The Racialization of Space and theSpatiaiization of Race

Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of LandscapeGeorge Lipsitz

ABSTRAOT A primary goai of iandscape architects and othercitizens concerned with the built environment shouid be to dis-assemble the fatal links that connect race, place, and power.This articie shows that the national spatiai imaginary is raciallymarked, and that segregation serves as a crucibie for creating theemphasis on exciusion and augmented exchange value that hasguided the contemporary ideai of the properiy-ordered, prosper-ous private home. For aggrieved communities of coior and othernon-normative popuiations, on the other hand, a different spa-tiai imaginary exists. This perspective on space revolves aroundsolidarities within, between, and across spaces. It views space asvaluable and finite, as a pubiic responsibiiity for which aii musttake stewardship. Priviieging the pubiic good over private inter-ests, this spatial imaginary envisions the costs of environmentaiprotection, efficient transportation, affordable housing, publiceducation, and universal medical care as common responsibiii-ties to be shared rather than as onerous burdens to be avoided.This paper argues for a two-part strategy that entaiis first, a fron-tai attack on aii the mechanisms that prevent peopie of coiorfrom equai opportunities to accumuiate assets that appreciatein vaiue and that can be passed down across generations, andsecond, the embrace of a spatiai imaginary based on priviieginguse vaiue over exchange vaiue, sociaiity over selfishness, andinclusion over exclusion.

KEYWORDS Defensive iocaiism, hostiie privatism, racializa-tion, biack spatiai imaginary

Late in June 2005, eighty-two-year-old Allison "Tootie"Montana stood before the New Orleans City Coun-

cil and spoke his mind. Montana complained to thecouncil about the brutal force used by police officers indispersing a gathering at the corner of Lasalle Street andWashington Avenue earlier that year. The crowd con-sisted of Mardi Gras Indian tribes—social clubs of blackmen who masquerade as Plains Indians and paradethrough their neighborhoods in flamboyant costumestwice a year, on Mardi Gras Day and St. Joseph's DayThe officers contended that the group was rowdy, bois-terous, and loud, that the participants had no permit toassemble at the intersection, and that some membersof the group appeared inebriated and potentially vio-lent. Montana saw things differently

Speaking from his perspective as a resident of theSeventh Ward, the oldest continuous free black neigh-borhood in the United States, as a black worker whoselabor as a lather had helped build houses throughout

the city of New Orleans, and as a respected elder—Chiefof the Yellow Pocahontas Tribe and reigning "Chief ofChiefs" of all the Mardi Gras Indian tribes—Montanacontended that those assembled posed no threat tocivic order and that the Indians had never needed a per-mit before though their organizations have been parad-ing every St. Joseph's Day for more than a century

Montana identified the incident as only the lat-est insult in a long history of struggles, going back tothe 1940s, over space in New Orleans. He describedincident after incident of police surveillance, harass-ment, and provocation. He pointed to the importanceof the corner of Lasalle and Washington in the contextof the constant destruction of key neighborhood sitesby urban renewal projects, freeway construction, anddisplacement of local residents. He affirmed the rightof the Indians to assemble and complained about of-ficial suppression of that right over five decades. Mon-tana told the council members solemnly, "I want this tostop." He then paused, collapsed, and fell to the floor(Reckdahl2005,1).

As city officials called for an ambulance, policeofficers surrounded the fallen chief and administeredCPR. City Council President Oliver Thomas adjournedthe meeting and asked those present to pray. The In-dians in the room began to sing "Indian Red," a songthat serves as a prayer traditionally voiced to honor thetribal chief. Montana died later that night at CharityHospital.

Tootie Montana passed away while championingthe right of black people in New Orleans to occupy andtraverse urban space. His final words—"I want this tostop"—speak volumes about the seriousness that liesbeneath the surface spectacle of the Indians' colorfulhand-made costumes, intricate language and lore, fes-tive dances, and celebratory songs (Lipsitz 1990, 233-253; 1994, 71-77). In New Orleans, where decades ofhousing discrimination, environmental racism, urbanrenewal, and police harassment have relegated differ-ent races to different spaces, the ferocious theatricalityand aggressive festivity of the Mardi Gras Indians holds

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great significance for the politics of place. Indian imag-ery evokes a history of heroic self-defense by non-whitepeople against the theft of their lands. Montana's Yel-low Pocahontas tribe, like all Mardi Gras Indian groups,comes from a specific neighborhood and speaks for it.The corner of Lasalle and Washington is not just anycorner. It is a place where Indians have congregated formore than a century, and it is the location of the DewDrop Inn, a venerable hotel, rhythm and blues night-club, and performance venue famous for its flamboyanttransvestite entertainers.

The Mardi Gras Indians and the New Orleans Po-lice Department clashed on March 19 because theyproceeded from diametrically opposed understandingsof space, from distinct spatial imaginaries rooted in thelinks between space and race. From the perspective ofthe police department, dispersing the Indians was fullyjustified. The officers felt their obligations to protectproperty values, to keep local thoroughfares open forcommerce, and to assure that tourists would have un-impeded and untroubled access to places where theymight wish to spend their money in and near the scenicFrench Quarter, justified the dispersal of the crowd as-sembled without a permit at the corner of Washingtonand Lasalle. These same officers, however, would neveract in the same way toward the crowds of revelers thatroutinely congregate near the Louisiana Superdome ondays when the local professional football team playsits games. The football crowds do not have permits toassemble; are loud, boisterous, often drunk; and posea greater threat to public order than the gatherings ofMardi Gras Indians. However, they congregate to spenda large amount of money in a state-authorized (andsubsidized) facility. Their revelry produces profits forprivate businesses. Their rituals and traditions are im-portant to wealthy whites.

The Indian tribes, on the other hand, function allyear round in their neighborhoods as mutual aid societ-ies. They help members meet unexpected emergencies,pay medical bills and funeral expenses, finance urgenthome repairs, and make up for lost wages caused by lay-offs, illness, and injuries. These forms of self-help serve

especially important functions because of the price thatblack people in New Orleans pay for the racializationof space and the spatiaiization of race. Systematic seg-regation and discrimination prevent them from freelyacquiring assets that appreciate in value, from movingto desirable neighborhoods with better services andamenities, and from reaping the rewards of home own-ership built into the American tax code. Urban renewalprojects, like the local football stadium and the Conven-tion Center, have dispersed neighbors to far flung des-tinations, undermined collective and individual equityin homes and businesses, reduced the political powerof black voters, and disrupted the routines of neighbor-hood social and support groups.

Like the members of suburban homeowners' asso-ciations and stakeholders in Common Interest Devel-opments, the inner-city residents who mask as MardiGras Indians express a defensive localism. Unlike theircounterparts in the suburbs, who establish private gov-ernments that benefit from exclusionary zoning andtax subsidized privatism, inner-city residents do notand cannot control the uses to which their neighbor-hoods are put by the rest of the city, nor can they secureincreases in the exchange value of their homes. Theironly recourse under these circumstances is to increasethe use value of their neighborhoods by turning "seg-regation into congregation" and fashioning ferociousattachments to place as a means of producing usefulmechanisms of solidarity (Lewis 1991, 91-2).

Musician Cyril Neville learned about Indian mask-ing from his uncle George Landry, who served as BigChief Jolly of the Wild Tchoupitoulas. "We don't needyour fancy floats," Neville imagines the Indians sayingto the dovwitown Mardi Gras. "We don't need fioats atall. We have our own stories, our own music, our owndrama. We'll make our own costumes according to ourdesigns and we'll design our own parades." Neville re-calls his uncle's moral authority as being rooted in theirfamily's uptown Thirteenth Ward neighborhood, takingthe name of his tribe from the name of a local street,and masking as an Indian to tell the world, "This is whoI am, this is where I'm from" (Neville et al. 2000, 245).

Lipsitz 11

On the day when the official Mardi Gras paradeenshrines Canal Street as the center of the city, the In-dians parade proudly through their neighborhoods,calling communities into being through performance.As Cyril Neville explains, "The mythology of the tribes ishased on territorial integrity—this is our plot of groundwhere we rule." He believes Chief Jolly's sense of self-affirmation also came from his uptown Thirteenth Wardneighhorhood (Neville et al. 2000,245).

THE RACIALIZATION OF SPACE AND THE

SPATIALIZATION OF RACE

The different spatial imaginaries of the New Orleans Po-lice Department and the Mardi Gras Indian tribes havelocal causes and consequences, but they are part andparcel of a larger process: the racialization of space andthe spatialization of race. The lived experience of racehas a spatial dimension, and the lived experience ofspace has a racial dimension. People of different racesin the United States are relegated to different physicallocations by housing and lending discrimination, byschool district boundaries, by policing practices, byzoning regulations, and by the design of transit systems.The racial demography of the places where people live,work, play, shop, and travel exposes them to a socially-shared system of exclusion and inclusion. Race servesas a key variable in determining who has the ability toown homes that appreciate in value and can be passeddown to subsequent generations; in deciding whichchildren have access to education by experienced andcredentialed teachers in safe buildings with adequateequipment; and in shaping differential exposure to pol-luted air, water, food, and land (Allen 1995; Feagin andMcKinney 2003; Oliver and Shapiro 1995; Lipsitz 1998).

Opportunities in this society are both spatializedand racialized. Inheritance based on home ownershipenables white families to pass on the benefits of pastand present discrimination to succeeding generations.Putatively race-neutral tax policies subsidize thoseforms of income most likely to be secured, in part, from

discriminatory practices. The home mortgage interestdeduction, the local property tax deduction, and thefavored treatment of income derived from inheritanceand capital gains provide enhanced rewards for racismand subsidies for segregation. Segregated schools andneighborhoods provide whites with privileged accessto insider information and personal networks, givingthem advantages in securing the 80 to 90 percent of jobsin American society that are never openly advertised.

These interconnections among race, place, andpower in the United States have a long history. Theystem from concrete policies and practices: Indian re-moval in the age of westward expansion; restrictivecovenants during the industrial era; and urban renewaland urban restructuring in the late industrial and earlypost-industrial periods (Rogin 1987; Hirsch 1983; Sug-rue 1996). Yet these policies also emanate from sharedcultural ideals and moral geographies based on a ro-mance with pure spaces. This romance fuels allegiancesto defensive localism and hostile privatism. It encour-ages well-off communities to hoard amenities and re-sources, exclude allegedly undesirable populations,and maximize property values in competition withother communities.

Having a better understanding of differential space,of the roles played by exclusion, exchange value, anduse value in determining the racial meanings of places,can help landscape architects and other professionalswhose work shapes the built environment to amelioratethe racialization of space and the spatialization of race.It is not yet possible, however, to formulate a valid gen-eral theory about race and space across different kindsof societies and historical eras. Land-use regulations,racial categories, and culturally-based investmentsin landscape vary widely across centuries, countries,and continents.' The relationship of race to the En-lightenment—as its always disavowed yet universallyproduced product—makes it necessary to struggle inseparate sites to unearth and identify the occluded anddisavowed historical genealogies and ideologies of ra-cialized space particular to specific locations.

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Understanding the links between race and. placein the United States starts with an examination of con-crete racial and spatial practices. Theoretical writings ofAntonio Gramsci show that great value can be securedfrom thinking about large concepts in relation to spe-cific and concrete historical and sociological situations(Hall 1986, 5-27). Louis Althusser (1971) demonstrateshow this kind of thinking can bring new insights to gen-eral theory. Althusser depicts the general Marxist theoryof social totality through a spatial metaphor that likenssociety to a house with a material "foundation" and anideological "superstructure." Conceding that the meta-phor is descriptive rather than analytic, it enables us tosee how social structure is both material and ideologi-cal. Althusser's argument forms a kind of descriptivetheory because it enables us to view reproduction ofthe social order simultaneously as a political, ideologi-cal, and economic imperative. The metaphor may be-come theory if and when it activates a perspective thatenables new relationships to come into view (Althusser1971, 90-92). Similarly, the idea of racially specific spa-tial imaginaries is not a theory, but a metaphorical con-struct that reveals actual social relations.

Donna Haraway builds on Althusser's emphaseson both metaphor and description to argue for thesuperiority of "situated" specific theory over universalgrand theory. Using the metaphor of human and ani-mal vision to show that knowledge is "partial, perspec-tival, and interested," Haraway insists on the particu-larity and embodiment of all vision. She argues for thevalue of partial perspective, for seeing from a situatedstandpoint. Instead of aspiring to an all-encompassing"eye of God," she urges us to accept the inevitable par-tiality of all perspectives, to build on local and situatedknowledges, and to construct "an earthwide network ofconnections, including the ability partially to translateknowledges among very different—and power differen-tiated—communities" (Haraway 1988, 580). Haraway'saim is not to present knowledge as the private prop-erty of incommensurable communities, but neitheris it to subsume the experiences of aggrieved groups

into sweeping generalizations for which no one is ac-countable. She argues that theories that claim universalapplicability will in practice merely elevate one histor-ically-specific dominant particular over others, assum-ing universality rather than proving it. Rather than pro-claiming one more dominant particular as a universal,Haraway seeks to build a better-theorized understand-ing of the world by promoting conversations, debates,and conflicts capable of registering clashes of experi-ences, interests, and perspectives, while compelling usto make choices about knowledge based on the broad-est possible range of points of view. To follow Haraway'srecommendations, we should stage a confrontation be-tween the moral geography of pure space and the moralgeography of differentiated space as it has developedamong aggrieved communities of color.

THE SPATIAL IIVIAGINARY OF WHITENESS AND

BLACKNESS

A white spatial imaginary, based on exclusivity and aug-mented exchange value, functions as a central mecha-nism for skewing opportunities and life chances in theUnited States along racial lines. Whiteness, as usedhere, is an analytic category that refers to the structuredadvantages that accrue to whites because of past andpresent discrimination. Not all people who are whiteconsciously embrace the white spatial imaginary, andnot all whites profit equally from their whiteness, but allwhites benefit from the association of whiteness withprivilege and the neighborhood effects of spaces de-fined by their racial demography. Grounded in the longhistory of housing discrimination, but augmented bythe rise of planned-unit developments, condominiums,cooperative apartment houses, planned-unit develop-ments of single family houses, and other forms of mass-produced and corporate-sponsored common interestdevelopments, the white spatial imaginary establishescontract law and deed restrictions as supreme authori-ties. It makes the augmentation of private property val-ues the central purpose of public associations, and pur-

Lipsitz 13

sues the ideal of pure and homogenous space throughexclusiveness, exclusivity, and homogeneity (McKenzie1994, 7,177).

Residents of these developments exercise the pow-ers of government through private homeowner associa-tions, pay fees for amenities and services that only they(and other members of the associations) can use, andresist the provision of general services by local govern-ment as a form of double taxation. At the same time,communities of color, especially black communities,have developed a counter-spatial imaginary based onsociability and augmented use value.

Blackness here, like whiteness, is not reducibleto an embodied identity. Not all blacks consciouslyembrace the black spatial imaginary, even though allblacks are suhjected to it. Systematic discriminationlimits blacks and other aggrieved minority homeseek-ers to an artificially constrained housing market wherehomes cost more and appreciate less than housingavailable to whites with similar incomes. Relegated toneighborhoods where zoning, policing, and investmentpractices make it impossible for tbem to control tbeexchange value of their property, and unable to moveaway from other memhers of their group because ofdiscrimination, ghetto and barrio residents turn segre-gation into congregation. They augment the use valueof their neighborhoods by relying on each other for bar-tered services and goods; by mobilizing collectively forbetter city services; by establishing businesses geared toa local ethnic clientele; and by using the commonalitiesof race and class as a basis for building pan-neighbor-hood alliances with residents of similar neighborhoodsto increase the responsibility, power, and accountabil-ity of local government. Black neighborhoods generatea spatial imaginary that favors public expenditures forpublic needs. As suburban property owners mobilizepolitically to cut property taxes, impose limits on gov-ernment regulation, and resist school desegregationand equal spending on education across district lines,residents of the differentiated spaces of cities and in-ner-ring suburbs have emerged as the most ferventadvocates for fair and affordable housing, for measures

to combat childhood lead poisoning, for the creationand maintenance of efficient and safe transportationsystems, and for equitable educational opportunities(Logan and Molotch 1987,195). Journalists, politicians,scholars, and land-use professionals have long beencognizant that these views represent the experiencesand opinions of different races, but they have been lessdiscerning about the degree to which these differencesin views stem from the experiences and opinions of dif-ferent spaces.

Changing the racialized nature of opportunitiesand life chances in the United States requires policies,practices, and institutions that reject the white spatialimaginary and constitute a new social charter alongthe lines emhodied in the black spatial imaginary. Myargument is that the primary goal of landscape archi-tects, and other citizens concerned with the built envi-ronment, should be to disassemble the fatal links thatconnect race, place, and power. This requires a two-partstrategy that entails, first, a frontal attack on the mecha-nisms that prevent people of color from equal opportu-nities to accumulate assets that appreciate in value andcan be passed down across generations, and second,the embrace of a spatial imaginary based on privileg-ing use value over exchange value, sociality over selfish-ness, and inclusion over exclusion.

The Ideal of the Pure American Space

For dominant groups in the United States, sociallyshared moral geographies have long imbued placeswith implicit ethical assertions about the proper formsof social connection and separation (McAlister 2001,4).Historian David W. Noble identifies a spatial imaginaryat the heart of European conquest and settlement ofNorth America in the seventeenth century. Republicantheorists in the Renaissance juxtaposed virtuous andtimeless nature with corrupt and time-bound humansociety. They believed that free nations had to be com-posed of homogenous populations with ties to the na-tional landscape, "timeless spaces" where citizens livedin complete harmony with one another. Starting in theseventeenth century, European colonialists imagined

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that American space might offer a refuge from the cor-ruptions of European time. Coalescing around whatNoble calls "the metaphor of two worlds"—the idea ofAmerica as an island of virtue in a global sea of corrup-tion—these ideals became institutionalized within thenational culture of the United States through the writ-ings of transcendentalists, the visual art of the HudsonRiver School, evocations by historians of the frontier asa unique source of regeneration, and ultimately, in theideal of the private, properly-ordered suburban home(Noble 2002).

Yet in order to have pure and homogenous spaces,impure populations had to be removed. The putativelyempty and timeless North American space designatedto serve as the refuge from the corruptions of Europeantime was actually occupied by indigenous people withhistories of their own. Rather than sharing North Amer-ican space with Indians as common ground, the moralgeography of the colonists required conquest, genocide,and Indian removal to produce the sacred ground thatthe Europeans felt would recreate the biblical idea of acity on a hill. The creation of homogenous polities livingin free spaces required the exclusion of others deemeddifferent, deficient, and non-normative. Noble showsthat this belief in a redemptive American landscape, asa refuge from the corruptions of European time, per-formed important cultural work necessary for the con-struction of the United States as an imagined commu-nity. As civilization penetrated the west, however, andit became more difficult for Americans to believe thatthey inhabited such a landscape, the properly-orderedand prosperous domestic dwelling became the nation'skey symbol of freedom, harmony, and virtue, eclipsingthe frontier as the privileged moral geography of Ameri-can society.

The association of freedom with pure spaces out-lived the frontier. In the late nineteenth and early twenti-eth centuries, this ideal coalesced around racial zoning,restrictive covenants, mortgage redlining, blockbusting,steering, and a host of attendant practices responsiblefor racially segregating residential areas in the UnitedStates.

THE PRICE OF PRIVILEGED GEOGRAPHY

Today, racially exclusive neighborhoods, segregatedsuburbs, and guarded and gated communities com-prise the privileged moral geographies of the contem-porary national landscape. These sites draw their privi-leged relationship to freedom, less from harmony withthe natural landscape, and more from their exclusionof non-normative others and the maximization of theexchange value of their houses as registered in the con-cept of property values. The privileged moral geographyof the properly-ordered, prosperous private dwellingdepends upon systematic exclusion. It produces a ra-cially-marked form of consumer citizenship that seeksto secure services for itself at the cheapest possible price,while passing on the costs of remedying complex socialproblems onto less powerful and less wealthy popula-tions. This stance places every sub-unit of governmentin competition with every other unit, strengthening thehand of wealthy individuals and corporations while de-funding the institutions established to regulate them.These practices serve the interests of owners and inves-tors twice over: increasing public spending in well-offdistricts increases their property values, while reducingspending in poorer communities makes residences inthem worth even less to their inhabitants. The effect ofthis social warrant is to add to white competitive andcomparative advantage in accumulating assets that ap-preciate in value and that can be passed down acrossgenerations.

The white spatial imaginary views space primar-ily as a locus for the generation of exchange value.Houses are investments that appreciate in value overtime. Assets accumulated or increased through realestate transactions receive favored treatment from thetax code, making them worth more than other kinds ofincome. Perhaps most importantly, the effects of segre-gated housing give white homeowners advantages andamenities unavailable to most minority home seekers:access to superior schools, protection from environ-mental hazards, proximity to sources of employment,inclusion in word-of-mouth networks about employ-

Lipsitz 15

ment and business opportunities, and the use of betterservices and amenities that can be secured from the un-derfunded public sphere after three decades of suhur-ban tax rebellions. These insurgencies do not so muchlower taxes as shift them—away from income taxes,property taxes, inheritance, and capital gains taxes,and toward payroll taxes and user fees. For residents ofthese spaces, dwellings are fungible assets tbat can in-crease in value the more their owners trade up or fiiptheir properties because of the tax breaks given for capi-tal gains and the propensity for upscale neighborhoodsto insulate themselves from the social costs incurred byhigh-risk populations.

Discrimination in Housing iVIarkets

Enabled largely because of support and subsidies frommunicipal, state, and federal government agencies,the inequalities at the heart of racialized space in theUnited States violate laws that have been on the hooksfor almost thirty years. The 1968 federal Fair HousingAct outlawed racial discrimination by realtors, mort-gage lenders, insurance agents, and home owners, butcontained no "cease and desist" provisions, allowed foronly minimal financial penalties, and placed the hur-den of investigation, exposure, and adjudication of thelaw on private citizens rather than the departments ofJustice or Housing and Urban Development. Decadesof tireless activism by fair housing advocates have madethe most of what the law allows, but bousing expertsagree tbat minority bome seekers are almost powerlessto stop the more than two million incidents of housingdiscrimination that take place every year (Massey andDenton 1993).

John Yinger estimates that direct discriminationin housing imposes a racial tax of $3 billion per yearon African Americans and $2 billion per year on Lati-nos in lost assets, wealth, and income (Torres, BuUard,and Johnson 2000, 90). A federally funded audit foundthat landlords in 24 major cities discriminated againstblack applicants for rental housing 53 percent of thetime, and that real estate sales personnel discrimi-nated against black home seekers 59 percent of the

time (Feagin 2000,155). Another study of the practicesof 3 major insurance companies in 9 cities revealedthat black and Latino insurance seekers frequently ex-perienced discrimination, from a low of 32 percent inMemphis to a high of 83 percent in Chicago. Overall,minorities received detrimental discriminatory treat-ment 53 percent of the time, while whites routinelysecured options that left them with greater insurancecoverage at lower rates (Feagin 2000, 15). Black apart-ment seekers in Houston in 2001 encountered dis-crimination 80 percent of the time, through openlydiscriminatory policies, unfair treatment in contracts,appointments, and applications, and the deliberatecommunication of inaccurate information (Feaginand McKinney 2003, 27). In 2004 and 2005, tbe GreaterNew Orleans Fair Housing Action Council (GNOFHAC)received 50 to 100 complaints a week about housingdiscrimination. Jn a survey conducted in 1996 and1997, the organization found that African Americansseeking apartments in New Orleans encountered dis-crimination 77 percent of the time. GNOFHAC attor-neys have secured more than $1 million in damagesfor victims of discrimination in the past 10 years alone(Wilson 2005, lA, 18A). African Americans in New Or-leans, like their counterparts in other American cities,know that spatial discrimination leaves them with ra-cialized relationships to many of the key institutionsand practices of society, from the school system to thecriminal justice system, from education to medicalcare, from entrepreneurial opportunities to intergen-erational transfers of wealth.

SPATIAL HISTORY OF COMMUNITIES OF COLOR

Current conditions have a long history. The racializationof space and the spatialization of race have long posedcollective, continuing, and cumulative problems forcommunities of color in the United States. Spatial dis-placement, dispossession, exclusion, and control shapethe contours of racial subordination and exploitation indecisive ways. From the theft of Native American andMexican lands in the nineteenth century; to the confis-

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cation of hlack and Latino property for urban renewalprojects in the twentieth century; from the Trail of Tearsto the Japanese internment; from the creation of ghet-tos, barrios, reservations, and Chinatowns; to the dis-proportionate placement of toxic hazards in minorityneighborhoods, the racial projects of American societyhave always been spatial projects as well.

Communities of color have experienced socialsubordination in the form of spatial regulation, butthe particular contours of slavery, sharecropping, andsegregation in the United States have inflected theAfrican-American encounter with the racialization ofspace and the spatiaiization of race in unique ways. Theplantation, the prison, the sharecropper's cabin, andthe ghetto have been visible and obvious manifesta-tions of white supremacist uses of space. Perhaps lessvisible and obvious, but no less racist, have been thespaces that have produced unfair gains and unjust en-richments for whites: the segregated neighborhood andthe segregated school. For black people in the UnitedStates, struggles against the oppressions of race haveby necessity also been struggles over space. African-American battles for resources, rights, and recogni-tion have not only taken place, in the figurative termthat historians use to describe how events happen, butthey have also required blacks literally to take places.The famous battles of the mid-twentieth-century civilrights movement to desegregate stores, lunch counters,trains, buses, and schools emerged from centuries ofstruggle over spaces, from a long history of struggle tosecure freedom of movement in public, and from cam-paigns to enter, inhabit, use, control, and own physicalplaces. This long legacy has produced a powerful blackspatial imaginary, a socially-shared understanding ofthe importance of public space and its power to shapeopportunities and life chances.

African-American artists and intellectuals havedrawn fully on this spatial imaginary in a broad rangeof cultural expressions, from migration narratives thatFarah Jasmine Griffin identifies as the core trope withinblack literature, music, and art; to the celebration of thecity street in the imagery and iconography of hip hop;

and in the sites appropriated for graffiti writing, muralart, and break dancing. The Chicago tenement apart-ment of Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun,the NewYork thoroughfares that serve as central "char-acters" in the novels of Chester Himes and Ann Petry,and the Houston walls reclaimed as sites for mural artby John Biggers and his students, testify to a pervasivepreoccupation with place in black culture (Griffin 1995).Geographer Clyde Woods argues that the expressiveculture of blues music grew direcdy out of the politicsof place in the Mississippi Delta, and that the blues con-stitute a key component of a distinct African-Americanethno-racial epistemology. His evidence and argumentbrilliantly demonstrate that this ethno-racial episte-mology is also an ethno-spatial epistemology (Woods1998).

During the Jim Crow Era, racial control restedopenly upon spatial control. State laws and municipalordinances in the sections of the country where mostblacks resided drew approval from federal courts. Thesestatutes mandated segregation in stores, restaurants,and public transportation. Direct de jure and indirectde facto segregation relegated African Americans toseparate and distincdy unequal schools. After 1877, theeconomically inefficient sharecropping system becamedominant in the South, largely as a way of dispersingthe black population and diluting the political powerAfrican Americans had secured through their collectivepolitical participation in the Loyalty and Union Leaguesin the era of Abolition Democracy.̂ Because the plan-tation system alone could not suppress black activity,white supremacy relied on the prison system as well.Blacks who refused to work under conditions speci-fied by employers could be arrested for having no vis-ible means of support. Those who fled from these un-just conditions could be incarcerated for vagrancy AsRuth Wilson Gilmore argues with pithy precision, mostblacks in southern prisons had committed only one oftwo crimes—moving or standing still (Gilmore 2007).

The contours of racial inequality today flow directlyfrom the racial and spatial heritage bequeathed to usfrom the past. Throughout the nation, from the 1880s

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through the 1960s, racial zoning ordinances, restrictivecovenants, and other private deed restrictions confinedAfrican Americans to an artificially constricted housingmarket. Between the 1930s and the 1970s, urban re-newal demolished some sixteen hundred black neigh-borhoods in cities in the North and South. This system-atic destruction of individual and collective ecosystemsexacted an enormous financial and emotional cost onblack communities. Clinical psychiatrist and publichealth specialist Mindy Thompson Fullilove argues thaturban renewal in the mid-twentieth century was of suf-ficient scale and scope that it destroyed the emotionalecosystems of black communities, inducing a profoundalienation and collective traumatic stress reaction thatshe describes as "root shock" (Fullilove 2004, 11, 20).Federally assisted urban renewal projects demolished20 percent ofthe central city housing units occupied byAfrican Americans during the 1950s and 1960s. Peopleof color made up more than 60 percent of the popula-tion displaced by urban renewal. Ninety percent of thelow-income housing units that were destroyed by ur-ban renewal were never replaced (Zarembka 1990, 104;Quadagno 1994, 91-2; Logan and Molotch 1987,168-9).

Mass mobilizations for black freedom in the mid-twentieth century concerned space as well as racethrough efforts to desegregate public accommodations,schools, and neighborhoods. Their success in puttingan end to de jure segregation did not end the racializednature of public space. Just as racial control of spacethrough segregation and sharecropping emerged in thenineteenth century as counter-revolutionary practicesto black freedom, new mechanisms to racialize spaceserved a central role in frustrating the aims and under-mining the achievements of the Second Reconstruc-tion as well. Northern investment in southern industryconcentrated new plants and high paying jobs in whiteareas, subsidizing the economic well-being of the de-clining white population, while discriminatory employ-ment practices and punitive welfare policies drove hun-dreds of thousands of blacks from the region (Woods1998, 162). Federal tax laws encouraged shutdowns ofviable industrial facilities and promoted investment in

new ones. These laws subsidized capital and job flightfrom inner cities toward mostly white suburbs (Squires1984,152-162). Failure to enforce fair housing laws gaverealtors, developers, mortgage lenders, and insurancecompanies full license to profit from segregated hous-ing by engaging in steering, block busting, home equityscams, and predatory lending (Shapiro 2004; Feaginand McKinney 2003; Squires and O'Connor 2001).

Environment and Inheritance

The collective, cumulative, and continuing legacy oftheracialization of space in the United States today makesitself felt most powerfully within black communities inthe form of structured disadvantages revolving aroundenvironmental politics of place. The spatial confine-ment and containment that accompanies racializa-tion in the United States damages both individuals andcommunities. Successful white resistance to schooldesegregation programs at the city, state, and federallevels relegated minority children to concentration inunderfunded and poorly equipped schools with inexpe-rienced teachers, while residential segregation, poverty,and political powerlessness left communities of colorwith disproportionate exposure to polluted air, water,and land. (Orfield, Eaton, and the Harvard Project onSchool Desegregation 1996; Cole and Foster 2001). Ag-grieved racialized groups are more likely than whites tolive in communities with toxic hazards, but less likelyto have access to medical treatment. Sixty percent ofAfrican Americans and Latinos live in communitieswith uncontrolled toxic waste sites. In Los Angeles, 34percent of whites inhabit areas with the highest levelsof air pollution, compared to 50 percent of Latinos and71 percent of African Americans. (BuUard 1994, 13; Lee1993, 49). Navajo teenagers experience organ cancer ata rate seventeen times the national average. In the low-est income families (those making less than $6,000 peryear), 36 percent of white children versus 68 percent ofblack children suffer from lead poisoning. Among fami-lies making more than $15,000 per year, 12 percent ofwhite children versus 38 percent of black children havetoxic levels of lead in their bloodstreams. Some seventy-

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five thousand African Americans die every year becauseof unequal access to nutrition, health care, and envi-ronmental protection (BuUard 1994, 9-10, 13, 21; Wray1992, 357-361; Lipsitz 1998, 8-10).

Important new work by Thomas Shapiro in hisbook. The Hidden Cost of Being African American (2004),underscores the links between housing discrimination,inheritance, and life chances. Shapiro shows that be-tween 1990 and 2020, some seven to nine trillion dollarswill be inherited by the baby boom generation. Almostall of that money is rooted in gains made by whites fromovertly discriminatory housing markets before 1968.Adult white wage earners are likely to inherit moneyfrom parents, while adult non-white wage earners arelikely to have to give money to their parents to com-pensate for low wages and lack of assets resulting fromdiscrimination. Shapiro's research reveals that white in-heritance is seven times larger than black inheritance.One third of baby boomer whites in 1989 could counton bequests, compared to only five percent of blacks.White families are four times as likely as blacks to receive

a significant inheritance, and of those who do receiveinheritances, on average whites inherit $102,167 morethan blacks. White families are 2.4 times more likelythan blacks to have parents who can provide help withdown payments or closing costs. Blacks get $2.10 in networth for every dollar earned, whites get $3.23. Cuts ininheritance and capital gains taxes disproportionatelybenefit whites and make property income more valu-able compared to wage income. Middle-class whiteshave between three and five times as much wealth asequally achieving blacks. Twenty-six percent of whitechildren grow up in asset-poor households, comparedwith 52 percent of blacks and 54 percent of Latinos. Ac-cording to Shapiro, inheritance is more important indetermining life chances than college degrees, numberof children in the family, marital status, full time em-ployment, or household composition (Shapiro 2004).

Skeptics may argue that the nation lacks the politi-cal will to implement fair housing practices, that they flyin the face of the direction that land use and tax policieshave been going for decades. But this inverts cause and

effect. It is not that suburban whites are innately rac-ist and consequently favor land-use policies that haveincreased the racial gap, but rather that prevailing land-use policies provide extraordinary inducements, incen-tives, and encouragement for a system of privatizationthat has drastic racial consequences. In his excellentstudy of the origins and evolution of the social move-ment for tax limitation that emerged during the 1970s,Clarence Lo notes how anti-tax and anti-busing activ-ists drew upon their experiences as suburban dwellerswho benefited from racial discrimination in housingto fashion a common notion of consumer citizenship."Whites joined antibusing movements," Lo observes,"because they sought to maintain advantages for theirracial or ethnic group in the consumption of govern-ment services." (Lo 1990, 58). Even the use ofthe term"forced busing" by white activists as the way to describedesegregation plans copied the example of opponentsof fair housing laws, who in the 1964 campaign to repealCalifornia's Rumford Act had declared themselves op-ponents of "forced housing" (Ethington 2000,25).

The defenders of segregated housing became thedefenders of segregated schools. The segregated neigh-borhoods and social circles that resulted served as themain sources of mobilization for tax limitations, budgetcuts on social services, and the denial of social servicesto immigrants. Philip J. Ethington's empirically rich andtheoretically sophisticated studies of race and spacein Los Angeles show that the white neighborhoodsmost physically isolated from black communities pro-vided the most enthusiastic support for California'sunconsttutional 1964 repeal of fair housing legislation,Proposition 13 tax limitation initiative (1978), and theunconstitutional Proposition 187 (1994) denying state-supported education and health care to undocumentedimmigrants (Ethington 2000,25-7).

Homeowner and condominium associations givethe appearance of democracy without the substance.Homeowners with direct financial interests in associa-tion activities do participate in governance activities.Yet the burden of work usually falls to self-selected, un-trained, and unregulated individuals with spare time

Lipsitz 19

who find themselves dependent on property manag-ers, lawyers, and accountants for guidance and advice.These professionals have a financial stake in continuingto work with the associations. For both volunteers andprofessionals, maximizing property values becomesthe one sure sign of success. These dynamics encour-age what Robert Reich calls "the secession of the suc-cessful" from the communities around them (McKenzie1994,186). Even though they need low-wage workers tolandscape their grounds, build their houses, repair theirstreets, clean their homes, and take care of their chil-dren, suburban property owners seek to avoid payingtaxes that contribute to the shelter, health, education,or transportation needs of their employees in order tohave more money spent on services and amenities forthemselves. Conservative scholar Charles Murray cel-ebrates this organized abandonment of aggrieved com-munities of color as a harbinger of the demise of thestate and the end of its regulation and control of privateproperty. Bringing the spatial imaginary ofthe nationallandscape full circle, he predicts that the wealthiest fifthof the population will control sufficient privatized ser-vices and political power to simply ignore inner cities,to view them with the same detachment that urban andsuburban dwellers now have for American Indian reser-vations (McKenzie 1994,187).

CONCLUSION: THE ROLE OF LANDSCAPEPROFESSIONS

Landscape architects, planners, and other land-useprofessionals can play an important role in discon-necting the nation's racial regimes from their spatialgrounding. Environmental designers must begin con-sciously to write and draw the under-represented andthe disenfranchised into their schemes and plans ratherthan ignoring or excluding such groups. They must alsowork actively to diversify the fields of practice in orderto challenge white dominance in design and decision-making. These efforts need to go beyond the kinds oftokenistic community participation (critiqued so ef-fectively by Arlene Davila in her study of gentrification

in East Harlem) to surrender actual decision-makingpower to community groups (Davila: 2004, 211).

Serious commitment to implement and strengthenfair housing laws would encourage the development ofnew kinds of spaces and spatial imaginaries. Measuresto increase diversity among design professionals and toreexamine the power dynamics between insiders andoutsiders in landscapes and urban settings would en-courage urban restructuring based on the black spatialimaginary. Landscape architects and other land useprofessionals can help create these spaces and spatialimaginaries by helping build communities character-ized by racial and class heterogeneity, inclusion, andaffordability.

In many cities, plans are already underway amongfair housing groups to sue mortgage lenders and insur-ance companies for the harm done to entire cities bytheir redlining policies, to sue realtors for the long-termeffects on communities of systematic steering of clientsto houses in neighborhoods composed largely of mem-bers of one race, and to sue large banks that supplycapital to predatory lenders. Members of these commu-nities need to engage in discussions with experts whocan help them assess how they have been damaged bydiscrimination and how they can craft appropriate rem-edies. Talking with presently poor and powerless peopleabout what kinds of communities they would like to livein would enable land-use professionals to envision newspatial and social relations grounded in another kind ofexpertise—the black spatial imaginary.

Public space also needs to be protected and en-hanced. Austin Allen's film Claiming Open Spaces pres-ents examples of how struggles by African Americansover access to public parks and recreational spaces

have placed planners and community residents in an-tagonistic relationships to one another (Allen 1995).Robin D. G. Kelley argues that the creation of privateparks and the destruction of public play areas in NewYork City during the 1990s are a small part of a largerproject of racial subordination and suppression (Kelley1998). Walter Hood, Margarita Hill, and Randy Hesterhave developed innovative ways of re-imagining the

20 Landscape Journal 26:1-07

work of design professionals, and their work should beimitated and augmented.

AFTERWORD

Eight weeks after Tootie Montana died. Hurricane Ka-trina hit New Orleans. The organized abandonment ofpoor and working-class black people, already affectedby decades of disinvestment, deindustrialization, anddefunding of public services, left them isolated in high-poverty neighborhoods especially vulnerable to theeffects of flooding. Now they face a concentrated cam-paign to disperse them to other regions, permanentlyremoving them from New Orleans. These plans threatenparticularly vicious injuries to blacks in New Orleanswho have come to depend so much on neighborhoodsupport networks that Mindy Fullilove describes asemotional ecosystems grounded in the solidarities ofspace, place, and race (Fullilove 2004).

Displaced residents of the Seventh, Ninth, andThirteenth Wards should have the right to return, theright to rebuild, and the right to occupy and traverseurban space in their city. As a result of Hurricane Ka-trina, they stand to lose even more than the owners ofmansions, luxury apartments, office buildings, and ho-tels, because working-class blacks in New Orleans wereresource-poor but network-rich. The reconstitution ofthose networks, and the spaces and social relations thatnurtured and sustained them, should be the first prior-ity of any rebuilding effort.

Yet from the perspective ofthe white spatial imagi-nary. New Orleans should be rebuilt for the convenienceof investors, entrepreneurs, and owners. From this van-tage point, poor and working-class blacks in New Or-leans are not people who have problems, but insteadare problems. Alphonso Jackson, an African Americanwho serves as George Bush's Secretary of Housing andUrban Development, articulated what the rebuildingof New Orleans looks like from the perspective of thewhite spatial imaginary: "New Orleans is not going to beas black as it was for a long time, if ever again," Jacksonpredicted. "I'm telling you, as HUD Secretary and having

been a developer and a planner, that's how it's going tobe" (Rodriguez and Minaya 2005, 1). Secretary Jacksoncould have said that it would be unwise to build newhouses in the flood-prone, mostly black lower NinthWard, but that new housing throughout the city wouldbe made available to all residents of New Orleans as re-quired by Fair Housing Act of 1968 and Civil Rights lawsdating back to 1866. Yet in keeping with the dominantspatial imaginary, he proposes to rebuild New Orleansfor the convenience of owners, investors, and tourists.Residents of the Seventh Ward who parade as Indiansunder the Freeway overpass on North Claiborne Ave-nue, or who assemble on the corner of Washington andLasalle because urban renewal has destroyed the spacesthey previously called their own, have no place in thisvision of rebuilding the city. The ways in which land-useprofessionals respond to the rebuilding of New Orleanswill have a major impact on the spatial imagination ofthis society.

In his extraordinary opinion in the 1968 Jones v.Mayer case. Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglasdescribed obstacles to fair housing as evidence of "slav-ery unwilling to die." Like slavery, most contemporaryforms of discrimination have spatial as well as racialdimensions. The struggles waged by fair housing advo-cates affirm Douglas's judgment about the continuingconsequences of slavery in American society. But theyalso provide evidence of abolition democracy unwill-ing to die, of the persistence of struggles for freedomby people whose spatial contestations entail steadfastrefusal to "know their place" or remain confined in it.Their spatial imaginary has something valuable to teachus about democracy, justice, and the built environment,if only we can train ourselves to see it.

NOTES

1. Excellent comparative work has been done, however, draw-ing mostly on case studies from the United States, SouthAfrica, and Brazil. See Howard A. Winant, The World is AGhetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II (New York:Basic Books), 2001. David Theo Goldberg, Racial Subjects:Writing on Race in America (NewYork: Routledge), 1997

Lipsitz 21

2. Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plan-tation Power in the Mississippi Delta (London and NewYork:Verso, 1998) 68-71. Woods also explains how debt peonagein Mississippi relied on laws that punished tenants who en-tered into contracts with new employers without notifyingthe oid ones, and how vagrancy laws provided criminal pun-ishments including terms in prison and on chain gangs forleaving a contract after receiving small advances. See 92-94.

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AUTHOR GEORGE LIPSITZ is Professor of Black Studies andSociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He Isthe author of seven books. Including The Possessive Investmentin Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity Politics(1997), American Studies in a /Moment of Danger (2001), andA Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition(1995). Lipsitz has been active in struggles for fair housing andis past president of the Board of Directors of the Fair HousingCouncil of San Diego.

Lipsitz 23