrimental to culturally advanced urban Black social structures. Like the early writings of Du Bois, Frazier’s work embraced the theme of racial uplift while also bringing nuance to understandings of Black identity and culture. Frazier’s decoupling of distinct Black experiences was still a needed counterpoint to the tendency by white scholars and Black nationalist activists and scholars to lump blackness and Black identity in the United States within a singular definition.27 In a similar vein, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton published an extensive ethnography in 1945, looking at the complex social structures and spaces of Black Chicago. Drake and Cayton looked with particular interest at class distinctions within the Black community, with specific attention to space. Although Frazier, Drake, and Cayton were sympathetic to the larger Black community and intended to add levels of complexity to views of Black culture and identity while holding white society accountable for the plight of Black citizens, these two publications would help establish the grounds on which social pathologies and risk were linked to Black people and Black space by white policy makers twenty years later.

In the same period that Chicago school sociologists were producing detailed descriptions of everyday life in Black communities with an emphasis on social patterns often linked to social pathologies, another student of the Chicago school, Oliver C. Cox, made different observations regarding social dynamics. As a Marxist, Cox argued that racial disparities and antagonisms were caused by the forces of capitalism and by the “peculiar type of economic exploitation characteristic of capitalist society,” rather than by social differences, pathologies, or cultural deficiencies.28 While culture and urban space did not explicitly factor into Cox’s work, the absence of culture as an explanation for disparity and his focus on economic structures were important yet overlooked contributions to studies of urban space at that point. Around the same time, an older Du Bois approached culture in a much different way from his early work. Forty-three years after his essay on racial uplift, Du Bois shed his Enlightenment skin with respect to “civilization” and returned to the concept of race in 1940, now situated within his own experience and through the prism of the racial narratives of his ancestors.29 Like other Black scholars, Du Bois theorized a diasporic Pan-Africanism and held that the imaginative capacity of memory and struggle culturally links groups of people to specific geographies across time and space. According to this view, “the fact of race” emerges as a response to racialized struggle and is a product of shared histories, memories, and culture.

Du Bois’s theorizing of a Pan-Africanism and embrace of blackness as experience were not dissimilar to the work of other relatively well-known Black scholars. Aimé Césaire’s incitement to discourse from an anticolonial perspective conceptualized Negritude as “a violent affirmation” of shared blackness and a culture of freedom.30 Similarly, Frantz Fanon equated liberation with the emplaced and embodied cultural expression of the liberated—a creative culture of struggle and resistance in contrast to the repressive culture of an oppressor.31 For Fanon, culture is constituted by the collective practices of a people in order to “describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence.”32 Cultural practice is therefore rooted in struggle—the struggle for or against freedom. Theorizing a national cultural consciousness, which he clearly stated is not nationalism, Fanon held that culture transforms, and is transformed by, struggle within the context of group domination and subjugation. Understood in this way, racist and antiracist practices do not just employ or deny culture; they are in fact culture itself. For Fanon’s project, this meant reconceptualizing what blackness was in relationship to rewritten histories and present and future possibilities for nationhood and collective identity.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, a Black radical tradition rooted in memory, emplacement, cultural expression, and activism was nurtured by many scholars, yet the intersections of other oppressions such as gender and sexuality within the space of Black scholarship and activism were primarily identified and theorized by Black women who struggled to be heard and recognized. Many of these women, who are less known than their male counterparts, used the prevalent frame of racial uplift and culture to argue for the inclusion of Black women in the struggle for full citizenship and the recognition that Black women faced greater struggles when it came to individual rights. Anna Julia Cooper, for example, relentlessly confronted Black male scholars, activists, and clergy, demanding that the unique experiences of Black women and poor Black families be equally elevated within critical debates of the time regarding race, rights, and social relations. In her book A Voice from the South, published in 1892, Cooper also argued that the North, which claimed a moral authority and prided itself with abolishing slavery, in fact perpetuated southern sentiments toward Black citizens as culturally inferior by capitulating to the South when it came to laws and practices impacting the everyday lives of Black Americans and especially those of Black women.33

Within the spaces of journalism and political reform, Charlotta Bass is another Black woman who made critical contributions to the Black freedom struggle, yet the Black men with whom she worked, such as Marcus Garvey and Paul Robeson, were more recognized for similar efforts. Bass understood that space is a critical factor in the struggle for freedom and rights in the United States, and much of her work focused on segregation in the workplace, schools, and housing, including important work targeting racially restrictive housing covenants. Bass also understood the power of discourse and the intersecting nature of oppression. The newspaper she operated, the California Eagle, provided alternative representations of African Americans in Los Angeles to those found in the popular white media outlets and helped to promote coalition building between those fighting against minority-targeted oppressions. The women who led Ferguson resistance similarly understood the power of space and discourse to both reinforce and disrupt unjust practices and embraced an understanding of intersecting oppressions. These same women and gender-nonconforming individuals were often overlooked by the media and dismissed by men in the movement.

Amy Jacques Garvey was also marginalized by the attention given to Black men doing the same work. After the death of her husband, Marcus Garvey, Jacques Garvey continued the work of the Pan-African movement, but much of her experience was shaped by the considerable male chauvinism she encountered. Like so many Black women in the first half of the twentieth century, Jacques Garvey occupied the territory of what Ula Taylor describes as “community feminism”—“a territory that allowed her to join feminism and nationalism in a single coherent, consistent framework.”34 This territory allowed Black women the space to exist within male-dominated Black nationalism as well as a platform from which to critique chauvinistic attitudes toward women’s intellectual and political capacities. A few decades later, in the 1970s and 1980s, Black women in North St. Louis County found themselves in a similar territory when they began to unseat white men and took over many municipal offices. Seeking political legitimacy in the region, which counted their race and gender against them, while also trying to preserve their communities, these women simultaneously critiqued white gendered norms while working within existing frameworks and normative constructs of suburban governance and respectability. The women and gender-nonconforming individuals leading Ferguson resistance, however, did not concede space to men who demanded higher visibility or recognition for the same or less work, nor did they feel the need to conform to external expectations of respectability or “civilized” conduct. In this way, the site of resistance is not just a physical space of protest but is equally the everyday spaces in which people unapologetically live and act as they choose, thus shifting the landscape in which a cultural politics operates and creating an opening for blackness-as-freedom.

Blackness and War

Daniel Patrick Moynihan did not appear to have much knowledge of the rich work Black radical scholars had produced when he selectively drew from the work of E. Franklin Frazier and adopted the anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s 1959 coinage “the culture of poverty” (originally used in reference to Mexican villages) to draft his 1965 report The Negro Family—The Case for Action.35 Written in conjunction with the Johnson administration’s “war on poverty,” the report illustrated how scholarship that seeks to ameliorate conditions of racial oppression can be strategically reinterpreted to aid and abet policy and rhetoric that absolve the state and blame victims.36 It also began what would become a long history of policy wars discursively and literally aimed at discrediting and criminalizing blackness and Black citizens specifically in and through urban space.

Although the report named slavery as the underlying evil and credited “the Negro” with “not dying out,” it framed the Black population rather than the color line for ongoing problems in US society, because of what Moynihan identified as cultural inferiority. Claiming that Black culture inherently deviates from hetero-normative family structures, Moynihan placed Black women—in the form of the “Negro matriarch”—at the center of a “tangled pathology” of social deviance.37 The report emphasized and quoted Frazier’s use of disorganization to characterize Black families and Black space: “The impact of hundreds of thousands of rural southern Negroes upon northern metropolitan communities presents a bewildering spectacle. Striking contrasts in levels of civilization and economic well-being among these newcomers to modern civilization seem to baffle any attempt to discover order and direction in their mode of life.”38 Not coincidentally, the report appeared at a time when growing impatience within the Black community was pressuring lawmakers to pass and enforce civil rights legislation, and the growing unpopularity of the Vietnam War was creating difficulties for the administration. Moynihan’s re-presentation of Frazier’s “disorder” and the conclusions drawn regarding an inherently inferior “Negro culture” were read against a backdrop of media images portraying disorder in the streets of Black neighborhoods, Black people confronting authorities, increasing solidarity with the Black Power movement, and visible public frustration over the war in Vietnam. Jonathan Metzl has pointed out that during this same period, racial anxieties prompted further conflations of mental illness with blackness, spawning countless “pathologies of blackness” that strengthened Moynihan’s tangled pathology thesis and delegitimized the aim of protests. 39 Almost fifty years later, similar language was used to single out the failure of Black mothers (matriarchs) and the absence of heteronormative families in Ferguson, Missouri, which also occurred against the backdrop of images depicting angry Black residents “disrupting the peace.”

The legislation credited to the Johnson administration’s war on poverty prior to 1970 included tangible poverty interventions; however, the discourse promoted by the Moynihan report ushered in, and shored up, two decades of federal and state legislation that subsequently hollowed out new public programs and dealt a substantial blow to prior New Deal–era public policy.40 Shifting subsidies to the private sector and criminalizing nonconforming individuals and groups, the war on poverty quickly morphed into the war on drugs under the Nixon administration in 1971. As the epigraph to this chapter reveals, the war on drugs targeted the two most visible opponents of the administration, hippies and Black people.41

While the criminalization of Black citizens was not new, postemancipation methods in the United States had operated primarily through overtly constructed Jim Crow segregation laws or through accepted forms of violence, such as lynching and intimidation by white mobs and individuals. These forms of criminalization and violence used the fear of contamination (racial mixing) and the fear of violation (of white women) as the primary rhetorical devices to maintain hierarchies. The war on poverty and subsequent war on drugs expanded the threat that blackness posed in the white imagination by framing blackness itself as a threat to US ideals, exceptionalism, and economic success, all of which reinforced an imagined link between the United States and whiteness. Both wars (on poverty and drugs) placed Black citizens, and particularly Black women, outside heteronormative social structures. As many people, including geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, have shown, this rhetoric was not motivated merely by personal racist attitudes. It also served as an important political tactic for quelling resistance and bolstering the US economy through prison expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity.42 Areas of cities where Black residents were forced to live because of longstanding racist policies—such as exclusionary zoning, racial covenants, red-lining, lending biases, and real estate practices—were further coded as places where cultures of poverty, drugs, and deviance coalesced and risk was firmly attached to the bodies and spaces of Black people through seemingly rational means resulting in what amounts to a social death.43

The war on drugs was picked up in earnest and expanded in 1981 by the Reagan administration, which filled in the gaps to establish a full set of legislative teeth for the criminalization of the Black family. With the help of the Just Say No campaign, spearheaded by the First Lady, Black men, as well as women, were incarcerated at exponentially increasing rates for nonviolent offenses throughout the 1980s and blamed for drug epidemics that hit Black communities especially hard, while a steady flow of illicit drugs made their way to white suburban communities with few consequences. The criminalization of space became an increasingly important factor in the criminalization of citizens of color, a process that went hand in hand with rhetorical representations of space and associations with chaos and dysfunction. At his 1981 address to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, Ronald Reagan invoked the “urban jungle” and “dark impulses” of moral degeneracy, stating that “only our deep moral values and strong institutions can hold back that jungle and restrain the darker impulses of human nature.”44 People in entire areas of a city were associated with crime by virtue of where they lived, while space itself was criminalized (or venerated) according to the predominant race of those who lived there. Zero-tolerance policing policies in urban areas and pressure from local and state politicians to build more prisons meant that the prison industrial complex became a local enterprise.45 The blocking of syringe access programs in inner-city neighborhoods at the same time coincided with the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS and added gay and nonconforming bodies to those criminalized in and through urban space. Meanwhile, Black women were represented as the bane of the welfare system—accused of refusing to work, milking the system, emasculating their men, and pumping out deviant children in order to increase their status as “welfare queens.”46

As rationales for diverting federal and state funding away from social programs were honed by local, state, and federal administrators and politicians, federal and state funds to cities—especially areas that were predominantly nonwhite—were substantially cut throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Government spending on affordable housing and community development and tax incentives for urban revitalization were highly contested at both the federal and state levels. Many programs that did exist contained loopholes by which funds were funneled to, and through, private investment or came with significant strings attached, aimed at social conformity. By associating public housing with crime and people of color, while also vastly underfunding basic maintenance of housing projects, it was possible to blame highly publicized failures of subsidized housing on residents. As projects were demolished, President Nixon declared a moratorium on all new construction of public housing in 1973. In spite of continued underfunding of housing policy following the Nixon era, it is important to note that grassroots community initiatives partially filled the housing gap by creatively taking advantage of policy that encouraged public-private partnerships and by forming nonprofit corporations that took on large-scale projects.47 One of the iconic images used to illustrate the failure of public housing programs featured the demolition of thirty-three high-rise buildings in the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis between 1972 and 1976.48 The demolitions displaced thousands of residents, many of whom followed other Black St. Louisans who had begun moving to areas of North St. Louis County adjacent to Black neighborhoods in the City of St. Louis.

Prior to, and just after, the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, many people believed that inequalities between white and Black citizens in the United States could be resolved by breaking down legal barriers preventing African Americans from accessing the full benefits of middle-class status and, specifically, the resources associated with suburban neighborhoods and ways of life. By the 1960s, the imagined “authentic” suburbs were almost interchangeable with an ethos of the American Dream.49 Civil rights–era logic assumed that Black families gaining entrance to middle-class suburbs would gain the same advantages that ethnic Europeans found when they left the central cities several decades before. These included higher standards of living, wealth accumulation through home ownership, low-interest financing, access to better schools, convenient and upscale shopping districts, the ability to selectively control land use through zoning, and improved safety. Many discourses around inequality shifted from race to class to culture, with an emphasis on individual responsibility and moral fortitude. Lacking in these discussions was whether or not areas in which middle-class Black families settled would maintain the benefits of middle-class status. Although many Black residents displaced by urban renewal programs did find their way to the suburbs, the promise of postracial suburban privilege was not, in fact, the experience of many Black residents moving to the suburbs and certainly not the experience of most Black suburbanites locating in North St. Louis County.50 What they experienced instead is described in detail in the chapters that follow.

Within scholarship focused on race and urban space in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the culture-of-poverty thesis prevailed, although this approach was highly critiqued as well. The continued impact of Chicago school theory on the discipline of sociology, combined with the influence of Marxist theory, reinforced the shift away from racially based paradigms of antiblackness toward paradigms focused on class difference and structures of the state. Some of the work of Black sociologists also linked “pathologies of culture” to class, with race appearing as secondary.51 When race was discussed in earnest within sociology and proximate fields, the discourse was often framed by the highly influential 1986 publication Racial Formation in the United States, by Michael Omi and Howard Winant.52 Taking a Gramscian approach to hegemony—defined as the power (of the state) to naturalize the values and norms of a dominant group in order to maintain dominance—Omi and Winant argue that race is a manifestation of specific “racial projects” that use particularized notions—racial formations—of ethnicity, class, and citizenship to reinforce white racial hegemony. While Omi and Winant contribute important conceptual framings regarding the fluidity and political motivations of racial construction, their work has also been problematized as decoupling race from racism and deemphasizing global histories regarding the fungibility of specifically Black life.53 Critics of racial formation theory argue that, while it explains formations, it does not sufficiently explain why they are formed. Other critiques of a racial formation model include: it problematically deemphasizes the work of whiteness and overemphasizes certain racial projects; it is overdetermined by state politics; it lacks the tools to look at deep foundations rooted in blackness by simplifying the formation process; it fails to address sufficiently the role of white actors; it does not attend to the everydayness of racial experience; and it essentializes identity through a “people of color” framework.54

More recently, critiques of racial formation theory have come from Black studies, specifically afro-pessimism and queer of color theory, that argue against the concept of racial democracy embraced by Omi and Winant and insist that race cannot exist independently from blackness.55 P. Khalil Saucier and Tyron P. Woods point out that “Omi and Winant are racial optimists because they insist on the general progressive trajectory of racial politics, despite evidence to the contrary.”56 Building on the work of Frank B. Wilderson III and Jared Sexton, Saucier and Woods reject the idea that racial formation occurs through similar processes with different inflections for all groups considered nonwhite and insist on the historical recognition of blackness as “the originary racial project.”57 This view also rejects the idea that the color line will progressively become less of a problem as society continues to advance its liberal projects. Saucier and Woods in fact use Darren Wilson’s (successful) justification for killing Michael Brown which was in essence “I feared his unarmed body because it was a weapon,” to illustrate how “the structure and method of fungible blackness exceeds the grasp of racial formation theory.”58

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, there was a push to study inequality within the context of a larger global project including factors that are consistently deployed for the purpose of securing non-rights-bearing subjects in the service of production. These studies increasingly focused on the conditions of late capitalism and a growing concern regarding neoliberal policy under Reagan and Thatcher (which eschewed state regulation but required state enforcement).59 Rigorous Marxist critiques of the links between militarized action, cultural production, and global capitalist markets emerged from this research.60 Many critiques looked at the policing of urban space in the United States and the United Kingdom and attempted to define the specific characteristics of neo-liberal urban policy in space.61 Class was privileged over race in much of this work as an analytic for studying the causes and effects of spatial disparity. An exception is Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, published in 1983, which took Marxist scholars to task for ignoring the fact that all capitalism is racial capitalism; Robinson provocatively and effectively rewrote history from the perspective of a Black radical tradition.62

Between 1975 and 1995, the fields of literature and cultural anthropology also produced work that drew lines between histories, experiences, and practices of colonial and imperial oppression across time, space, and economies. Much of this work was by non-Western authors and helped expand the discourse to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.63 Feminist sociologists took on the male-dominated discipline of sociology and the race/class paradigm by theorizing intersectional oppressions as a sociological concept.64 In keeping with this shift, new fields emerged, such as gender studies, ethnic studies, and Black studies, which were intended as specific critiques within the larger discourse of postcolonial analysis and often emphasized a Foucauldian understanding of power—as a force reproduced at every scale of public and private life.

Attempts by antiracist projects to shift discussions of culture away from culture-of-poverty critiques and to affirm nonwhite, and specifically Black, cultural production were met with new forms of racist practice. Writing in 1987, Gilroy was among the first to call out the work of race in neoliberal projects in terms of renewed conflations of nation, culture, and belonging in conjunction with the new order of capitalist imperialism. Defined through this prism, multiculturalism works within the context of national identity to recognize different cultures so as to actually not have to recognize them at all. David Theo Goldberg later argued that when cultural difference is placed between two poles of celebration and risk, bodies are neutralized, on the one hand, and disciplined, on the other.65 Recently, João H. Costa Vargas has argued that, similar to multiculturalism, a “people of color” framework denies that antiblackness is fundamental, ubiquitous, and transhistorical to the construction of nonwhite bodies deemed more and less human.66

The 1990s saw continued growth in both the military and prison industrial complexes, which directly impacted metropolitan space. Public discourse continued to blame individuals and culture for “unfortunate” outcomes, and cities were increasingly run as private corporations in the business of policing disorderly bodies and space, using military-style tactics to make way for profitable development. Legal theory arguing for public choice described cities as businesses competing for customers in an environment of governmental austerity, further propelling a business model of risk management. Defenders of localism echoed neoliberal arguments that private markets logically sort people and space and operate at the highest level of colorblind and democratic practice.67 Conversely, proponents of regionalism objected to the idea that localism supports spatial inequality and argued that cities with geographic and economic advantages would poach taxes and resources from areas with fewer advantages, thus funding services for their own citizens on the backs of poorer cities.68 This is in fact the case in North St. Louis County where municipal poaching practices are at the root of predatory policing practices, both of which use risk attached to Black residents to gain needed resources.

For the past thirty years, government funding to metropolitan areas increasingly has been directed toward policing and surveillance activities that protect private property and facilitate private development. This mirrors global trends toward militarizing public spacexy—increasing surveillance of citizens while suppressing democratic dissent—under a banner of stamping out threats to democratic ideals. As cities were encouraged to compete for resources, the economic consequences of blackness (as risk) posed much anxiety but also many opportunities for mayors, city and county administrators, and urban planners. Using and amplifying an already robust public discourse regarding Black deviance, municipal leaders passed laws and ordinances aimed at policing minor offenses of “disorder” common in poverty-stricken areas. These measures in turn removed peoples who were in the way of development, and routed nonwhite youth and individuals into zero-tolerance court systems that fed the pipeline to incarceration, while simultaneously funding city budgets and private contractors. By the 1990s, policing policies such as the broken-windows approach, enforcement of newly passed nuisance laws aimed at poverty and homelessness, and later stop-and-frisk tactics provided the tools for police to harass and arrest individuals viewed as a threat to private property on any level.69 Clinton-era legislation that effectively ended the welfare state, dramatically increased police funding, and mandated the courts to follow extreme sentencing guidelines ensured that the prison pipeline would increase the number of people incarcerated in the United States from roughly 500,000 in 1980 to over 2.3 million by 2008.70 As Elizabeth Hinton states, seemingly in answer to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, “the long mobilization of the War on Crime was not a return to an old racial caste system in a new guise—a ‘New Jim Crow.’ Rather, the effort to control and contain ‘troublesome groups’ through patrol, surveillance, and penal strategies produced a new and historically distinct phenomenon in the post-civil rights era: the criminalization of urban social programs.”71 An important part of this phenomenon is the criminalization of urban space, both real and imagined, with and through the perpetualization of blackness-as-risk. As the twenty-first century ushered in the war on terror, cities gained even more tools to surveil and criminalize residents, in the form of discursive practices centered on risk attached to blackness and increased funding for police and military-style equipment.

North County stands as a prime example of how blackness-as-risk has been deployed at a local level through cultural politics in order to differentiate and police bodies and space for profit through racist and “race-neutral” policies and practices. The processes that currently play out in this area illustrate a political economy of risk that employs highly developed logics of antiblackness and well-honed tropes of dehumanization to exploit and sort people and space. This results in areas that are able to hoard opportunity and poach resources while other areas bear the burden of environmental hazards, predatory lending, and limited access to basic services.72 In response, and for the purpose of replacing lost funding and maintaining municipal autonomy, leaders in tiny majority-Black jurisdictions implement the same logics used against their cities to extract resources from Black residents through a continuous loop of catch-and-release policing. By the time Michael Brown (who was portrayed posthumously as a modern-day barbarian) was killed in Ferguson, Black residents of North St. Louis County had been living with the consequences of disinvestment and racialized municipal policing practices for more than thirty years. These practices are amplified by extreme geographic and political fragmentation and an unusually high degree of importance placed on local political autonomy in the St. Louis region. The specific ways that cultural politics and political fragmentation shape experiences of race and space in this region are taken up in chapter 2.