3
The Makings of a “Maybe Environment”
What was once a destination for many during the Great Migration is now the basis for a good-old fashioned talking to. “Why are you moving to the Midwest? Are there any people of color there?” These were just some of the questions I got from friends and family after they learned of my decision to pursue a PhD in Minnesota. Truth be told, I asked myself the same questions. Coming from mostly Black and Latinx neighborhoods in Boston and Providence, I sensed that a move to the Midwest would require some serious adjustment. My limited knowledge of US geography left me with provincial conceptions of states outside the Northeast. Before moving to Minnesota, my perceptions of the Midwest were restricted to fields and whiteness, which regularly mixed to form fields of whiteness.
Observing a whiter and whiter demographic at each rest stop, gas station, hotel, and supermarket during the drive from Providence to Minneapolis only reinforced my earlier assumptions about whiteness and space. If what Sara Ahmed calls a “phenomenology of whiteness” helps us to see how “whiteness allows bodies to move with comfort through space, and to inhabit the world as if it were home,”1 I wonder to what extent a phenomenology of whiteness infringes on the phenomenology of Blackness. I learned that my rendering of Minnesota was not inaccurate save for some parts of Minneapolis and St. Paul and sections of surrounding suburbs. Good Samaritans warned about venturing too far beyond Twin Cities lines, as the contrast between white and nonwhite grew more ostensible. But even making light of the overwhelming whiteness of the Twin Cities in the absence of snow risks participating in settler-colonial logic and obscuring Indigeneity and the Black Midwest.2 Studying Black youth in the Twin Cities is, then, not only an attempt to bring attention to presence in presumed absence. Just as I aim to funk the clock, this work attempts to funk with settler time as well as white spatial and temporal imaginaries.3
Even the term “Midwest” itself implies that this region had yet to fulfill a sort of Orientalist fantasy predicated on asinine logic that suggests there can be an “East” and “West” on a sphere called “Earth.” The “Midwest,” though, is not some inchoate space or merely an amalgamation of East and West Coast culture. Rather, the Midwest, and the Black Midwest more specifically, remains a rich site of intellectual and cultural production that must be taken on its own terms. The Twin Cities, for example, represents a site of both funk and flava—a funk drawn with purple, not green, stank lines and a flava that tastes like “Hot Cheetos and Takis.”4
Based on the overwhelming amount of urban ethnographic research throughout the late twentieth century, it is easy to see why some still conflate Chicago with the entire Midwest. Social scientists, particularly sociologists from the Chicago School, cornered the market on urban ethnographic research and set up shop in the Windy City. But the Midwest is more than Chicago. Even before the murder of George Floyd, plenty of Minnesotans were calling for greater attention to systemic racism, anti-Blackness, and settler-colonial violence that disappears Indigeneity into whiteness.5 Why did social scientists not listen? Perhaps Black life and Black sociality remained unintelligible unless first filtered through the logics of crisis, abjection, and metaphor.6 Terrion Williamson makes this point exceptionally clear when describing the impetus behind the Black Midwest Initiative:7
The conditions under which black people live are, and historically have been, in stark contrast to the experiences of many other residents of those same cities. You might argue, pretty credibly in fact, that there is nothing particularly particular to the Midwest in this—that black life is conditioned by precarity wherever it is lived. But what is distinct about black Midwesterners is the extent to which our lives fail to register collectively as worthy of sustained attention except, of course, in moments of crisis when the national spotlight hones in just long enough to use us as fodder for the expediencies of political outrage—think Chicago, Flint, Detroit, Ferguson.8
When the Twin Cities erupted after the murder of George Floyd, the national spotlight was once again on Minneapolis and St. Paul. That spotlight shined brightly on those targeted and arrested for the destruction of destructive property but conveniently dimmed when organizers, activists, artists, and other communities in the Twin Cities mobilized mutual aid and healing justice collectives. The spotlight lessened further during scenes of asymmetrical warfare between police and protesters. Still, explicit forms of police terror can easily mask the symbolic and structural violence that remains less salient yet equally, if not more, pernicious. As Saidiya Hartman writes, “The most invasive forms of slavery’s violence lie not in these exhibitions of ‘extreme’ suffering or in what we see but in what we don’t see.”9 Perhaps some of what is unseen is in fact hidden, sanitized, and/or romanticized.
In March 2015, approximately four months after I began volunteering at Run-a-Way, The Atlantic published an article by Derek Thompson titled “The Miracle of Minneapolis.” Increasing incomes, affordable public transit, low unemployment, and high college-graduation rates were just a few of the indices Thompson used to gauge the quality of life in the Twin Cities:
Only three large metros where at least half the homes are within reach for young middle-class families also finish in the top 10 in the Harvard-Berkeley mobility study: Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis–St. Paul. The last is particularly remarkable. The Minneapolis–St. Paul metro area is richer by median household income than Pittsburgh or Salt Lake City (or New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles). Among residents under 35, the Twin Cities place in the top 10 for highest college-graduation rate, highest median earnings, and lowest poverty rate, according to the most recent census figures. And yet, according to the Center for Housing Policy, low-income families can rent a home and commute to work more affordably in Minneapolis–St. Paul than in all but one other major metro area (Washington, D.C.). Perhaps most impressive, the Twin Cities have the highest employment rate for 18-to-34-year-olds in the country.10
Readers quickly recognize that the “miracle” Thompson refers to is an economic one. The Twin Cities are home to nineteen Fortune 500 companies, which, according to Thompson, helped subsidize “the Minneapolis miracle” through the redistribution of commercial tax revenues to “enrich some of the region’s poorest communities.” The miraculous portrait Thompson creates, however, is what Jessica Nickrand, in a response also published in The Atlantic, calls “Minneapolis’s White Lie.” Nickrand challenges Thompson’s claim that the programs for sharing commercial property taxes would “lift all boats,” including low-income communities of color:
The policies that Thompson cites as responsible for keeping “the poorest areas from falling too far behind” were designed for a population that looks very different from what Minnesota looks like in 2015. The Minnesota Miracle Plan of 1971, which was mentioned in Thompson’s article, required all municipalities in the metropolitan Twin Cities area “to contribute almost half their growth in their commercial tax revenues” to a fund that would be invested directly back into the community. This served the area well until 2002, when the Minnesota Legislature revised its property- and income-tax systems. This resulted in a nearly 10 percent decrease in revenue-raising capacity between 1999 and 2002. Since 2002, 90 percent of municipalities in Minnesota have seen their tax revenues drop another nine percent. Even with these cuts the Twin Cities still experience lower overall rates of poverty than other cities around the country. But poverty is increasing, and it is largely centralized in the Twin Cities’ communities of color.11
Nickrand suggests that part of Thompson’s white lie involves the use of white people as a reference category. Thus, it is irresponsible to entertain Thompson’s romanticized picture of the Twin Cities, when Minnesota maintains the lowest rankings in the nation on key indicators of social welfare. Nickrand references a WalletHub study that ranked Minnesota third in terms of the highest poverty-rate gap (296%), just below North Dakota (328%) and Connecticut (340%).12 Nickrand warns, “If racial inequalities are not addressed, Minneapolis could find itself as one of the nation’s poorest cities when it comes to racial politics and urban decline.”13
It is no surprise that, in a piece published on November 16, 2018, USA Today ranked the Twin Cities fourth among the “15 worst cities for black Americans.”14 How miraculous, then, is the “Minneapolis Miracle” for Black and other racialized youths at Run-a-Way? When did guarantees (for white people) become “miracles”? What role do white spatial imaginaries and white temporal imaginaries play in constructing suburbanized and urbanized space? What is the difference between staying and living in poor urbanized space? What are the makings of a “maybe environment”? To answer these questions and others, I present this analysis of race, space, and time in the Midwest.
Recounting the narratives of Marie-Joseph Angélique, the Portuguese-born slave accused of burning down most of Montreal, Katherine McKittrick describes Angélique and other Black people in Canada as “surprises.”15 What, then, does it mean to be Black in the Midwest? Does it mean believing in those deemed unbelievable? Perhaps engagement with Black life in the Midwest requires an engagement with wonder. What wonder could possibly exist in a region of mostly “flyover states”? In flying over the Midwest, what is overlooked? Blackness? Indigeneity? Black people? Indigenous people? If Black people are a surprise in the Midwest, are Indigenous people similarly astonishing? Blackness and Indigeneity both defy latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates and exceed containment within a specific region. As Richard Iton writes, “Moreover, beyond the cataloguing of geographical presences and genealogical connections, there is the possibility of approaching Black identifications conceptually: as a matter of indexing a related set of sensibilities that resist quantification, physical or temporal classifications, and corporeal boundaries.”16 Blackness, specifically, “anarranges” linear logic and what Michelle M. Wright calls “middle passage epistemologies.”17 McKittrick describes Black geographies as “unhinged from territory and its attendant juridical requirements” and thus in defiance of racial-cartographical coordinates.18 What makes Black people such a surprise to Canadians is not that they exist, but that they exist in the midst of whiteness.
According to demographic data from the American Community Survey (ACS), at the time of my research the Twin Cities was approximately 62.2 percent white; 17.3 percent Black or African American; 9.6 percent Asian; and 10 percent Hispanic or Latino. Native Americans and Alaskan Natives made up 1.6 percent of the total population of the Twin Cities. Because whiteness remains the central reference category for white sociality, a single nonwhite person has an incredible capacity to turn a predominantly white space into a hyperbolized nonwhite space. The magnification of nonwhiteness leads many white people to conclude that the sprinkling of a few faces of color shields them from any claims of discrimination or racism. “Minnesota Nice” is an added line of defense brandished by many white people when confronted by accusations of racialized violence. Minnesota Nice requires reciprocity, mutuality, coherence, consistency, and a false equivalence between the experiences of white and nonwhite people. In theory, Minnesota Nice is universally accepted and practiced. In reality, it legitimates some of the cruelest forms of violence against racialized persons precisely because the established discursive parameters prohibit the potential to be mean, angry, or enraged. In other words, the emphasis on “nice” summarily dismisses the potential to be anything but kind. Minnesota Nice may be nice for whites, but it is beyond a nightmare for many Black folks.
Perhaps there is room to think about the temporal dimension of Minnesota Nice and what it requires of Black youths. How might the expectations associated with Minnesota Nice actually come to harm Black youths in the Midwest? Does Minnesota Nice ask them to remain patient in school, when education comes slowly or not at all? Does Minnesota Nice demand that Black youths smile when a police officer stops them for “walking up to no good”—a charge that always already precludes the possibility of Black youths being nice? Minnesota Nice might demand patience and remind Black youths that opportunity will come “in due time,” without acknowledging the time that is long (over)due. We might also consider, as the previous chapter suggests, that racialized violence results in an inordinate amount of time taken and thus due to Black youths.
A 2013 report produced by the Council of Minnesotans of African Heritage (formerly the Council on Black Minnesotans) reveals qualitatively different educational experiences between Black and white students. For example, while 75 percent of all students in Minnesota graduate on time, only 55 percent of students of color do so. According to the report, less than half of all Black third graders achieved expected reading proficiency for their grade level, compared to approximately 84 percent of their white counterparts.19 Prospects for employment and escaping impoverishment are additional sites of struggle for Black Minnesotans. According to the 2017 American Community Survey’s five-year (2013–17) estimates, the unemployment rate for people sixteen years and older was 4.3 percent. While only 3.6 percent of whites were unemployed during this period, the Black unemployment rate was 11 percent. While Black people make up just 6 percent of all Minnesotans, they made up 28.2 percent of those living below poverty. By contrast, whites make up 83.7 percent of the state population but only 7.2 percent of people below poverty.20 Though both Minnesota and the Twin Cities are majority white, it remains essential to analyze racialized peoples in relation to one another and not just in relation to whiteness.
Blackness and Indigeneity in the Midwest
Settler colonialism and anti-Blackness both remain in full effect across Minnesota. Some scholars emphasize the incommensurability of slavery and settler colonialism, while more recent scholarship suggest that there is possibility within this sort of impasse.21 As Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith argue, the “stuckness” of incommensurability is itself a form of relationality between Black and Native peoples.22 The “stuckness” the authors describe derives from analyses and critiques of sovereignty, land, labor, and questions of the Human. For example, in critiquing Native studies scholars who misrecognize slavery as a form of “deculturalization” or “loss of sovereignty,” Jared Sexton writes, “Slavery is not a loss that the self experiences—of language, lineage, land, or labor—but rather the loss of any self that could experience such a loss. Any politics based on resurgence or recovery is bound to regard the slaves as the ‘position of the unthought’ (Hartman and Wilderson 2003).”23 There is a temporal order to Sexton’s critique that suggests that before there can be a loss of “language, lineage, land, or labor,” there has to be a self to lose such things. For Sexton, enslavement precludes the possibility of such personhood, thus rendering Black people to the “unthought.”
In response to Sexton’s critique of “sovereignty,” Andrea Smith states, “While Sexton holds that Black peoples occupy the ‘unthought of sovereignty,’ colonization itself makes alternative conceptions of reality unthinkable.”24 Here Smith is attempting to push back on Sexton’s claim that “colonization is not a necessary condition of enslavement.”25 Still, Smith is wary of “sovereignty” as an endpoint and instead describes the pursuit of sovereignty itself as “deferred genocide.”26 Frank Wilderson also critiques sovereignty as a tool that perpetuates “savage” negrophobia in film.27 The range of such debates exceeds the scope of this book but nonetheless informs my thinking about Blackness and Indigeneity in Minnesota and the living histories of both groups.
The inextricable connection between space and time reveals not only the logic of terra nullius (land belonging to no one) but, as Helen Ngo argues, the concomitant violence of tempus nullius: “On this view, Australia was not just ‘founded’ on the basis of terra nullius, but also tempus nullius—uninhabited time, time not utilised or made use of, time that therefore does not register as such.”28 Thus, conquest left Native peoples devoid of space and time. Manifest destiny, the Doctrine of Discovery, and violated treaties upheld the twin logics of terra and tempus nullius. The Treaty of Traverse des Sioux and the Treaty of Mendota, for example, legitimated occupation of Dakota lands by both settlers and Anishinaabe peoples.29 As the Wahpetunwan Dakota professor Waziyatawin writes, settlers coerced Native people into signing treaties by “withholding rations (theoretically guaranteed from previous treaties)” or threatening to take lands by force without any compensation.30 Adding to the cumulative settler-colonial violence, settlers passed new legislation that unilaterally abrogated earlier treaties, while providing white settlers with Dakota treaty annuities and ushering in a US-military-led operation of evisceration.
The limited number of Native youths in youth programming is a direct result of attempts to decimate Nations while diminishing and disappearing settler violence. Though Native adults make up just 1 percent of the total population in Minnesota, they make up 12 percent of the state’s unhoused population.31 Among the youths who contributed to this research, one identified as Native, while nine identified as Black and Native. Though Native youths represented one of the smallest populations served at Run-a-Way, to not convey the presence of supposedly past settler-colonial violence would be tantamount to reinforcing settler logic that holds that Native peoples should not only disappear “but must always be disappearing,” as Andrea Smith puts it.32
Smith describes how courts in Virginia during the early eighteenth century “ascribed Native slaves with the same status as Black slavers.” In 1806, the Supreme Court, in Hudgins v. Wright, removed Native peoples from the category of Blackness and declared them “FREE.”33 Smith’s broader critique is that Native people must disappear into “whiteness (civilization) or Blackness (extermination) in which Indigenous disappearance itself disappears… . However, the threat of disappearance into Blackness makes disappearance into whiteness appear as both survival and a choice rather than deferred genocide.”34 In short, assimilation is death.
Despite the “stuckness” some find themselves in when thinking through questions of Blackness and Indigeneity, youths I spoke with who identified as both Black and Native formed their racial identities in relation to multiple parts of their biographies, as well as space and time. When asked about the importance of their past, nearly every Black, mixed Black, and Black and Native youth talked about enslavement, colonization, or both. Among them was Sean, a sixteen-year-old Black and Native, queer youth. Sean responded to my question about the importance of his cultural past in this way: “Yeah, I talk about the past. What I’ve experienced. For us, slavery or Indians, when white people came over and took America from us. Yeah.”
It is not uncommon for parents, local elders, and other members of the chronologically gifted class to remind younger activists, “You don’t know where you are going unless you know where you are coming from.” Despite being confined to linear progress narratives, this phrase seemed to resonate with many youths at Run-a-Way. For example, Gerard completed ancestry tests to learn about his family’s Indigenous history. When I asked Gerard about the importance of his cultural past, he offered,
It’s very important to see how it’s shaped the society we have today. I think that it’s all very important because if you didn’t have that history knowledge then that’d be Bad News Bears for you… . Actually, one of my ancestry things [referring to ancestry tests]. Have you ever did that? Your ancestry? … I had like a lot of Natives. Like, Native Americans. I was from a Winnebago tribe or whatever. That’s really interesting.
Sites of Relational Racial Identity Formation
Both family and school serve as important sites of relational racial identity formation. Seventeen-year-old Adam was the only Native youth who did not also identify as Black. Adam identified as Native but, in his words, could pass for white, Asian, and/or Mexican. Adam described himself as quite different from his brother, who was eager to learn “traditional things,” including how to make fry bread, how to play drums, and how to make dresses for powwows. Adam attributed his brother’s penchant for learning Native traditions to his close relationship with their grandmother.
Adam’s distant relationship with tradition and family was different from that of some of the youths who identified as Black and Native. One such youth was Cedric, who was sixteen at the time of our interview. I also asked him about the importance of the past.
I feel like it’s very important. Like, my Grandma is Native so what I do is I smudge … every other day if I can or every day. ’Cuz … sage is used to cleanse your body and cleanse your house for thirty days. Whenever I’m sick I go smudge and the next day I’m perfectly fine or the next couple of hours I just start to come back. So I feel like it’s very important.
Though only sixteen years old, Cedric smudged not only to cleanse but also to remain in communion with many of his elders and ancestors. Cedric’s observance of Native tradition signaled a deep connection to the past and present. When I asked Tanisha whether she talked about her cultural history with her family, she described her grandmother as a beacon of historical knowledge:
I try to with my grandma… . Well, she told me that we have a Native in our family. And the only person that we knew or that was still alive that was Native in our family, like fully Native, was her grandpa. And she told me that he didn’t like colored … the colored people in our family, which was kind of weird to me ’cuz he’s Native. Not white. So kinda shocked me.
In “Uncle Tom Was an Indian: Tracing the Red in Black Slavery,” Tiya Miles describes how African Americans invoked Native ancestry as a tactic to destabilize fixed and essentialist constructions of Blackness.35 To what extent did Black youths’ Indigeneity also destabilize single-origin stories? Studying the multiple dimensions of Black and Native youths’ biographical histories side by side rather than in isolation reveals the importance of relationality within racial formation.36
Reckoning with distinct identities and mutually constitutive histories extended beyond the family. Many youths learned what Black and Native history was by learning what it was not. They recognized that much of their schooling was synchronized to “settler time.” Such synchronization necessitated the violent erasure of Black and Native history, leaving many youths disenchanted with their schooling. For example, Remy, a sixteen-year-old Black and Native, nonbinary youth, explained why they were so turned off by their educational experiences:
Standardized tests. Those teachers who tell you, oh, well, when you walk in and they’re like, “Oh, you have an hour to finish this pop quiz.” And you get a real-life grade on it but then they ask you to write a paper and they expect you to write a five-page paper in two minutes. And just the expectation. And the privilege, just the white privilege. I just don’t like the fact that I have to learn about my culture as an elective and how us learning about white people be the main thing. It’s like there’s really no excuse for it. It’s not like they’re saying, “Oh, we’re learning about what happened in America.”’Cuz even if they were saying that, then we shouldn’t be learning about white people at all, to be honest. So I don’t like that. Because white people aren’t even from America. They couldn’t even stand they own continent. Like, come on now. This is the Native Americans’ country. White people love taking things from other people. That’s they favorite thing to do, I promise you. Love takin’ stuff that ain’t theirs.
As with youths who identified as Black and/or African American, the significance of the cultural past to Black and Native youth was integral to shaping their present realities. Most youths who identified as Black or African American invoked the civil rights movement and resistance during slavery to signal the connection with the past. Their connection to their cultural pasts recognized the mutually constitutive nature of settler colonialism and enslavement. Despite the “stuckness” brought about by conceptions of slavery and settler colonialism as incommensurable, Black and Native youths found ways to reconcile both within the context of their own relational identity formation.
Though I have so far centered Black and Native life in Minnesota, I would be remiss to ignore other racialized groups that constitute the distinct demographics of the Twin Cities in particular. A number of migrant groups have come to call the Twin Cities home. Consider that the largest number of Somali migrants and refugees in the United States reside in Minnesota. St. Paul is also home to the largest Hmong American community in the United States. While scholarship on Asian racialization continues to grow, the experiences of Southeast Asians, particularly Hmong, Cambodians, Laos, Karen, and Vietnamese, warrant further research.37 Still, it may be worth refraining from settler equivalence and considering the experiences of the unsettled settlers, or, as Nandita Sharma describes them, “those who are rendered as always-already oppositional others.”38 Free trade agreements, deregulation, speculative capitalism, privatized land, ecological violence, the destruction of local economies, and the paternalistic role of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in increasing a debt that should be owned by developed, as opposed to developing, nations is all further evidence of the role of geopolitics in spurring migration.39
Reducing analyses of race, racialization, and racism to a settler-Native binary risks obscuring the importance of relationality to processes of racial formation.40 In some cases, the absence of racialized groups from sociological research may serve as a generative site of inquiry as opposed to strictly an opportunity for critique. For example, the absence of youths who identify as Native, Latinx, and Asian and Pacific Islander at Run-a-Way is due in large part to their population numbers within shelter programs. According to findings from the 2015 Minnesota Homeless Study, only 11 percent of unhoused youth in the state identify as Hispanic; 9 percent identify as American Indian, and only 2 percent identify as Asian.41 Though existing demographics limited the opportunity to be more inclusive of other racialized youths, this book brings greater attention to what it means to be Black in the Midwest.
Minnesota Maybe
The racialization of space is inextricably linked to the racialization of time and the temporalization of race. For Charles Mills, ownership of space is contingent on ownership of time and vice versa: “Whose space it is depends in part on whose time it is, on which temporality, which version of time, can be established as hegemonic.”42 The naturalization of time zones, for example, conveniently obscures the role of capitalism and colonialism.43 So although time differs depending on the space and region of the world we inhabit, what happens when people within the same alleged time zone are read as temporally distinct? For example, how might prisoners “doing time” in the same region as their loved ones remain in what Richard Wright calls a “No Man’s Land”—“a shadowy region … the ground that separated the white world from the black”?44 Can time actually be “done” when carceral logics (e.g., law, “crime,” “deviance,” and policing) serve as timekeepers outside carceral space (i.e., prisons)? Analyzing themes of time in the writings of Black novelists, Barthold likens “No Man’s Land” to a “state of timeless estrangement”: “For Bigger, as for the other residents of this landscape, living in No Man’s Land is tantamount to spiritual and/or physical death, where the isolation in time coincides with an isolation from the human community.”45
In Time and the Other, Johannes Fabian makes a compelling case that social scientists prohibit “the other,” or the exoticized object of social research, from inhabiting the same space and time as the researcher: “The history of our discipline [anthropology] reveals that such use of Time almost invariably is made for the purposes of distancing those who are observed from the Time of the observer.”46 Sociology is not immune from denying empirical subjects the opportunity to inhabit the same space and time as researchers. Despite the discipline’s emphasis on the iterative relationship between the individual and the social, sociologists look more like psychologists when privileging individual behavior, morals, and values over systems and institutions. William Julius Wilson, for example, uses limited access to “social capital” as grounds for denying poor Black families coevalness (i.e., a place in time):
Inner-city social isolation also generates behavior not conducive to good work histories. The patterns of behavior that are associated with a life of casual work (tardiness and absenteeism) are quite different from those that accompany a life of regular or steady work (e.g., the habit of waking up early in the morning to a ringing alarm clock). In neighborhoods in which nearly every family has at least one person who is steadily employed, the norms and behavior patterns that emanate from a life of regularized employment become part of the community gestalt. On the other hand, in neighborhoods in which most families do not have a steadily employed breadwinner, the norms and behavior patterns associated with steady work compete with those associated with casual and infrequent work. Accordingly, the less frequent the regular contact with those who have steady and full-time employment (that is, the greater degree of social isolation), the more likely that initial job performance will be characterized by tardiness, absenteeism, and, thereby, low retention. In other words, a person’s patterns and norms of behavior tend to be shaped by those with which he or she has had the most frequent or sustained contact and interaction. Moreover, since the jobs that are available to the inner-city poor are the very ones that alienate even persons with long and stable work histories, the combination of unattractive jobs and lack of community norms to reinforce work increases the likelihood that individuals will turn to either underground illegal activity or idleness or both.47
Wilson makes clear that “social isolation” is less of a choice and more indicative of structural economic changes. But by representing Black people in urbanized space as trapped within a degenerative and regenerative system of social, cultural, economic, and temporal regression, Wilson displaces an emphasis on structure in favor of a psychosocial analysis. Wilson, though, is not unique. Many urban sociologists complicit in the reproduction of temporal stigmas are simply doing their job. As a discipline predicated on interpreting the iterative relationship between individual and social structures and linking biography to history, sociology prides itself on its unique capacity to reveal what is hidden in plain sight.48 Unfortunately, few seem to question how sociology can honestly work toward such a goal when it remains complicit in hiding what is hidden.
Here, I aim to complicate existing sociological analyses of the relationship between poor urbanized space and time. I argue that in limiting their analyses to the interplay between culture and structure, urban sociologists have constructed inadequate representations of the temporal orientations of people residing in poor urbanized space. How do Black youths at Run-a-Way view their communities in relation to time? To what extent do they reckon with the temporal stigmatization of their communities? What are the implications of constructing people within the same time zone as “behind” and “ahead of” time? To answer these and other questions, I privilege a conversation with fifteen-year-old Devon. I asked all of the youths how outsiders view their community.
Devon: Old, run down. We are not very up to date. I mean, a lot of us are still wearing Jheri curls. Yeah. I feel like … we’re definitely described as being behind or not very up to date.
RM: Why would you say that is?
Devon: Because … there’s nothing that’s really pushing us into the modern time. We live in crappy buildings, we get treated crappy. And so there’s no real reason to push forward, so we just remain in this same type of … we just remain behind. There’s nothing pushing us forward.
RM: How do you think white people view you as an individual in relation to time?
Devon: … I don’t like to assume, but I know some of them view me as being slow, lazy, not hardworking, not using my time the right way.
RM: Any reason why you think that?
Devon: I think that’s because of my skin. Because that’s what they see so many of my people doing, they assume that when they see me that I do the same thing as them.
Devon reveals a corporeal dimension to the temporalization and racialization of space. Once white people epidermally define and spatially locate Devon through racializing surveillance, they place him outside white time.49 Key to racialization is the ascription of value and worth. In Devon’s case, white people rely on space as an indicator of individual value and worth. Devaluing space, in turn, justifies devaluing those within that space. For example, “crappy buildings” legitimate “crappy” treatment of residents. Devon’s reference to Jheri curls is not an attempt to put down other members of his community. Perhaps he is struggling to reconcile the relevance of Jheri curls within the context of white time. Jheri curls, then, are not a product of “cultural lag” or indicative of life in an “urban jungle.”50 Is there room to appreciate the possibility that old heads might rock a Jheri curl to transgress time and defy linear progress narratives by embodying the timelessness of Rick James and N.W.A.? Toward the end of our interview, I asked Devon at what age he believed people should have children. In his response lies a provocative analysis of race, space, and time:
Oh, I feel like it should be when you’re out of college and you have a good job, and everything is stable. Because it’s very, very hard to raise a kid. I know this from personal experience. It’s very, very hard to raise a kid in a maybe environment. Maybe I’ll get a job. Maybe there’ll be money coming in and maybe we’ll have an apartment. I feel like if you’re gonna have a kid it should be in a very stable, very for-sure environment. I’m not saying you have to be rich and own a big house, but you should have a form of income coming in, you should have a house at least, whether it’s just an apartment or whatever, but it should be a very for-sure environment.
When Common begins “U, Black Maybe” by distinguishing between a “white man’s yes” and a “black maybe,” the rapper signals a double standard wherein what is guaranteed to whites is but a possibility for Black people.51 As Devon suggests, the use of “maybe” does not function only as a discursive tool. There is a materiality to “maybe.” The construction of the ghetto, for example, required uncertainty about how residents would survive (“Maybe they’ll make it out. Maybe they won’t”). Ambiguity and, more specifically, the production of ambiguous life chances through the construction of space and opportunity structures make certain aspects of Black life a “maybe.” Devon pointed out a striking difference between raising a child in a “maybe environment” and a “very for-sure environment.” According to him, the overwhelming sense of uncertainty in “maybe environments” hamper efforts at time management. I asked Devon who or what is responsible for creating “maybe environments”:
Devon: I feel like it’s … shared between people who have not really worked towards making it a for-sure environment so it stays a maybe environment. I also feel like it is a system. The government and the police and all the people we’re supposed to trust have also made this maybe environment a bigger even maybe. Because they’re not giving us jobs. But at the same time they’re taking our money and they’re sending us out to war. But they’re not feeding us. They’re not protecting us. And so it’s made it an even worse environment because of the lack of responsibility that they’ve put into our community.
RM: Can you say more about how systems like police, governments, make it a maybe environment?
Devon: I’m not saying all social workers are like this, but in the Black community many, many families are torn apart by social workers because you take the, what do you call it. The … child protection services. A lot of them come in because it’s a single mother and she’s been raising her kids on her own and this social worker comes in and she one by one divides and conquers the family. She stops in all the time, she interviews the kids equally, and a lot of them just basically put the stress on the family and eventually the stress just breaks the rope and the family falls apart. And then the social workers come in and they divide up a family. And it makes the community worse because of the pain that that inflicts on the community.
Though part of this response seems to reinforce urban sociology’s emphasis on ambiguity as an inherent part of life in poor urbanized space, Devon offers a structural analysis of the makings of a “maybe environment” and a broader atmosphere of uncertainty.52 According to Devon, “the government and the police” are largely responsible for making so many things a “maybe” for racialized and dispossessed persons in urbanized space. As products of systematic racialized violence, “maybe environments” occupy a unique space within and outside white time. Insofar as “maybe environments” are held to standards and expectations of white time, they remain within white time. Wilson, for example, maps “maybe environments” onto standards of white time including heteronormative family formation, “breadwinners,” norms, punctuality, and stable work histories. It is not that racialized people do not know how to conform to white time; it is that white time requires the exploitation and extraction of nonwhite life. Hence, white time limits a racialized person’s potential to find “stable work” because it takes their time through exploitation.
Consider the experience of a single mother who has to wake up at four o’clock in the morning to get her daughter ready for day care before going to her own job. At five o’clock, the mother and daughter are on a bus headed toward the day care. After dropping the child off at day care at six, the mother is back on a bus headed to work. The trip, however, involves two different buses, and the mother arrives late to work. If time is in fact money, much of the mother’s time spent preparing for work remains uncompensated for by her employer. The employer legitimates its wage theft under the guise of white time, literally making gains (i.e., capital) at the mother’s expense.
Similar examples of such time theft have been well documented since the early twentieth century. Drawing on archival data, Evelyn Nakano Glenn describes the sacrifices Black women made when performing reproductive labor for white families: “A black child nurse reported in 1912 that she worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day caring for her mistress’s four children… . She reported that she was allowed to go home ‘only once in every two weeks, every other Sunday afternoon… . I see my own children only when they happen to see me on the streets.’”53 Here we see that Black women’s estranged relationships with their children is but a reflection of their estranged relationships to time. Glenn reveals one of many sources of the mounting debt held by those who are likely to owe, rather than own, time. E. P. Thompson helps illustrate this point when distinguishing between an employer’s time and the alleged “time” of a worker: “Those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer’s time and their ‘own’ time. And the employer must use the time of his labour, and see it is not wasted: not the task but the value of time when reduced to money is dominant. Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent.”54
Such temporal extraction and filial estrangement are key to the production of “maybe environments.” Maybe a Black mother working for a white family will be able to see her children. Maybe she won’t. Though a Black mother may live in the same city as the white family that employs her, she does not have access to the resources of what Devon calls a “for-sure environment.” “Maybe environments” remain outside white time and a white habitus by dint of their racialized composition. The temporalization of urbanized space, according to Anne McClintock, required that Black people be cast into a temporal alterity, diametrically opposed to modernity:
The urban slums were depicted as epistemological problems—as anachronistic worlds of deprivation and unreality, zones without language, history, or reason that could be described only by negative analogy in terms of what they were not… . Like colonial landscapes, the slums were figured as inhabiting an anachronistic space, representing a temporal regression within industrial modernity to a time beyond the recall of memory.55
As McClintock illustrates, poor urbanized space is a site of temporal stigma marking poor people as inherently regressive. Sociologists and urban ethnographers, in particular, are complicit in making poor urbanized space asynchronous and temporally “deviant” (a point I return to in greater detail in chapter 8). Opportunities to improve life chances in “maybe environments” are habitually late or absent. The certainty of ambiguity requires residents of those communities to maintain a unique relationship with time. Many of the youths I interviewed came from two notable “maybe environments” in the Twin Cities: the Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul, and North Minneapolis.
The Presence of the Past in Rondo and North Minneapolis
From 1956 to 1968, under the guise of “urban renewal,” or what James Baldwin once called “Negro removal,”56 more than five hundred families were uprooted as construction of the I-94 freeway rammed through the heart of St. Paul’s Black community. Urban renewal effectively destroyed several sites of Black sociality, including homes, businesses, churches, and social houses. Racial segregation, and more specifically anti-Blackness, made many of these sites vital to promoting a sense of safety and affinity among Black people. Today, Black residents of St. Paul still remember the process of urban renewal in part because the past for Black people and many other racialized subjects is always present. Each year in mid-July, many residents of Rondo and the broader Twin Cities gather to celebrate “Rondo Days”—a weekend festival commemorating the vibrant social life of the historically Black community. On July 17, 2015, the then mayor, Chris Coleman, declared July 17 “Rondo Remembrance Day,” saying, “Today we acknowledge the sins of our past… . We regret the stain of racism that allowed so callous a decision as the one that led to families being dragged from their homes creating a diaspora of the African-American community in the City of Saint Paul.” Coleman then went on to issue a formal apology to past and present residents: “Today as Mayor of Saint Paul, I apologize, on behalf of the city, to all who call Rondo home, for the acts and decisions that destroyed this once vibrant community.”57
Like many other forms of racial violence, removing sites of Black sociality, Blackness, and Black people in service of capitalism and what George Lipsitz, in the title of his book, calls “the possessive investment in whiteness” represents an incommensurable debt. It is unclear whether Coleman was apologizing for a continual undoing of Black social life or for what the mayor treated as an isolated case of racism relegated to a specific historical spacetime. To ensure that the past remains a present part of the Black community in St. Paul, Rondo residents proposed the creation of the Rondo Commemorative Plaza. Unveiled on July 14, 2018, the plaza offers “a space for education, contemplation, inspiration, and community building.”58
Traveling far enough west on I-94 (the same highway that divided Rondo) will bring out-of-towners to another predominantly Black community: North Minneapolis, otherwise known as the Northside, North, and sometimes Near North. According to a geographic profile by Minnesota Compass, Blacks or African Americans make up 55 percent of the Near North community, while whites make up only 14 percent.59 North Minneapolis is, according to the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, a site of ongoing “strategic disinvestment and racial segregation.”60 “White flight” and the shift from public to private investments resulted in decades of economic decline and undervalued housing stock. Consequently, the Northside is increasingly becoming the target of gentrification. As the population of young white families grows in North Minneapolis, many responses to key questions about Black people’s future in the community begin with a “maybe”: “Maybe I’ll graduate.” “Maybe I’ll find a job.” “Maybe I’ll have to move.” “Maybe I’ll survive.”
The makings of the Northside and other “maybe environments” reflect the makings of what Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton describe as “the underclass.”61 Racialized violence, “rapid economic growth and growing spatial deconcentrating,” white suburbanization, the withdrawal of commercial institutions from the inner city, “urban renewal,” institutionalized racism in housing markets and federal housing authorities, failed public policy, restrictive enforcement of antidiscrimination legislation, and geographic and political isolation are integral to the construction of poor urbanized space and the “underclass.” The authors go on to note that “segregation, not middle-class outmigration, is the key factor responsible for the creation and perpetuation of communities characterized by persistent and spatially concentrated poverty.”62 The making of “maybe environments” implies an ongoing construction ensuring that racialized histories are rarely past. Instead, subprime mortgages, gentrification, and “accumulation by dispossession” have become the standard operating procedures for what Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva call “the racial logic of global capitalism.”63
Despite their contributions, however, the extent to which Massey and Denton intervene in conventional social scientific understandings of poor racialized persons is debatable. For example, while the authors acknowledge that the construction and persistence of the ghetto is a product of systemic racism and discrimination, their explanation for the perpetuation of the “underclass” reifies socially constructed conditions of the ghetto itself. Ultimately, through their own structural explanations of segregation, Massey and Denton pin themselves into a familiar culture-of-poverty trap. Take, for instance, the use of the term “underclass.” The “under” in “underclass” implies subordination. Not only is the “underclass” subordinate to all other socioeconomic classes, but it is also temporally inferior. In turn, the ghetto becomes a key emblem of anachronistic space marked as backward, behind time, and devoid of coevalness. By definition, the “underclass” is “under” other classes. Hence, social scientists can make sense of “underclass” only through a paternalistic and deficit ideology that requires what is “under” to advance through racial progress and uplift. Remaining true to conventional social science, Massey and Denton turn to public policy and state-expansionist strategies to address ongoing racial segregation,64 while ignoring that poor urbanized space remains underwritten by a possessive investment in whiteness and, more specifically, white space and time.
White Spatial and Temporal Imaginaries
In the 1972 hit song “Across 110th Street,” Bobby Womack sings, “The family on the other side of town would catch hell without a ghetto around.”65 Here, Womack refers to the mutually constitutive relationship between the ghetto and the suburbs. He makes clear that suburban maintenance requires both the systemic construction and destruction of the ghetto. The “family on the other side of town” requires uncertainty within “maybe environments” as proof of their residency in “very for-sure environments.” Certainty is backed by a possessive investment in whiteness and white habitus.
It is no coincidence that “white habitus” is just a couple of letters short of “white habitats.” Where white people live shapes their worldviews and orientations. Existing sociological research reminds us that “maybe environments” exist in relation to the guaranteed privileges of “very for-sure environments.” The blueprints of many white habitats form within what Lipsitz calls the “white spatial imaginary”:
This imaginary does not emerge simply or directly from the embodied identities of people who are white. It is inscribed in the physical contours or the places where we live, work and play and it is bolstered by financial rewards for whiteness. Not all whites benefit from the white spatial imaginary, and some Blacks embrace it and profit from it. Yet every white person benefits from the association of white places with privilege, from the neighborhood race effects that create unequal and unjust geographies of opportunity.66
The solipsistic design of many white habitats leaves little space for analysis of the structured advantages woven into whiteness. Instead, personal success is naturalized and detached from the institutionalization of whiteness in education, employment, housing, the penal-legal system, and public policy. Expanding on Lipsitz’s white spatial imaginary, Charles Mills calls for a corresponding “white temporal imaginary,” to consider the role of white time in shaping social cognition. Mills argues that a “white temporal imaginary” is key to “structuring social affect as well as social cognition, and helping to constitute exclusionary gated moral communities protected by temporal, no less than spatial, walls.”67 Spatial and temporal walls extend beyond gated communities.
The walls of whiteness require the construction of other impenetrable barriers difficult to break from the outside. I am referring to mutually constitutive relationships between gated communities and the ghetto, project, hood, trap, and/or barrio.68 I wonder what it might look like if youths like Devon had an opportunity to speak back to the many white homeowners who accuse him and other Black youths of being “up to no good.” Maybe Devon might remind them that “everything you got is because other people got got.” For those unfamiliar, to “get got” is to get tricked, duped, fleeced, hoodwinked, bamboozled, and/or fooled. During my upbringing, my hood had what are called “getters.” A getter is a person who might “get you” for your chain, wallet, pocketbook, and so on. Some might describe such actions as “crime.” Getters call it “survival.” And what many may never understand is that, in most cases, it is survival.
In this hypothetical scenario, though, Devon is confronting getters that live beyond the boundaries of the ghetto. Those that live within a white habitus and white habitats have what they have because Black, brown, and Indigenous people got more than just got. What many middle-to-upper-middle-class white people have is the product of debt, dispossession, and death. Redlining, restrictive covenants, highway construction, blockbusting, deindustrialization, and the pathologization and punishment of those living in poor urbanized space secure whiteness and protect white space. The Twin Cities’ own history of racist real estate policies, specifically restrictive covenants, became the subject of a 2018 PBS documentary titled Jim Crow of the North.69 Devon’s conception of a “maybe environment” signals his awareness that white people’s safety is predicated on nonwhite people’s unsafety. The space that many white people call home cannot exist without the ghetto. “Urbanized” space is just a few letters short of “suburbanized” space. Some stay in one or more of these locations because, as Saidiya Hartman notes, they are places not meant for living in:
We stay there, but we don’t live there. Ghettos aren’t designed for living. The debris awash in the streets, the broken windows, the stench of urine in project elevators and stairwells are the signs of bare life. “The insistent, maddening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that comes from trying to breathe in a very small room with all the windows shut,” writes James Baldwin, daily assaults the residents of the ghetto, the quarters, the ’hood. It produces the need to “destroy tirelessly” or “to smash something,” which appears the most obvious path of salvation. As C.L.R. James observes about the San Domingo masses, they destroyed “what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much.”70
Spaces “not designed for living,” however, are not devoid of life. As gated communities strive to protect whiteness and wealth, insurgency brews among temporally dispossessed and racialized peoples in urbanized space. The brew will eventually spill over into an urge toward destroying that which is destructive. In other words, when segregated by the walls of wealth and whiteness, poor, racialized people remain intent on razing what is raised and rising. The asynchronous temporalities of “maybe environments” and “very for-sure environments” must recalibrate according to standards not set by white time but by Black resistance.
Calibrated according to white spatial and temporal imaginaries, “The Miracle of Minneapolis” offers a future-oriented portrait of two cities haunted by a present past that disproportionately harms racialized and Indigenous peoples. Derek Thompson credits top-down economic theory (i.e., the maintenance of capitalism) with the preservation of the “American dream.” Thompson’s universal claims offer further evidence of the use of white life as a reference category to make sense of the life chances of all Twin Cities residents, including nonwhite ones.
“The Miracle of Minneapolis” is more than a “white lie.” It is a form of journalistic perjury overrepresenting white life as life itself while rendering the Black Midwest invisible. There is a difference between a “miracle” and guaranteed success at every conceivable level of measurable success. For those with the complexion for the protection, however, “miracles” and “guarantees” are apparently interchangeable. Perhaps the real “miracle” of Minneapolis and greater Minnesota lies within the capacity of Black and Indigenous people to continue to resist and rage against ongoing forms of racialized violence.
The systematic neglect, underdevelopment, and divestment of majority-Black communities in the Twin Cities is key to the construction of “maybe environments.” What is guaranteed to many white youths is more likely a “maybe” to Black youths, particularly those residing in poor urbanized space. Despite representations of poor urbanized space as inherently uncertain, I argue that Black youths retain an acute awareness of the future, making them more prescient than “present oriented.” When the response to a yes-or-no question is “maybe,” most youths know to be prepared to wait. For racialized youths in urbanized space, however, a “maybe” is not only a potential response to ordinary questions but also a default decision on their life chances. Black youths at Run-a-Way interpret maybes as the product of structural violence that offers some people guarantees and others gimmicks. The promises made to white youths cannot be understood without the false promises made to those not white. Relying on “maybe” to gauge their life chances, Black youths can hope for the best, but they are accustomed to preparing for the worst. In other words, what was once a maybe becomes an unequivocal no for Black youths.
Beyond the conventional deficit-based perspectives used in the makings of a “maybe environment,” there exists a more liberating framework. It is one less concerned with the imposition of uncertainty on poor racialized communities through a top-down dynamic and more attentive to “radical” resistance that, remaining true to the etymology of the term (radix, the Latin word for “root”), comes from the ground up. It is a paradigm that refuses to be contained by the fixity of “yes” and “certainly,” one that is deliberately elusive, fluid, dynamic, and fugitive in order to escape the rigid confines of dominant modes of thought, discourse, and action. So when someone asks a Black youth, “Can we count on you to behave? Be on time? Do what we tell you to do? And follow the rules?” the most dignified, self-determined, affirming, and life-preserving reply might just be, “Maybe.”