2014 Shaping the Future of New York Fridays: 11:00-1:45 Boylan Hall, 2231

Reading this set of chapters, I had two main reactions. The first was a connection to a class I’m taking called Hip Hop and Social Inequality, in which we discussed the 1960s-1980s South Bronx at length in the beginning of the semester. Urban renewal programs in other parts of the city (like lower Manhattan) helped create the extreme poverty, along with the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, that was characteristic of the South Bronx during that time. When poor people’s communities were uprooted by urban renewal, many of them moved to the South Bronx because they could afford it, which concentrated poverty there. Communities that have very limited financial resources (and therefore many other resource limitations, because needing money eats up time, energy, etc.) are more vulnerable to exploitation, as seen in the various communities in this reading and in the landlord arsons in the Bronx. That’s not even taking the effects of systematic racism into account.

The other reaction I had was to wonder how can we prevent urban renewal in the future? I think we can all agree that these “development” programs ultimately cause more problems than they solve by uprooting and dispersing vulnerable communities. What in our current system of governance and decision-making allows such devastating programs to be authorized and carried out? My thought is that power over neighborhoods and development/”development” is held by people who have no direct stake in the neighborhood’s well-being, which means that (in the context of capitalism and racist classism) they have no deep motivation to advocate for its survival. A solution to this discrepancy between who makes decisions and who feels consequences could be ameliorated by having community boards, run by people who actually live in the community in question, that have direct veto power over any proposed urban renewal programs and development plans more generally.

The thought that kept circulating uncomfortably through my head while I was reading chapters 2 and 3 of The New Jim Crow was, “Crap, someone actually thinks this is a good way to run a country.” There are lots of people, both elected and not (e.g. corporate heads), who hold and have held (over decades and centuries) considerable social power who apparently believe/believed that racialized social control is a workable and desirable plan. What’s terrifying is that those people have collected the political, social, economic, and military capital to make their vision a reality. After reading this section of the book, I still do not understand (and honestly don’t particularly care to understand) why exactly people like Nixon believed in the War on Drugs and how they obtained the power to implement it. I’m talking about psycho-social processes here–people do things for reasons, so what were their reasons? The trouble is, I suspect those reasons are not possible to understand if you don’t agree with them.

Related reading on the NYPD for anyone who’s interested (I’m sure many of you have already seen this): http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/9-frightening-things-about-americas-biggest-police-force

Even though Professor Braine warned us that this reading could be depressing, I had not adequately braced myself before starting to read it. It’s one thing to have prison abolitionist and anti-racist political opinions on generalized, non-specific grounds; it’s entirely another to see all the reasons for those ideologies clearly laid out. I’m not sure if I want to read the rest of the book–I’m sure it will be both (a) brilliantly articulated and (b) a terrifying dose of reality.

One dominant cultural narrative in particular that Alexander challenges that she doesn’t discuss at length is the “things are gradually improving” trope. In a way, this trope is, I think, one of her main reasons for writing the book, because the misguided notion of a gradually equalizing society comes directly out of collective ignorance of racism in history, racism today, and racism as a systemically oppressive force (not individual prejudice). It seems to me that racism in the very recent past (last 40ish years) is less discussed in schools than racism from the time of the Civil Rights Movement and before. It’s not just racism, either; I learned very little about the very recent past in history classes, which makes no sense to me from a pedagogical perspective (isn’t it more important to know recent political history like the War on Drugs and benign neglect and HIV/AIDS stigma than about the War of 1812?). Anyway, this is all to say that I think the work Michelle Alexander is doing with this book is extraordinarily important, and I applaud her for it. Her book makes me extremely uncomfortable, which I find to be an appropriate emotional response to a comprehensive, oppressive system of social control that targets Black Americans.