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john a. powell
excerpted from: john a.
powell, , DREAMING OF A SELF BEYOND WHITENESS AND ISOLATION, 18
Washington University Journal of Law and Policy 45, 29- (2005)(90
Footnotes omitted)
In the post-civil-rights era, how is it that whiteness and racial
hierarchy endure despite the end of Jim Crow and the end of the
legal enforcement of what many considered to be the ultimate
boundary, anti-miscegenation laws? I have argued elsewhere and will
continue to argue here that the way we organize our metropolitan
areas, especially through persistent segregation, plays a large part
in maintaining a way of racially distributing benefits and burdens,
and provides the necessary space and boundary for whiteness to
continue to flourish. It is clear, and increasingly accepted by
contemporary geographers, that the spatial and the social are
mutually constitutive.
Historically, Jim Crow laws had been most heavily developed in the
South. However, the North had long used more rhetorically benign
ways of inscribing whiteness. While the South was using specific
laws that separated whites and blacks more by status than by
physical space, the North was much more likely to use spatial
separation. At the time that blacks began to demand an end to Jim
Crow laws and started moving north, the country was creating, on a
massive scale, a new white place called the suburbs. From its
inception, this place was explicitly white space. When this space
was challenged by Dr. King in Cicero, a Chicago suburb, by leading a
march against housing discrimination, he was attacked by angry
whites and there was a withdrawing of Northern support for civil
rights. In many respects, the civil rights movement in this country
was about the South, and attacking the ways that the South had
constructed white space. Not only was the Northern form of white
space not successfully attacked, but it was actually expanded to
protect and extend white privilege.
Today, our arrangements of metropolitan space--persistent
segregation, concentrated poverty, and fragmented governments people
and opportunity in a racialized way reinscribing whiteness and its
attendant privileges. We can, in part, trace this back to the
government. The executive and legislative branches help finance
white flight through transportation spending, subsidies and other
measures, and the courts help to develop legal barriers to
facilitate the exclusion of blacks and, to a lesser extent, other
non-whites. For years, blacks and other marginalized groups fought
to get into public space as full members, in part to have access to
opportunity, but also to change the rules around space. What has
happened in the last fifty years since the dismantling of Jim Crow
is that rules related to public space have changed and shifted, and
white space has become quasi-private. So now, the suburbs are
treated as private, with the implicit right to exclude, and cities
are treated as public. Blacks are now moving to the suburbs in
record numbers, trying to take advantage of well-financed,
high-functioning schools, and to gain access to emerging job markets
and other opportunities. But to date, much of their efforts have
been frustrated by the protections that the law and public policy
have extended to this new white space. At one point, the Court
treated local space only as a function of the State, and therefore,
accessible to and able to be regulated by the State. Nevertheless,
as blacks began to move to these spaces, there was an important
shift as local autonomy became constitutionalized. What we are
seeing today is a devolution not just back to States' Rights, which
was always bound up in the right to regulate blacks and create white
space, but also a devolution back to local rights, which is
increasingly being used to draw boundaries around white space.
The civil rights movement has been successful in opening up public
space just in time to see that power and privilege shift to private
space. Blacks gained power in the cities as opportunities left. This
is why Winant can note that "the elimination of Jim Crow did not
really occur" and that civil rights laws fail to "address the deeper
logic of race in U.S. history and culture." This is not about
individual preference on the part of whites. Whites did not and
could not create this space without the economic and legal support
of the government. This realignment has caused another major shift
in political alliances in this country. Northern suburban whites
have realigned with Southern whites. The realignment has been both
facilitated and exploited by the Republican Party. It is based on
maintaining white space by preying on white fears without the
explicit use of Jim Crow laws. Even though this process was complex,
some variation of it was predicted by President Johnson when he
signed the voting rights act into law. So despite Brown, lunch
counter sit-ins, marches on Washington, riots, speeches, hundreds of
civil rights laws, and considerable gains in terms of racial
attitudes, today we still live in racially segregated neighborhoods,
send our children to racially segregated schools, have a
transportation system and a health care system that is highly
racialized, and distribute future opportunity through racialized
wealth, all with virtually no reference to racism.
What is particularly important to the focus of this paper is that
this phenomenon of spatial racism helps explain why the ending of
anti-miscegenation laws and other old white boundaries did not bring
about the destruction of whiteness as a social category. Too often,
we tend to focus on particular borders or boundaries, obscuring our
understanding of the fluid and relational nature of these
boundaries. There is not a singular way to arrange institutions and
structures to preserve whiteness and recreate racial hierarchy. Our
focus on what was and its demise may obscure what is, and more
importantly, what will be. At the same time that Jim Crow laws were
being attacked and dismantled, the country was restructuring with
new boundaries that would facilitate a new form of racial hierarchy.
Federal Judge Robert Carter has noted that he was mistaken in
thinking that the principle problem of racial exclusion was
segregation. He now notes that segregation was but a symptom of the
more intractable problem of white supremacy. I do not say this in
order to be pessimistic, nor to downplay the roles that segregation
and white space have in creating whiteness, but simply to urge us to
be aware that while we are fighting to change these racial
boundaries, new and transformed structures, institutions and
arrangements may be emerging to shore up whiteness.
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