Abstract
This essay discusses Empathy in an American Urban Context. An attempt will be made to redefine normative understandings of dominant and counter-narratives, to flip which narratives are negatively defined against the other, to redefine a right to the city, and to assert my lived experience.
Whose pain hurts more? Whose pain is more valid? Whose experience is valid? Whose claim to the city is more valid? Under which structures must we operate? Under which structures should we operate?
I assert only true Empathy as exercised by Black people (and historically marginalized groups) can be used to make that which is Urban America, for the double consciousness of Black people, as articulated by W.E.B. DuBois, allows them to both see what is and what should be, without the "othering" inherent to the white spatial imaginary as articulated by George Lipsitz. For it is Empathy in lieu of sympathy, as a means of ethnography, that allows the reader to feel a true understanding —the Vesterhen of Max Weber— of the observed's experience, and the ability to place themselves in the shoes of the subject. The constant struggle to exist within the normative structure for Black people is what creates the ability to have true empathy for the plight of another, for the common thread between marginalized peoples is that they are "othered" by dominant societal norms and discriminatory spatial practices that established the white suburb through extortion and degradation of the Black central city. Therefore, I conclude that, in a white and Black world, the right to the city can only be exercised by those who were condemned to the inner city by the white spatial imaginary, Black people, for their resilience/lived experience in the face of oppressive dominant social norms has afforded them true empathy.
This is an assertion of my right to the city as I understand it at the end of this course and critically engaging with myself and theory.
Keywords: Empathy, Double Consciousness, White Spatial Imaginary, White Space, Black Spatial Imaginary, subject vs. object, Historically Marginalized Groups (H.M.G), Dominant-Normative White Power Structures (D.P.S), Revanchist
INTRODUCTION
I chose to look at empathy for a certain reason. Much of the work I have studied in Urban Studies, Anthropology, or Sociology, has been predominately ethnography. Our course recently discussed the shortcomings of ethnography, or the ethical imperatives that scholars need follow to produce ethical and representative work. In response, our professor Stefano Bloch referred to a recent article by Mario L. Small titled De-Exoticizing Ghetto Poverty: On the Ethics of Representation in Urban Ethnography.
In this article, Small discusses the critique of outsider ethnographers who have painted one-dimensional portraits of poor Black and latinx communities in their work. Minority scholars put forth this critique while adding their voices to the debate, critically examining how middle-class whites represent themselves and the observed in their work. It is in that relationship where conflict arises.
“When an ethnographer either purposefully of unwittingly improves her representation of herself by worsening the representation of the observed, she risks a kind of rhetorical exploitation.” (Small 2015)
Small elaborates on this point by considering two ways ethnographers represent themselves, the first being sympathetic observer. Using the history of religious man Bartolomé de las Casas and his sympathy for the indigenous people of the Americas, Small demonstrates that a commitment to sympathy will focus the lens on aspects of the subject likely to evoke pity, sorrow and anger. In doing so, the observer highlights those elements at the expense of others, painting a one-sided view of the observed while pandering to sympathetic outsiders. It is here where Small shifts his focus from a critique on sympathetic observer to suggesting an alternative: empathy.
“One feels empathy when one understands another’s condition as one would one’s own, and pity or sorrow are irrelevant. An ethnographer seeking empathy hopes to understand what aspects of the ostensibly exotics are plausibly familiar, often in the belief that similar social processes may manifest themselves in different contexts” (Small 354). As Small states, this concept is so powerful because it does not align perfectly with stereotypes, instead, it allows the reader to understand the observed as a person who, just like the reader, has conflicting feelings about social issues. It is the following quotation which struck me and inspired this essay.
“If the reader cannot see himself in the teenager out of school, or the undocumented worker, or the single mother of three, then an ethnographic text has failed as an empathetic project, even if it elicits easy sympathy.”
Sympathetic writing, he continues, often sparks readers into action, but the danger is that sympathy depends on the willingness of the reader to pity the observed, and many readers will not. The issue with sympathetic portrayals is that both readers who sympathize with the victims and readers who blame the victims share an understanding of the poor Black or latinx person as a representation of a problem first, and a multidimensional human being second, thus reinforcing stereotypes in the public that are longstanding in society. (Such writing dehumanizes, and views POC as “others,” becoming a “Black problem.” —Sympathy as it operates in the white spatial imaginary.)
Small’s other ethnographic category, courageous immersive, is just as problematic as sympathetic observer. Here, the ethnographer paints themselves as courageous to the extent that the observed are viewed as dangerous, with their courage augmented the more the observed is violent or criminal. Readers with no experience of poor neighborhoods are given a one-dimensional image that focuses on crime and violence. They will be left with the impression that those neighborhoods only feature crime and violence, as the writer is favoring this narrative over the myriad complexities inherent to the study of human beings. Even more dangerous is how readily the American public consumes stories (documentaries, movies, plays) about violence and crime, particularly stories of black and brown people, as evidenced by the Academy Awards and critical acclaim given to Black Actors who play stereotypes of black people —Halle Barry in Monsters Ball played a drug addict and single parent, Denzel Washington played a corrupt and violent cop in Training Day, Lupita Nyong’o played a slave in 12 Years a Slave(a). The ethnographer, who is all too familiar with such realities, makes a conscious decision to reject, ignore, or capitalize on their subjects. Small then provides recent ethnography that reject, ignore, or capitalize on it. The ethnographer must consider the ethics and effects of how they represent the observed.
Small then concludes his work arguing that ethnography is most effective when the work isn't sensational but rather boring and mundane. There exists ethnography that deal with the (normative) ordinary experience of middle class white men and women that lack the sensationalism and sympathy-bating commonly found on studies of low-income minorities, despite the social problems present in the middle class such as drug-abuse, depression, and mass school shootings. (Small 356) The ease with which ethnographers only see poverty and race in low income minority communities speaks to George Lipsitz’s white spatial imaginary in which the social ills of the inner city and low income minority communities only happens in communities of color, viewing these issues as inherently black and brown issues while ignoring those of the white communities. I will explain in more detail the white spatial imaginary in the following sections. For now, it provides me a bridge to my ultimate goal with this paper.
The most personally striking conversation we had in our course centered on pain, more specifically : whether the pain of the debutante (read: a stand in for some hyper stereotyped white, obedient, female of privilege) whose parents did not love them was equal to that of the gangbanger (read: hyper stereotyped black or brown, defiant, male lacking opportunity) who is racially profiled and criminalized for their appearance. The most prevalent responses, summed up succinctly by Professor Stefano Bloch were:
1 Yes, if we zoom in on the individual human, out of social context, then the pain is the same in that it is experienced personally and profoundly at a visceral level.
2 No, if we zoom out and see the individual in a social context and with all of the identifiers placed upon them and all the categories to which they fit. At the scale of the social, pain becomes relative and effects our opportunities differently, and is often a matter of life and death.
The resulting question is “are we all the same?”, to which the answer is yes and no. However, in our normative, social reality we must conclude that no, we are not all the same. To cite Professor Bloch, “Our superficial indicators matter deeply to how others see us and how we see ourselves, both positively and negatively. At this scale, to neglect categorization is to neglect recognition of power differentials.”
“Structural forms of inequality have cultivated and maintained this inequality despite our individual best intentions or naive desire to envision and realize equality.” Bloch continues to discuss how difficult it is to disavow or utilize those superficial categories, for using them reifies their use, while neglecting them doesn't allow the conversation to take place. ‘Why do you always bring up race’ truly means, ‘I refuse to acknowledge your reality for mine’.
To contextualize this theoretically, the refusal of someone’s reality is a key point of W.E.B. DuBois’ concept of double consciousness. Double Consciousness is knowing you're an “other” and internalizing how you're a problem to normative society. As a result, you are always an actor, never an observer, a character on the stage adapting their persona to the set. José Itzigsohn and Karida Brown focus on the significance of DuBois’s Double Consciousness in their article Sociology and the Theory of Double Consciousness: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Phenomenology of Racialized Subjectivity. In a racialized society, there is no true communication or recognition between the racializing (read: White, D.P.S) and the racialized (read: Black, H.M.G). They continue by emphasizing that, “…Double Consciousness puts racialization at the center of the analysis of self-formation, linking the macro structure of the racialized world with the lived experiences of racialized subjects.”
I would go further than to say there lacks a true communication between the racialized and the racializing, for the racialized is able to see themselves in both the white space and black space. This comes from DuBois’s concept of Twoness, which asserts that, “…within the process of self-formation, the racialized takes the position of two different worlds—the Black world, which they intersubjectively construct behind the veil, and the White world, which dehumanizes them through lack of recognition.” (Itzigsohn & Brown, 235 )The Veil behind which the racialized subjects have to process their self-formation according to the projections of Whites onto the Veil itself is another aspect of Double Consciousness. The Veil is the color line, the line that separates by race. This demarcation is a constitutive structural element of racialized modernity that structures the way in which subjects on either side of the veil (i.e., White v. Black) see and experience their social world. (ibid) “For the racializing subject, the racialized subject is invisible. Therefore, the racializing subject cannot take the position of racialized.” The Veil prevents the full recognition of the humanity of racialized groups and bars the racializing from empathizing with their humanity. The racialized view the veil as creating, “…a lifeworld distorted by a series of dualities: duality of agency within an oppressive system, a duality in the formation of self, and a duality in understanding of the world.”(ibid, 230) Life behind the Veil simultaneously imprisons Blacks in and cuts them off from the dominant white world.
Second Sight is the final tenet of double consciousness, which speaks to the potential ability of the racialized to see the world behind the veil. “Second Sight creeps in as the awareness of their invisibility and of the world beyond the veil gradually becomes apparent to Black subjects.” (ibid, 240) The racialized can only see themselves through the revelation of the white world, gaining the awareness to identify and suspend the veil and reimagine non-normative ways to organize society. This “gift” forces the Black subject on the one hand to contend with their constant dehumanization, but, on the either hand, allows them to glance into the white world, creating the possibility of neutralizing the effects of the veil.
It is from the careful consideration of the aforementioned texts and theories that I came to critically engage my auto ethnography as a means of discussing Empathy. As much as the theory provides the structure under which to operate and provides the language, engaging a subject’s history will shift the scope by zooming in on myself as the individual human and hopefully elicit empathy.
This work is intended to be expanded upon as I continue my studies. In the future, this work will include more ethnographic work that is not of myself.
I. WHY EMPATHY?
In light of the aforementioned review, and particularly the beauty and truth that shine through DuBois’s double consciousness, I must contend with my own double consciousness: the living contradiction, the white-black man, the black-white man that I am.
Full disclosure, I am a passing, dirty blond-green eyed, freckled light-skinned, bi-racial man. I am the first of my family to attend and complete an undergraduate university program and on track to be the first to receive a masters deegree. I am also of a low-income background and on almost a complete financial package from the university. I am afforded privileges based on the color of my skin just like other fair-skinned white or passing POCs receive. I know this. I also know that I am in a constant process of self-formation, debating who I am at all times of my life, whether I have to be white or black, or me, in our racialized world. For my light complexion has granted me the status of an undercover brother -- I may exist in white spaces as a black person and evade for a period of time the dehumanizing othering of the white space. I am able to evade the veil, but once found out I am immediately subjugated to that of the “other” and the veil is established. My humanity is rejected.
From early child-hood, I was socialized to understand that I was the “other.” As Elijah Anderson states, “[Middle Class Suburban Black Families] send their children to private schools and encourage them to excel in the classical study of language, literature, and music while gently warning them to not forget where they came from, urging them to hold on to their blackness. However, their children sometimes become intimately involved in diverse play and social groups that totally belie their parents’ experiences with the nation’s racially segregated past, of which the younger people are sometimes fundamentally unaware and to which many are unable to relate.” (Anderson 2015) My father, a darker skinned southern Black man, imbued me with a strong sense of what blackness meant for him growing up in Monroe, Louisiana. He imbued my self-formation with a strong idea of myself as a Black man, and I continued to view myself as such until the gift of second sight opened my eyes to the complex racial world in which we live.
“Are you Hawaiian? Latino? You can’t just be white.” “My mother would kill me if she found out you were black.” “But…he’s not really black.” The white space refuses to grant humanity to the body. For all my passing, and decades after the one-drop rule went out of fashion, my humanity was second to my blackness.
When you’re socialized from a young age to explain why you look a certain way, why you speak or say words a certain way, you are taught that who you are is not normative. I use normative instead of normal because there is no normal. As our course has taught us, superficial and stereotypical categories do all people a disservice. However, when academic correctness and the language isn't accessible, normal suffices, because the mainstream norms are equated with normalcy. I’ve always been told and have understood myself to not be normal. When you are deemed less-than intellectually by your academic peers because of your background, your interests, or your athletic skill is attributed to your race, you are taught to think of your pros as exceptions or not a result of your true merit. As DuBois was aware, “…that White world often existed primarily, so far as I was concerned, to see with sleepless vigilance that I was kept within bounds.” (Itzigsohn, Brown 2015) My acceptance to an Ivy League institution and general successes in life were seen as an affront to the white space, for no matter my appearance, my blackness itself was a criminal incursion on white privilege, despite my own white privilege.
A white friend’s mother once said, upon my telling her I’m biracial, “Oh, thats why you have such a beautiful voice!” As a Black person, aspects of you are exoticized. I was not afforded the individual credit for having a beautiful voice, it had to be attributed to my blackness; you are your whole race, not an individual person.
Upon entering Brown University, what I deem a white space, I was thrust into a clear color line between Black and White. Coming from Los Angeles, I was lucky to be surrounded by multi-racial black men and women, and I was able to craft my idea of self with the support of those empathetic to my experience. I lived what was my urban truth and exerted my right to the city (which I must acknowledge was significantly strengthened by my whiteness). However, Brown was the complete opposite: you were either white or black, colored or not of color, rich or poor, and I was the just off the exact middle. For all the liberal discussion held across our liberal campus, the social reality was a stark binary, a return to the one-drop rule. This stark difference between my life until that point and the life I was about to start crippled my ability to function productively. I was simultaneously imprisoned in and cut off from the white world— despite my lighter skin. My efforts to make friends were sad, in that the people who ostensibly looked like me had no cultural connection to me; there was no empathetic understanding of each other, and I lacked an empathetic understanding of their experiences but as a result of class. I was lucky enough to have acclimated and have a productive undergraduate career, as I am now able to articulate my experience in a way that explores self, the black and white space, and a right to the city. After careful consideration of the literal review in the introduction, I’ve concluded that my right to the city revolves around Empathy: an empathy of the lived experience of H.M.G who have been dehumanized and excluded from the white world and sequestered in urban ghettos across the United States only to now have that ghetto stolen and repurposed in the revanchist form of gentrification.
I define my own concept of Lived Experience. Empathy is important because people will never completely trust another’s opinion or self-formation, as they themselves are entirely different people. One’s life experience, their lived experience, defines their truths more than anything else; One’s life, what one experiences viscerally, physically and mentally, is one’s truth, providing their epistemological framework for social, economic, and political production. As for my experience, whenever a racializing subject asked me about my experience, the answer was always a resounding, "Wow, I can't imagine what that must be like.”
In essence, I am activating DuBois’s theory of double consciousness by invalidating the white spatial imaginary, the white world, and the side of the veil where the white racializing subject resides. A potential criticism is that the invalidation of a white existence is dehumanizing and counter to my emphasis on empathy of other lived experiences. I accept that critique. However, I argue against the validity of the white spatial imaginary, for I view it as a heterotopia, a space that functions in true opposition to the black spatial imaginary.
Therefore, I equate the true communication of DuBois with Max Weber’s Vesterhen, which refers to understanding the meaning of action from the actor's point of view. Understanding the meaning of action from the actor (read: subject, observed) is true empathy, true communication between people.
My ultimate goal is not to convince you that I’m right. My goal is to assert my reality as valid and provide my critical perspective. To give myself the voice I suppressed while struggling to find the words and language to liberate my thoughts. Though it may be selfish or myopic, this essay is my truth manifest. I encourage those reading to engage with their own truth as a means to understand mine and formulate their own.
II. THE BLACK SPATIAL IMAGINARY AS THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE
The terms Black Spatial Imaginary and White Spatial Imaginary were coined by George Lipsitz in his seminal work, How Racism Takes Place. Lipsitz discusses how White and Black Identity is place-bound, with racism persisting because a network of practices skew opportunities and life chances along racial lines. These practices assign people of different races to different spaces, leading to grossly unequal access to education, employment, transportation, and shelter. The White Spatial Imaginary is white privilege enacted in space. These spaces white people inhabit (i.e., Post WWII suburb) are afforded resources, capital, shelter from aggressive police activity, authoritative rule, and the moral high ground (read: normative moral compass). The Black Spatial Imaginary is negatively defined against it as the ability of Black people to enact the private space as public, jettisoning normative spatial practices by crafting their own means of taking space.
Though I value Lipsitz work, I cannot help but reject his Black Spatial Imaginary. As outlined through the Small review, there is an ethics in representation when conducting ethnography or other sociological work. I believe despite his best intentions, his Black Spatial Imaginary comes from the perspective of the sympathetic observer. Though I doubt it was his intention, the language used to describe how Black spatial practices reflect a unique response to segregation and racism of Black American character, it paints those who operate within it as other. There lacks an empathy in the work, for it is written by a white man, an outsider. As DuBois’s double consciousness explains with my passionate agreement, the racializing white person cannot take the position of the racialized black. As the white spatial imaginary inherently dehumanizes Black and H.M.G, negatively defining a Black Spatial Imaginary against it dehumanizes those spatial practices and assigns it a value judgement from a white world.
I reject Lipsitz Black Spatial imaginary, for it perpetuates the idea that from segregation rose certain beneficial spatial practices that are distinctly Black and self-affirming. I side with Ta-Nehisi Coates, who criticizes the “misty-eyed” nostalgia for the old ghetto in The Case for Reparations. “It is common today to become misty-eyed about the old black ghetto, where doctors and lawyers lived next door to meatpackers and steelworkers, who themselves lived next door to prostitutes and the unemployed:
"This segregationist nostalgia ignores the actual conditions endured by the people living there—vermin and arson, for instance—and ignores the fact that the old ghetto was premised on denying black people privileges enjoyed by white Americans.”
Shortly thereafter, Coates critiques the implied natural expression of preference in the concept of white flight; “…white flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America’s public and private sectors. For should any nonracist white families decide that integration might not be so bad as a matter of principle or practicality, they still had to contend with the hard facts of American housing policy: When the mid-20th-century white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma--he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on market prices. Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived.” In his work, Coates provides physical and anecdotal manifestations of the white spatial imaginary: “DONT SELL TO BLACKS” signs were left in the homes of fleeing whites. (ibid) Coates then provides a look at the true reality faced by Black people in America (H.M.G too). Mattie Lewis, a black resident of North Lawnsdale, Il for over 50 years, reveals to Coates that she believed, “American Piracy— black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it” was a fact of nature. That unmitigated theft of Black people can be thought of as part of nature speaks to the nature of existing while black: you are in a never ending struggle against the white spatial imaginary.
The struggle of Blacks moving to northern U.S cities only to encounter a new jim crow is, as Mexican and Central American immigrants travel north seeking opportunity, as Syrian refugees seek asylum from a horrific civil war, a true representation of the never ending struggle that is reality for those “othered” by dominant western power structures. Yet, this reality allows for empathetic exchange, the ability for racialized subjects to take the position of other racialized subjects, leading to true Vesterhen. It is for this reason that I assert the Black Spatial Imaginary as what ought to be the dominant power structure, the normative imaginary. I used different migrational groups in the sentences before to illustrate that, though superficial social constructions separate them racially or ethnically, and come from distinct cultural backgrounds, these groups have a common struggle between them: the escape of social, political or economic forces inhibiting their ability to live and provide for themselves and their families in the racialized world.
Elijah Anderson’s White Space illustrates how just occupying a white space is oppressive to the Black man’s self-formation. “When present in the white space, blacks reflexively note the proportion of whites to blacks, or may look around for other blacks with whom to commune if not bond, and then may adjust their comfort level accordingly; when judging a setting as too white, they can feel uneasy and consider it to be informally ‘off limits.’” (Anderson 2015) Double consciousness forces the Black man to confront whiteness in all aspects, constantly being made aware that, “…while navigating the white space, they risk a special penalty—their putative transgression is to conduct themselves in ordinary ways in public while being black at the same time.” (ibid) This fact alone leads me to conclude that true existence is this constant awareness, a constant self-affirmation by Black people that: a) they are human, but b) being Black robs you of humanity in the white space.
In sum, the Black spatial imaginary and the Black experience is to confront self-formation on a daily basis. To expand the scope, as all non-white people — as the language suggests— are negatively defined against white people, their lived experiences are those of the Black spatial imaginary. Their exclusion and “othering” from and within the white space is a refusal of their humanity. As a result, I assert that only when one is denied their humanity within a racialized society can true empathy be attained, for it is that denial of humanity that truly makes one human and establishes within them a deeper connection to Humanity. This is my definition of a Black Spatial Imaginary.
III. THE WHITE SPATIAL IMAGINARY AS HETEROTOPIA
Though I reject his definition of the Black Spacial Imaginary, George Lipsitz concept of the white spatial imaginary is a critical reflection on how white privilege is enacted spatially. It is a social imaginary that affords white americans privileges denied to Black americans through spacial separation and social manipulation of attributes and the moral compass of… Spaces in which white people inhabit are afforded resources, capital, shelter from aggressive police activity, authoritative rule, and the moral high ground, etc.
Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, by way of Ta-Nehisi Coates, outline the devastating effects that racial policy enacted by the Federal Housing Authority in the 1940s and 50s stripped black communities of all productive means of capital.
“Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’ of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable.”
A real estate manual instructed brokers in 1943 to avoid selling homes to the menace that is “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitle to live among whites.” (Lipsitz, pg. 25) He continues that such an act or desire is condemned as a criminal incursion on white privilege. This example confirms the predominant commitment by developers, appraisers, and planners to promote the racial exclusion of Blacks as a mechanism for inflating the value of white owned property.
AirBnb is a new form, but a continuation of the exclusion for Black tourists and travelers, as white property owners refuse to rent their rooms to black users with actual photos of themselves, their true names that are perceived as too ethnic, yet will rent the same rooms to black users whose names are made to be more “White” or their actual white friends who are also users, or whose photos don't reveal the race of the user. (b)
When white suburbia is created by the coordinated condemnation, concentrated blighting of black neighborhoods, and guaranteed exclusion from the post-World War II housing market through violence while the american dream became manifest, and white people use the capital they accumulated through said exclusion to then exclude Black people from the city through neoliberal revanchism, there is no right to the city for whites. The white spatial imaginary is an invalid accomplishment. As the teenager who uses cheat codes to circumvent any impediment to their domination of a video game, so too does the white imaginary contort and develop institutions, social norms, and spatial practices in the interest of maintaining a social order reserved for whites.
Since the federal, state, and local government convened to condemn and sequester Black people to the inner city through redlining, subsidized housing, and used the federal highway system to close off black neighborhoods while providing Whites the ability to extract and accumulate capital from those black neighborhoods and in the suburbs, their claims to redevelop the city are egregiously invalid. Revanchist projects of gentrification, the increasing migration of white professionals from the suburbs to the city, is an unjustified and immoral theft (or re-theft: think of indigenous pops) of the land to which mid twentieth-century black residents were doomed/condemned. Hell, Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country, and it was founded by Black fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, and the city that remains is intent on corralling and letting Black people live in constant struggle on the South Side. (Ta-Nehisi Coates) I can only assume control was wrested from him by the white spatial imaginary and his history all but destroyed.
The moral right promulgated and lauded by conservatives (read: traditional right wing ideology) and white property owners is a fallacy. Suburbia was created by state policy and white racial politics as whites benefitted from the privileged access they enjoyed to expressly discriminatory government-supported mortgages that enabled them to move to the suburbs during the 40s and 50s. (Lipsitz 27) As a result, “…Instead of recognizing themselves accurately as recipients of collective public largesse, whites came to see themselves as individuals whose wealth grew out of their personal and individual success in acquiring property on the ‘free market.’
“At the same time, whites viewed the inner-city residents not as fellow citizens denied the subsidies freely offered to whites, but as people whose alleged failures to save, invest, and take care of their homes forced the government to intervene on their behalf, to build housing projects that were then ruined by alleged Black neglect.”
“Whites attributed urban decay and poverty to the behavior of Black people, not discrimination and ill-advised public policy.” (Lipsitz 28) For whites, the suburb reflected the moral worth of white people. They fought to keep Blacks out of their neighborhoods because they associated them with the ghettos that whites created and from which they profited.
Lipsitz has argued so far that the White Spatial imaginary is based on exclusivity and augmented exchange value, and forms the foundational logic behind prevailing social and spatial policies in cities and suburbs today. It employs contract law and deed restrictions to channel amenities to places designated as white. It has cultural and social consequences. It structures feelings as well as social institutions by idealizing “pure” and homogenous spaces, controlled environments, and predictable patterns of design and white behavior (read: gentrification, redevelopment, urban renewal). This is tied to the homogenous colonists’ view of the Americas as a space of virtue in a sea of global corruption.
But for a homogenous and pure space to manifest, “impure” populations have to be removed and marginalized. (Lipsitz 29)
This is Perhaps one of the more poignant points made by Lipsitz in these chapters. Looking at urban renewal and gentrification, Blacks and other POCs and marginalized groups were cast away in the inner city, forgotten as sprawl and suburban development dominated development patterns for decades. As the city became a desirable place in which to live following a shift from suburban development to urban and redevelopment of old industrial sites starting in the 1970s, white suburbanites are now coming back to the city, buying property on the cheap and flipping it for a profit and imbuing the social and spatial designs and behavior of the WSI into that property, then the area, then the neighborhood until dominant White Spatial morals and practices vengefully claim the space. Neil Smiths “The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City” asks what the rallying cry of the revanchist city is. “Who lost the city? And on whom is revenge to be exacted?” (Smith 227) The white world believes it lost the city, and the central city Black ghettos they created will receive the full brunt of their revenge through the strong arm that is property investment and urban renewal.
This dangerous, invalid narrative speaks to the Heterotopia that is the white spatial imaginary. This theory elaborated by philosopher Michel Foucault describes places and spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions. These are spaces of otherness, which are neither here nor there, that are simultaneously physical and mental, such as the space of a phone call or the moment when you see yourself in the mirror. Calling the white spatial imaginary a heterotopia goes against its definition as a non-hegemonic space. However, I view the invalidity of this imaginary as the non-normative narrative. It is not real, nor should it be real, that the white space is the dominant narrative in our reality when the majority of the world population is of color. The white spatial imaginary is an invalid spatial existence supported by white supremacist cheat codes. The true hegemony that are people of color live a true existence and experience true understanding. Those in the white space do not.
CONCLUSION
I must reiterate: This is my truth. It was not arrived upon lightly, but was the conclusion of a (albeit short) lifelong search for my self-formation as a black and white man in the United States. I view my existence as a blessing as well as a curse. I would never want to be anyone but who I am, yet the psychological and never ending existential crises I must confront are taxing. I ask that you read this over at a later date, replacing my story with yours, and critically engaging with the racialized world, using the american city as a unit of analysis. This work is unfinished. It requires a constant reexamining as the racializing world mutates over time. It also requires an analysis of data, stories, experiences, and analysis that is not centered on myself. I wish to one day have the ability to finish this work.
I hope that one day, all Historically Marginalized peoples will activate their double consciousness and asset their right to the city. True equality and democracy is a horizon toward which we strive, constantly remaking ourselves to reach a point of true understanding. And that one day, humanity will be recognized first before any superficial aspect of one’s being is used to define them.
But we can never forget to zoom out; we can never dismiss the structure.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, Elijah, "White Space" Sociology of Race and Ethnicity Vol. 1(1) 10–21, 2015
Brown, Karida & Itzigsohn, José, “Sociology and the Theory of Double Consciousness: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Phenomenology of Racialized Subjectivity,” 2015
Bloch, Stefano, URBN 1870U, Critical Urban Theory, 2016
Coates, Ta-Nehisi, The Case for Reparations, 2014
Harvey, David, Right to the City, 2012
Foucault, Michel, Of Other Spaces, 1984
Lipsitz, George, How Racism Takes Place, 2011
Small, Mario l., De-Exoticizing Ghetto Poverty: On the Ethics of Representation in Urban Ethnography
Smith, Neil, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the revanchist city, 1996
Internet Links
a) THR Staff, #OscarsSoWhite: How to Win an Oscar if You’re Black (Chart), January 29, 2016, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/oscarssowhite-how-win-an-oscar-859613
b)#AirBnbWhileBlack, http://www.vox.com/2016/5/6/11601180/airbnbwhileblack-racism
Vesterhen, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verstehen
Aisle of Man, http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/populate.asp
Sean Scott, 2016