20 November 2007

Overview:

In The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996), Thomas J. Sugrue defines whiteness by space, structuring the issues of racism and definitions of whiteness according to territory and territoriality. In this manner, the public and private sphere come to central focus as resistance and discrimination become issues of home protection and community contamination. (Hence the 'one drop of blood' campaign.) With issues of space, homeownership becomes key and this factor alone becomes the legitimizing definer of American citizenship after the legalization of The New Deal.

Historian Charles Tilly identified 'resource hoarding' as leading to historical and metropolitan inequality where white Americans used race and residence to hoard political and economic resources at the expense of the urban poor. Compounded with power plays and illegal manipulations over homeownership, resource hoarding served as another yoke against the urban poor and the rising Black bourgeoisie.

Sugrue identifies three principal factors occuring simultaneously to reshape American cities:

1) Flight of Jobs (well paid, unionized, industrial)

2) Persistance of Workplace Discrimination

3) Intractible Racial Segregation in Housing (leading to inequal distribution of power and resources in the metropolitan area)

He also outlines three underlying beliefs about the Urban Crisis:

1) Racialized Inequality is chiefly a political problem because of the enduring effects of public policies.

2) Unemployment is the fault of macroeconomic changes that gutted the urban labor market at the time.

3) Political and Economic causes of impoverishment stemmed from the actions of policymakers, large corporations, small businesses, realtors, and white Americans to reinforce racial and class inequality and black America's political marginalization.

Despite these obstacles against them, a black American bourgeoisie emerged to flourish and to sustain themselves as a viable and formidable (albeit sparse) class.

Sugrue basically has seven main goals - broad strokes - for his book:

1) To open a rich historical understanding of racial dynamics, economic changes, and political processes that remade mid-20th Century America.

2) To situate the history of race and transformation of postwar urban America in the context of changing racial attitudes and practices:

a) new forms of capitalist mobility

b) New Deal liberalism that simultaneously empowered black Americans while perpetuating race-based inequality

3) To reappraise liberalism and discuss the rise of grassroots conservatism.

4) To delineate how white racial conservatism and indifference hamstrung the struggle for racial equality well before the tumult of the 1960s.

5) To show how urban inequality arose as a result of mapping racial differences onto the geography of the city and how the power of categories of racial difference led to racial hierarchies shaping housing, the workplace, public policy, and private investment.

6) To analyze the flip-side to urban deindustrialization, disinvestment, and depopulation as suburbanization due to the 20th Century migration of white Americans from central cities to outlying suburbs. The result of this suburbanization ironically led to the southernization of the North and northernization of the South between the 1950s and 1960s.

7) To understand why racial inequality resulted from a mutually reinforcing process of ideology and political economy and of identity and self-interest.

Sugrue bridges the cultural and the structural to provide a more rigorous account of the mechanics perpetuating racial difference in ideology and experience. He exposes the ironic fact that the process of capital mobility and urban devastation begin amidst the post-World War II economic boom. In the 1970s, deindustrialization led to oil shocks; a rise in international competition in industries America once dominated; globalization in which cheap labour markets were mined outside of the United States; and capital flight and labour saving technology. Before the 1970s, deindustrialization began in the early 1920s in cities dominated by the textile industry; intensified post-World War II; took new forms in the wake of the economic crisis of the 1970s; and caused cities to reel when plants were closed and relocated from 'single industry' markets. Ultimately, Sugrue sees a new globalization of capital in the late 1990s and early 21st Century as part of the same process ravaging mid-20th Century Detroit.

Because geography was destiny in post-World War II America, the reallocation of political and public resources to an increasingly privatized, exclusionary world of white suburbia meant the concentration of power centered in these areas. On this issue of power, Sugrue is quite clear and he states that the history of resistance to oppression must begin with a clear-eyed understanding of power - who wields it and the impact it has on ordinary people. Activists during this time fought for rights, justice, and power, providing an alternative vision for urban change influencing public policy (e.g., affirmative action, antipoverty, education reforms) against the odds in a political climate more hostile to their demands.

Here is where he comes to the crux of his overall argument:

America continues to be shaped by processes with origins in the mid-20th Century. The widening gap between rich and poor, privelege and poverty, and racial divisions are all deeply entrenched in factors of income, wealth, education, employment, health, and political power. Together, these factors rather than homeownership alone as recent reports claim, reinforced inequality, segregation and disinvestment. It is these factors too that led to the Detroit Urban Crisis of 23 July 1967 - a five day riot of unrelenting brutality and violence leaving forty-three dead, 7,231 men and women arrested, 2,509 buildings burned, and $36 million in insured property damage. And this, this is where Sugrue ends his book.

For Sugrue, history is an ongoing process opening up possibilities and constraining present choices and this is why we must grapple with the past to engage with the present.

In Reason In History, Hegel writes:

"The life of the ever-present Spirit is a cycle of stages that on the one hand, co-exist side by side, but on the other hand, seems to be past. The moments which Spirit seems to have left behind, it still possesses, in the depth of its present."

I argue that it is and always will be language as a dynamic process and structure accounting for potentiality and limitations of the time within which it is relevant. Language is a marker of our past contained in the ever-present that constrains as much as it unfolds the depth of our culture. Currently, hyphenation is the relevant language structure critically in need of acknowledgement to account accurately for the potentialities and limitations of the present multiple (virtual) realities shaping our culture and imprinting our history.

It is this new element - hyphenation - that replaces Spirit, at once transcending past limitations and enabling future potentiality in its omnipresence.