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“The Ghetto is a Gold Mine”: The Racialized Temporality of Betterment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2019

Marisa Solomon
Marisa Solomon*
Affiliation:
Baruch College, City University of New York
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Abstract

Gentrification makes trash a discursive and material index of degeneration, mobilizing projects to “clean” and “better” neighborhoods and people. This ethnographic article explores how trash's movements and labor reveal the spatialized and temporalized racial histories of neighborhood transformation in the historically black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy), Brooklyn and the gentrified town of Norfolk, Virginia. Foregrounding the objects and people whose value(s) are called into question as the context around them changes, I draw on two key interlocutors whose scavenging is conditioned by the “betterment”—community revitalization and “clean up”—programs that seek to displace them. As Sal “saves” Bed-Stuy by directing the flow of the dismembered ghetto, Superfly redirects coffee shop ephemera to black barbershops. By attending to how trash moves, Sal's and Superfly's labor make visible the material conditions of gentrification and point to how race and time are spatialized under racial capitalism.

Type
Articles
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 95: Labor Laid Waste , Spring 2019 , pp. 76 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2019 

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References

Notes

1. Jeremiah Moss, “New Yorkers Need to Take Back Their City,” New York Times, April 13, 2014. Accessed on 1 June 2018.

2. As capital seeks to reproduce itself through property investment and land value, the capacity to control and define “improvements” to land is taken out of poor communities’ hands. (Smith, Neil, “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People.” Journal of American Planning Association 45, 4 (1979): 538–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

3. Harvey, David, The Right to the City (New York, 2008)Google Scholar.

4. Emily McKee argues insightfully that moralizing discourses naturalize and link poor landscapes with imaginations of disorder and lawlessness in southern Israel. In this context, “Trash Talk” refers to similar patterns of segregation within state building processes that rely on the naturalization of “the other” as dirty or as producers of waste. Here, however, I am using “trash talk” to refer specifically to how those naturalized by the discourse that degrades them as outside of a state—or in this case, outside a neighborhood-building project—talk about discarded objects in order to talk about systemic degradation at the hands of the state. By focusing on how those naturalized as dirty labor the objects discarded by powerful projects, we can see the real contours and effects of larger systems on individual and community labor. McKee, Emily, “Trash Talk: Interpreting Morality and Disorder in Negev/Naqab Landscapes,” Current Anthropology 56, 5 (2015): 733–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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7. I rely on the theoretical interventions of black urban anthropologists like Steven Gregory and Robin Kelley who, as Marxists scholars, emphasize conditions. For black Marxists, terms like “the politics of blight” and “infrapolitics” point to the structural production of urban segregation, as opposed to the re-inscription of structural inequalities through descriptions of poor landscapes. (See: Gregory, Steven, Black Corona (Princeton, NJ, 1998)Google Scholar and Kelley, Robin, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994)Google Scholar).

8. Recently, many anthropology scholars have been interested in the relationship between waste and infrastructure (see: Nagle, Robin, Picking Up: On the streets and behind the trucks with the sanitation workers of New York City (New York City, 2010)Google Scholar); the relationship between waste and value (see: Hawkins, Gayle, Culture and Waste: The creation and destruction of value (Lanham, 2003)Google Scholar, Humes, Edward, Garbology: Our dirty love affair with trash (New York, 2012)Google Scholar, Gill, Kaveri, Of Poverty and Plastic (Oxford, 2010)Google Scholar); the ontology of waste (see: Kennedy, Greg, An Ontology of Trash: The disposable and it's problematic nature (Albany, NY, 2007)Google Scholar, Choy, Tim, Ecologies of Comparison: An ethnography of endangerment in Hong Kong, (Durham, NC, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and the materiality of waste (see: Hird, MJ, “Knowing Waste: Toward an Inhuman Epistemology,” Social Epistemology 26, 3–4, (2012): 453–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gille, Zsuzsa, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: They politics of waste in socialist and postsocialist Hungary (Bloomington, IN, 2013)Google Scholar; Rachwal, Tadeusz, Rubbish, Waste and Litter (Warsaw, 2008)Google Scholar; Rathje, William, Rubbish! The archeology of garbage (Tucson, AR, 2001)Google Scholar). Less attention has been paid to the epistemological conditions waste makes and its relationship to biopolitics and racial capitalism.

9. Fabian famously argued that anthropology has been shaped by constructing “the other” as either outside of time or in a different time than the time shared with the ethnographer (Fabian, Johannes, Time and The Other: How anthropology makes its object (New York, 1983)Google Scholar. While considerations of temporality shape the discipline (see: Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York, 1979)Google Scholar, Gell, Alfred, The Anthropology of Time: Cultural constructions of temporal maps and images (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar, Trouillot, Michelle Ralph, Silencing the Past: Power and the production of history (Boston, 2001)Google Scholar, as indigenous scholar Andrea Smith argues, the logic of genocide, in which “indigenous peoples must disappear. In fact, they must always be disappearing, in order to enable non-indigenous peoples’ rightful claim to land” is a way that teleologies inform white supremacy and setter colonialism. Settler colonial temporalities are world-forming processes that have shaped anthropology's commitments (Smith, Andrea, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,” in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, Hosang, Daniel Martinez, LaBennet, Oneka, and Pulido, Laura (eds.) (Berkley, 2012), 66–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These ways of describing those who have been colonized, marginalized, and rendered unevenly susceptible to death, create dangerous ways of talking about the relationship between race and landscape.

10. The 2012 plan to rezone north Bed-Stuy was well under-way. The plan, which sought to “incentivize affordable housing creation in major corridors” and “preserve neighborhood character,” was rapidly transforming Bed-Stuy, posing the question: Affordable housing for whom?

11. The Mayor's Office uses scorecards to assess safety and status of a neighborhood's streets. Since the 1930s, Bed-Stuy has had a reputation of being the filthiest since the black population began to grow (for more, see: Brian Purnell, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings (Lexington, KY, 2013)).

12. With the rapid evictions and evacuations that had been taking place in the neighborhood, many people made creative use of existing community to direct their own flows. For example, when people were kicked out of the apartments with little notice they would leave a set of keys at a barber shop so that those who were daring enough or looking for refuge on a cold night could make use of what was left. As Robin Kelley has said about the relationship between the church and the black working class, there is creative and critical power in the ability to make congregation out of segregation. Kelley, Robin, “We Are Not What We Seem.” The Journal of American History, 80, 1 (1993): 75–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. According to black Marxist scholars, all capitalism is racial because it is a system dependent on colonialism, slavery, and genocide. I use racial capitalism to think through how capitalism and racism co-produced spatial and racial “order.” See Cox, Oliver, Caste, Class, & Race (New York, 1948)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Robinson, Cedric, Black Marxism: The Making of a Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC, 1983)Google Scholar, and Marable, Manning, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Boston, 1999)Google Scholar.

14. Rothstein, Richard, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York, 2017)Google Scholar.

15. Bois, W.E.B Du, The Philadelphia Negro; a Social Study (Philadelphia, 1995)Google Scholar.

16. Osman, Suleiman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (New York, 2012)Google Scholar.

17. “From Redlining to Subprime Lending: How Neighborhood Narratives Mask Financial Distress in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn,” Housing Policy Debate 23 (2013): 714–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Faber, Jacob W., “Racial Dynamics of Subprime Mortgage Lending at the Peak,” Housing Policy Debate 23 (2013): 328–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Spence, Lester, Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics (New York, 2015)Google Scholar.

18. Redlining made a black middle class in Bed-Stuy possible. However, the uneven struggle for civil rights was often fractured along class lines. In particular, the struggle for civil rights sometimes broke out into a cross-class fight about who needed to be disciplined into civility to prove that black people where human. These struggles are also located within and circumscribed by white modernist projects that equate betterment with whiteness and humanness.

19. Sanitation districts are calculated by a projected population based on number of domiciles. However, white heteronormative understandings of family ignore how the institution of slavery had forced different kinds of bonds as kin. Not only was Bed-Stuy's population density being miscalculated, it was being miscalculated on historically racialized lines that would make Bed-Stuy seem disorderly compared to other districts with the same number of homes.

20. For more on this protest, see Purnell, Brian, “Brian Taxation Without Sanitation is Tyranny” in Taylor, (ed). Civil Rights in New York City: From WWII to the Giuliani Era (New York, 2007), 52–76Google Scholar.

21. Geographer Laura Pulido argues that environmental racism is constituent of racial capitalism. (Pulido, , “Environmental Racism, Racial Capitalism, and State Sanctioned Violence,” Progress in Human Geography, 41 (2017): 524–33)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Arjun Appadurai argues that objects move in and out of the “commodity” phase, thus revealing the socially constructed nature of the politics of value under capitalism (Appadurai, The Social Life of Things, Cambridge, 1986). Similarly, I argue, trash is a phase of an object's “life” that it can pass in and out of. As Sal's shop makes visible, how and when objects move in and out of “trash” are shaped by the conditions of racial capitalism.

23. There are three different municipal maps of Bed-Stuy that draw its boundaries differently: Map 1. Community District 3, Map 2. The Bed-Stuy Redevelopment Plan, and Map 3. The Department of Housing and Preservation. In the case of Bed-Stuy, the shifting border is about different ways of planning for real-estate development, but for Sal, the claiming (and perhaps preservation) of black history spatializes Bed-Stuy in ways that refuses municipal distinctions, if maps are arguments about space rather than mere descriptions of “the real.” See Sparke, In the Space of Theory (Minneapolis, 2005), McKittrick, Demonic Grounds (Minneapolis, 2006), and Banivanua-Mar, Making Settler Colonial Space (New York, 2010).

24. Jonathan P. Hicks, “Mayor Announces New Assault on Graffiti Citing its Toll on City.” New York Times 17 November 1994.

25. A corollary of this argument is implicit in much pro-gentrification literature: that it is the new (white, upper middle-class) residents of a gentrifying neighborhood who can “restore” the neighborhood to its “true” value by preserving its history—that these new residents are the proper stewards of value. Again, the assumption is that black people don't—can't—care for property and in their lack of care cause property to decay.

26. Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, Chakravartty, and da Silva, , “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—An Introduction,” American Quarterly 64, (2012): 361–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27. hooks, bell, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, 1992)Google Scholar.

28. Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 2002)Google Scholar.

29. Gregory, Steven, Black Corona Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton, NJ, 1998)Google Scholar.

30. R.H. Melton, “N.Y. Mayor's Trash Talk Riles VA,” Washington Post, January 15, 1999.

31. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues regarding California's prison boom, land lying fallow drives down the price of real estate. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkley, 2007)Google Scholar.

32. Brown, Jacqueline N., Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 3–15Google Scholar.

33. As Kelley Hernandez argues, the white settler colonial history that shaped Los Angeles's infrastructure was upheld through targeting poor whites to clean on chain gangs, “aggressively promot[ing] an idyllic settlement of middle-class white families” (412). The maintenance of class ensured that whiteness was equated with middle-classness and blackness with poverty. (Hernandez, Kelley, “Hobos in Heaven: Race, Incarceration, and the Rise of Los Angeles, 1880-1910,” Pacific Historical Review 83, 3 (2014): 410–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.)

34. Isenberg, Nancy, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York, 2016), 136–53Google Scholar.

35. Roberts, Dorothy, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.

36. Robert's work shows how miscegenation laws maintained white supremacy through the regulations of black women's bodies (Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body).

37. Sect. 42-16. Norfolk Municipal Code of Ordinances: Begging Code 1958, 31-10; Ord. No. 40,594, 1, 1-29-02

38. Steven Gregory, Black Corona.

39. For example, codes now known as “The Poor Laws” criminalized behaviors associated with poverty, such as sleeping on the sidewalk or in public parks, buskering, and scavenging. Criminalizing behaviors associated with poverty is a way of reproducing spatialized class distinctions. See Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford, 2009)Google Scholar, Chadwick, Edwin, “Poor Law Administration, its Chief Principles and their Results in England and Ireland as Compared with Scotland,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 27 (1864): 492–504CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Melosi, Martin, “Equity, Eco-racism, and Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 3 (1995): 1–16Google Scholar, and Melosi, Martin, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment (Pittsburgh, 2005)Google Scholar.

40. Retrieved from Norfolk DID online: https://www.downtownnorfolk.org (accessed on September 26, 2016).