Racialized space and the culture of segregation: "hewing a stone of hope from a mountain of despair."(Symposium - Shaping American Communities: Segregation, Housing & the Urban Poor)

• Author: Calmore, John O.

Racial discrimination not only produces a societal injury, it strikes at the dignity of the individual. It says to the individual that no matter how much money you have, no matter what your social position is, you cannot live here. To most people, that message is malignant. It strikes at the victim's personhood, and if left to fester, will poison the victim's selfesteem.(1)

Racial segregation, like all other forms of cruelty and tyranny, debases all human beings--those who are its victims, those who victimize, and in quite subtle ways those who are mere accessories.(2)

INTRODUCTION

For black Americans, these telling epigraphic observations represent historically constructed mountains of despair. Although the legacy of the civil rights movement, with its integration imperatives and equal opportunity mandates, can continue somewhat to address racial discrimination, that legacy is inadequate to redress imposed segregation and expendability. In this post-civil-rights era, more complementary and promising stones of hope will necessarily have to be hewn from within the communities, at the grassroots level, where imposed segregation and expendability are most acutely experienced. Accordingly, this Paper presents a counterstory to that which has written off inner-city communities of color. It offers a note of resistance to those who doom the human beings who reside there because they are deemed to be hopelessly embedded in a culture of poverty or a culture of segregation. It offers a normatively reformulated conception of social justice that requires an elimination of oppression and domination and not merely a correction of inequitable distribution. It argues that heterogeneity must constitute an integral part of the analysis of social justice. It entreats progressives to intervene and connect with the people who reside in these communities, and, for all of these story lines, it proceeds against the odds.

Empathetic understanding is a rare gift, so I imagine it is very difficult for whites to appreciate the pain, the hurt, the humiliation, and the insult of housing discrimination. Likewise, I imagine it is difficult for whites to appreciate the dehumanizing constraints and isolation of imposed segregation. After all, eighty-six percent of suburban white Americans reside in neighborhoods where the percentage of blacks is less than one percent,(3) which I think most of us would find to be a remarkable indication of our separateness. The compoundedness of race and space, I imagine, is for whites taken for granted; white space is not problematic and black space is somewhere else. For whites, the broad notion of housing simply does not present the problems that it has for blacks.(4) Shortly before my now deceased father was born in 1904, W.E.B. Du Bois spoke prophetically that "[t]he problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line--the relation of the darker to lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea."(5) Five short years away from the twenty-first century, it appears that Du Bois was overly optimistic.(6)

As a conceptual framework, "the racialization of space" elaborates on the color line, marking it with complexity and empirical detail. British scholar Robert Miles traces the concept of "racialization"(7) to Frantz Fanon's discussion of the problems decolonized intellectuals in Africa faced in trying to construct a cultural future.(8) Extending the concept, Miles refers to it as "those instances where social relations ... have been structured by the signification of human biological characteristics in such a way as to define and construct differentiated social collectives."(9) Racialization is a "dialectical process of signification" that reaches to the societal processes in which people participate and to the structures and institutions that people produce.(10)

The "racialization of space," as I am using the term, is the process by which residential location and community are carried and placed on racial identity. I take my meaning from Susan Smith, who characterizes the term to be "the process by which residential location is taken as an index of the attitudes, values, behavioural inclinations and social norms of the kinds of people who are assumed to live [there]."(11) Once largely an American matter of black/white race relations, it is growing more complicated as Latinos and Asians enter the mix.(12)

An analysis of racialized space is complex for many reasons, as it involves at least the consideration of politics and public policy, racially signified and symbolized conflicts, and aspects of hegemony, such as the construction of our "common sense" understandings of everyday life. In exploring this complexity, I draw heavily from the work of Michael Omi and Howard Winant, who attempt to provide a theoretical explanation for how race, despite its "uncertainties and contradictions," is a fundamental factor in both "structuring and representing the social world."(13) Therefore, race is not an essence, something that is fixed, concrete, and objective, nor should we view race as a mere "illusion we can somehow get beyond."(14) These basic perspectives inform Omi and Winant's theory of "racial formation," which they define as "the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed."(15) They provide a three-step elaboration. First, they argue that the process is fueled by "racial projects" where "human bodies and social structures are represented and organized."(16) Second, they link the process to the evolution of hegemony.(17) Third, they argue that race is now primarily a political matter that is influenced by "the racial state."(18) All three of these arguments apply to my analysis of racialized space.

Omi and Winant view race as a matter of both social structure and cultural representation. A racial project ideologically links this structure and representation. Thus, a racial project constitutes a combination that is "simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines."(19) In viewing residential segregation as racialized space, I in turn view the racialization of space as a process of racial formation and its associated racial projects that undergird oppression and domination by force and hegemony.(20) I believe that the racial ghetto is a paradigm site of racial projects. It is where we connect what race means discursively and racially organize both social structures and everyday experience. Douglas Massey's Article in this Symposium, Getting Away with Murder, graphically illustrates this.(21)

A consideration of racialized space, as urban apartheid, also forces one to consider the political economy, urban social theory, and contemporary cultural meanings. These, in turn, compel a more general consideration of the destabilizing notion of the "postmodern city."(22) In writing from the home base of Los Angeles, a postmodern analysis of city life must incorporate a way of seeing as well as being.(23) As Michael Keith and Malcolm Cross observe, "we are talking ... about a new conceptualization of the city as well as a new form of urbanism."(24) These insights, I believe, relate as well to the important work of Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton on America's apartheid society and the making of the black underclass.(25) The contemporary urban form they describe and analyze incorporates a set of racialized values that structure what Keith and Cross term "the architecture of power in the city," and this structure "in its most fundamental principles is nothing less than the urban realization of the ideology of apartheid."(26)

I observe by way of introductory caveat that this writing is driven by my attempt to incorporate explicitly a sense of resistance. I take a cue from Martha Mahoney, who has suggested that "[i]f we were better at articulating both oppression and resistance, at both the individual and collective level, we might be less confused."(27) Mahoney rebuts the argument that "agency among the oppressed" is to be judged exclusively in terms of "effectuated change."(28) Instead, we can claim an agency that manifests itself in the "liberatory struggle" associated with the "resistance to oppression."(29) Hence, this Paper reflects a developing oppositional consciousness, which can redirect the responsibility for segregation and its ill effects from the divine, natural, and personal domain to the systems of domination and oppression that have constructed and maintained the color line. This Paper ultimately stands for the proposition that positive social change in the ghetto "is not only desirable but possible."(30)

In Part I, I will briefly describe criticism, from the political right and left, of Massey and Denton's book, American Apartheid. I will take up both the critique from the right that the book failed to acknowledge the black crime rate as a justifiable reason for white aversion to black neighbors and the critique from the left that the book failed to consider how segregation and white prejudice are mutual causations of each other--a vicious cycle. In his article, Getting Away with Murder, Massey writes as if he is addressing both of these criticisms.

Part II will discuss Massey's thesis on black crime within the context of a larger conversation about what he calls the "culture of segregation." Although unique, this thesis bears some similarity to reactionary ideological constructions of the unworthy poor as a racialized class living within racialized space. I argue that Massey, in effect, has been absorbed by the right, because his position now supports their racial projects.

I think that most people, virtually without thinking, see integration as the sure-bet way for people of color to achieve acceptance by dominant society and to negotiate successfully the mainstream...