How Racism Takes Place PDF
Preview How Racism Takes Place
How Racism Takes Place George Lipsitz How Racism Takes Place temple university press Philadelphia TemPle UniversiTy Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress Copyright © 2011 by Temple University All rights reserved Published 2011 Permission to revise and reprint selections from three of the author’s earlier publications is hereby acknowledged: “The silence of the rams: How st. louis school Children subsidize the super Bowl Champs,” in John Bloom and michael nevin Willard, eds., Sports Matters: Race, Recreation and Culture (new york: new york University Press, 2002), 225–245. Copyright 2002 new york University Press. “The racialization of space and the spatialization of race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of landscape,” Landscape Journal 26, no. 1 (march 2007), 10–23. Copyright University of Wisconsin Press. “new Orleans in the World and the World in new Orleans,” Black Music Research Journal 31, no. 2 (2011). Copyright 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of illinois. Used with permission of the University of illinois Press. library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data lipsitz, George. How racism takes place / George lipsitz. p. cm. includes bibliographical references and index. isBn 978-1-4399-0255-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — isBn 978-1-4399-0256-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — isBn 978-1-4399-0257-8 (e-book) 1. United states—race relations. 2. United states—social conditions. 3. racism—economic aspects—United states. 4. income distribution—United states. 5. African Americans—social conditions. 6. African Americans—economic conditions. 7. Human geography—United states. i. Title. e185.615.l5765 2011 305.800973—dc22 2010045079 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American national standard for information sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed library materials, Ansi Z39.48-1992 Printed in the United states of America 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Contents introduction: race, Place, and Power 1 SECTION 1 Social Imaginaries and Social Relations 1 The White spatial imaginary 25 2 The Black spatial imaginary 51 SECTION II Spectatorship and Citizenship 3 space, sports, and spectatorship in st. louis 73 4 The Crime The Wire Couldn’t name: social Decay and 95 Cynical Detachment in Baltimore A Bridge for This Book Weapons of the Weak 115 and Weapons of the strong SECTION III Visible Archives 5 Horace Tapscott and the World stage in los Angeles 131 6 John Biggers and Project row Houses in Houston 149 vi Contents SECTION IV Invisible Archives 7 Betye saar’s los Angeles and Paule marshall’s Brooklyn 169 8 something left to love: lorraine Hansberry’s Chicago 191 SECTION V Race and Place Today 9 new Orleans Today: We Know This Place 211 10 A Place Where everybody is somebody 238 notes 257 Acknowledgments 291 index 293 How Racism Takes Place Introduction Race, Place, and Power it is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn. —martin luther King, Jr. What happened to the hopes of the civil rights movement? What has become of Dr. King’s dream? How can it be that decades after the adoption of comprehensive civil rights laws, racial iden- tity remains the key variable in shaping opportunities and life chances for individuals and groups in the United states? Why does race still matter so much? The most popular answers to these questions lead us in exactly the wrong directions. since the 1970s, politicians, pundits, and publicists have argued that Black people have shown themselves to be simply unfit for free- dom. They argue that in a time when civil rights laws clearly ban discrimina- tion, the persistence of racial inequality demonstrates that Blacks have been unable to take advantage of the opportunities afforded them. equal opportu- nity exists, they contend, so unequal outcomes have to be attributed to what they perceive to be the deficient values, beliefs, and behaviors of Black people themselves. At times those who adhere to these positions concede that past generations of Blacks had legitimate grievances about slavery, segregation, vigilante violence, and disenfranchisement, but they argue that the problems that Black people confront today are of their own making. What was once done to them by white racists, this line of argument contends, Blacks are now doing to themselves. inequality between races today, they claim, exists because Blacks allegedly commit more crimes, have lower rates of marriage, and higher rates of children born out of wedlock. They contend that Black students perform poorly on standardized tests because they and their parents do not value education, and that they are disproportionately poor because
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