How the Streets Were Made: Housing Segregation and Black Life in America

By Keith Stavely

In this book, Yelena Bailey examines the creation of "the streets" not just as a physical, racialized space produced by segregationist policies but also as a sociocultural entity that has influenced our understanding of blackness in America for decades. Drawing from fields such as media studies, literary studies, history, sociology, film studies, and music studies, this book engages in an interdisciplinary analysis of the how the streets have shaped contemporary perceptions of black identity, community, violence, spending habits, and belonging.

Where historical and sociological research has examined these realities regarding economic and social disparities, this book analyzes the streets through the lens of marketing campaigns, literature, hip-hop, film, and television in order to better understand the cultural meanings associated with the streets. Because these media represent a terrain of cultural contestation, they illustrate the way the meaning of the streets has been shaped by both the white and black imaginaries as well as how they have served as a site of self-assertion and determination for black communities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781469660608

Keith Stavely

Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald--New Englanders, librarians, independent scholars, and husband and wife--live in Jamestown, Rhode Island. Stavely is director of Fall River (Mass.) Public Library and has written several books on Puritanism in both old and New England. Fitzgerald is a librarian at Newport (R.I.) Public Library.

Book preview

How the Streets Were Made

How the Streets Were Made

Housing Segregation and Black Life in America

Yelena Bailey

The University of North Carolina Press CHAPEL HILL

© 2020 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bailey, Yelena, author.

Title: How the streets were made : housing segregation and black life in America / Yelena Bailey.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020018379 | ISBN 9781469660585 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469660592 (paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469660608 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Segregation. | Segregation—United States—History. | African Americans—Social life and customs. | African Americans—Social conditions—1975– | African Americans—Economic conditions—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC E185.615 .B266 2020 | DDC 305.896/07301732—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018379

Cover illustration: Manhattan Bridge Tower in Brooklyn (photo by Danny Lyon, 1974). Documerica, Record Group 412: Records of the Environmental Protection Agency (1944–2006), National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

Excerpts from Ann Petry’s The Street: A Novel are copyright © 1946, renewed 1974 by Ann Petry. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me are copyright © 2015 by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Used by permission of Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

For my mother

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

How the Streets Were Made

CHAPTER TWO

The Secret of Selling the Negro

The Creation of Black Urban Consumerism

CHAPTER THREE

From The Street to the Streets

Black Literary Production and Urban Space

CHAPTER FOUR

Music Born of the Streets

Hip-Hop’s Articulations of Urban Life and Identity

CHAPTER FIVE

A Hood Genre

Visualizing the Streets in TV and Film

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1. The Man Who Owns His Home poster 47

2. How Glad I Am poster 49

3. Advertisement for Bassett furniture 64

4. Advertisement for Ultra Wave hair straightener 70

5. Advertisement for Artra skin tone cream 74

6. Cover image for Fu-Gee-La single 109

Acknowledgments

Friends and colleagues at Seattle Pacific University (SPU) and the University of Washington helped foster this project through their time, conversation, and support. My colleagues in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, my department chair, Mark Walhout, and my Dean, Debra Sequeira, went above and beyond to support me while I finished this project. My friends and colleagues Eunsong Kim, Shannon Smythe, Chris Chaney, Becky Hughes, Zhiguo Ye, Traynor Hansen, Linh Thủy Nguyễn, Kim Seagall, Kate Ness, and Will Hartmann helped sustain me in this work through their kindness and conversation. I want to especially thank Eunsong for taking me to see Kendrick Lamar perform and helping me work through the material in chapter 4. Likewise, I need to thank Olushade Unger, Jade Parker, Nicole Cotton, and Janelle Bobbitt for supporting me as a fellow Black woman by fostering community. I also want to thank Dennis Childs, my former adviser at the University of California, San Diego, whose example and support helped me see that I could do this kind of work as a young Black scholar. All of these people have been an invaluable source of support.

My students in the social justice and cultural studies major at SPU played an important role as I completed this project. While I was initially content to identify and analyze the problem of how the streets came to be, these students urged me to provide concrete avenues of redress. Their generation holds mine accountable in many ways.

This project has also greatly benefited from the guidance of the University of North Carolina Press. My peer reviewers provided incredibly helpful feedback and pushed me to make this the best work possible. I would like to especially thank my editor, Lucas Church, whose advice, patience, and guidance ushered this project to full fruition.

Finally, this project would not have been possible without the support of my family. Naomi Windham, who has become my adopted sister, encouraged me along the way through many late-night video calls. I also need to thank my mother, Shelly Lucore, and my stepfather, Michael Lucore, and my father, Jote Betel. In addition to giving me the experiences that inspired this project, my mother continues to be my greatest source of encouragement. She and my stepfather have read every draft of every piece of writing I have produced. My family’s love and support continue to ground me and remind me why I do this work.

How the Streets Were Made

Introduction

Soon after musician Nipsey Hussle (Ermias Joseph Asghedom) was murdered on March 31, 2019, social media was flooded with the reactions of Black artists, authors, and activists mourning his death. Originally from Crenshaw, Los Angeles, Nipsey Hussle made a name for himself through the release of several mixtapes. It was his community activism, however, that drew wider attention. The rapper invested in companies and real estate in Crenshaw with the goal of helping Black youth find a path to success and economic self-determination. He was also working to address policing and gun violence in his community. In fact, he managed to set up a meeting to discuss these issues with Jay-Z’s entertainment agency, Roc Nation, and the Los Angeles Police Department. He never lived to see the meeting, however, because he was murdered the day before it was scheduled to take place.

In the wake of this loss, writer and creative strategist Duanecia Evans tweeted, "The hood is a construct. The deepest underbelly of survival and poverty. The science project of classism and elitism. If you get out you have survivors

[

sic

]

guilt forever, if you stay in … man. Ain’t no middle. Rest easy, @NipseyHussle."¹ Evans’s description of the hood, or the streets, as something more than physical geography is at the heart of this project. Whereas Evans describes the hood as a construct that can’t be escaped or reformed by people like Nipsey Hussle, How the Streets Were Made examines the streets as a sociocultural construct stemming from U.S. geographic segregation that continues to define the contours of Blackness and belonging in the United States today.

The notion of the streets as a sociocultural construct resonates with me personally and professionally. On a personal level, although I did not grow up in the streets, I was raised by a mother whose parenting was in no small way shaped by her determination to keep me from them. My mother spent most of her childhood in the projects of North Minneapolis. She is intimately familiar with the streets and the threats they pose to Black life. She is equally familiar with the way such spaces foster community and belonging. Despite this, her parenting was shadowed by the threat of the streets. Her story is an exception to the norm. Her mother, like many other African Americans, did all she could to move out of public housing projects. Eventually, this meant marrying a Black veteran in the 1970s who managed to secure a home in a first-ring suburb of Minneapolis.

Although my mother made it out of the hood, throughout my childhood she was painfully aware of just how little separated us from that life. This awareness created a ferocious determination in her. Although we did not have much money, she was resolved to keep me from the fate of other poor Black folks. This often meant moving us from place to place, actively fighting against the social, economic, and cultural forces that attempted to corral us back into poor urban neighborhoods. Even when we lived in the projects, my mother moved us across town just so we could get into one of the few available suburban public housing projects. We may have been poor, but she would be damned if I didn’t get a middle-class education.

When those housing and school opportunities ran out, my mother was willing to relocate to another suburb or another area of the city. I say this not to exalt her as an example of exceptional perseverance or determination to raise oneself up but rather to highlight the way the streets, even in their strict absence, radically shaped my childhood. My mother accepted a life of transience just so her daughter could have a shot at a decent education and a childhood free from the violence of the streets. Reflecting on my own experience has helped me to recognize the streets as much more than a physical space associated with urban Blackness.

On a professional level, I am continually interested in the way this understanding of the streets appears in cultural production, ranging from literature and film to advertisements. Author Ta-Nehisi Coates does this particularly well. When I first read Coates’s book Between the World and Me, I was captivated by his articulation of the streets—not only as a place but also as a construct with its own set of cultural ideologies, social practices, opportunities, and limitations. Coates revisits this concept in a more recent book, We Were Eight Years in Power. Discussing his reluctance to embrace a liberal vision of linear racial progress during the Obama administration, Coates specifically cites his experience growing up in West Baltimore as evidence to the contrary. Initially, Coates accepts the explanation that urban poverty and crime are the unfortunate consequence of deindustrialization. It is not that Coates fails to understand the role of White supremacy, but rather that white supremacy was not in direct evidence because there were no white people around.²

For Coates, the streets merit a more complex explanation than White supremacy alone. As he explains: When I recalled the Baltimore of my youth, it did not seem to suffer from anything so quaint and simple as ‘segregation’ or ‘white supremacy,’ terms that conjured COLORED ONLY signs, night rides, and thuggish sheriffs with ominous nicknames. Instead, the pox represented itself in an abundance of men hanging out on corners, single mothers working night shifts, teen parents in all my high school classes, and kids with ready and easy access to guns.³ In this passage, Coates dispels the myth that geographic segregation was merely about determining who could exist where and was thus resolved with antisegregation policies. Beyond physical separation, geographic segregation determined how people were made to exist in certain spaces, creating a set of beliefs and practices that came to define Blackness in twentieth and twenty-first-century America.

The beliefs and practices associated with the streets are what Coates alludes to when he claims that "the streets

[are]

a country and like all others, the streets

[have]

anthems, culture, and law."⁴ At times, this culture is known only to those intimately familiar with the streets. A prime example of this is Coates’s statement that the realities of the streets are observable … on any Martin Luther.⁵ What Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Street, or Avenue signifies for Black people in nearly every city across America is almost universally understood. As someone who has moved across the country several times, I can distinctly remember my mother telling me to go drive by Martin Luther at night to get a feel for the city before each move. Understanding what urban Blackness looked like in a new city gave me a basis for understanding how I would be perceived and treated in any space. In The Beautiful Struggle, Coates differentiates between those who are of the streets and those who are from the streets.⁶ I would add to this those who, like myself, are shaped by the streets despite residing outside of them. These distinctions are important to avoid an oversimplification of the heterogeneous ways Blackness exists in America. What started as a project to confine Blackness to specific geographic spaces eventually created a set of beliefs about how all Black people exist in all spaces.

In an effort to analyze this phenomenon, How the Streets Were Made examines the creation of the streets not just as a physical, racialized geographic space produced by segregationist policies but also as a sociocultural entity that has influenced our understanding of Blackness in America for decades. Drawing from fields such as media studies, literary studies, history, sociology, film studies, and music studies, this book engages in an interdisciplinary analysis of the how the streets have shaped contemporary perceptions of Black identity, community, violence, spending habits, and belonging. I argue that because the physical, social, and cultural creation of the streets is rooted in White supremacy and anti-Blackness, it produced myths of urban Black pathology, financial irresponsibility, and inherent violence that have fueled the economic and social divestment of Black communities, as well as a broader divestment from Blackness as a part of U.S. identity. Nevertheless, Black Americans have contested these myths through literature, film, and music, through both overt political messages and personalized narratives that assert the fundamental humanity of Black people. What all of this illustrates is that creation of the streets is significant when discussing not only geographic segregation and the racial wealth gap but also the contested racial imaginary of American life.

More Than a Rap Lyric: Understanding the Racialized Geographies of the Streets

Whether one refers to the streets, or instead uses terms like the ghetto or the hood, the geographic space of reference is the same. As a concept, however, the streets occupy a liminal space. Sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton address this point when they write: The term ‘ghetto’ means different things to different people. To some observers it simply means a Black residential area; to others it connotes an area that is not only Black but very poor and plagued by a host of social and economic problems.⁷ Thus, while nearly everyone understands the space we are referring to when we discuss the streets, the cultural, racial, political, and economic significance of the streets varies greatly depending on the persons using and/or hearing the term.

Scholars have wrestled with this broader significance for decades. In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal argued that geographic segregation in America operates on a social level as well as a physical one. In his words, it creates an artificial city where schools, hospitals, social circles, and institutions are racially segregated.⁸ Thus, the result of geographic segregation is the proliferation of prejudice. Twenty years later, Kenneth B. Clark, who was Myrdal’s student, defined the United States’ segregated spaces as dark ghettos. By using dark as a qualifier, Clark took the already racialized Italian term for marginalized Jewish space and added another layer of exclusion by applying it to the context of U.S. White supremacy and anti-Blackness. Furthermore, Clark argued that there was something unique about U.S. ghettos, making them more than segregated spaces. Rather, he posited that these dark ghettos were social, political, educational, and—above all—economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.⁹ Both Myrdal and Clark articulate how the racially segregated spaces in America called ghettos are much more than sites of physical separation. They are complex structures of socioeconomic relations. Moreover, both scholars highlight the way such spaces have been historically tied to Blackness.

More recent studies of urban segregation have described Black space in similar ways. In Code of the Street, sociologist Elijah Anderson describes the streets as a "social context of persistent poverty and deprivation,

[and]

alienation from broader society’s institutions."¹⁰ Much like Myrdal and Clark, Anderson suggests that the streets are made up of complex social relations and practices that dictate the terms of Black life in very particular ways. In their study of urban segregation, Massey and Denton describe the ghetto as "a set of neighborhoods that are exclusively inhabited by members of one group, within which virtually all members of that group live. By this definition, no ethnic or racial group in the history of the United States, except one

[urban Blacks]

, has ever experienced ghettoization."¹¹

Anderson, Massey, and Denton capture the nature of the streets as both a physical space created through government policy and a social space of isolation. These scholars also recognize that while poverty and geographic segregation affect a number of communities within the United States, the specific way these factors have converged through government engineering had a unique impact on Black Americans. A number of sociologists, historians, and other scholars have executed thorough studies of how geographic segregation impacts Black Americans socially and economically.¹² However, much of this scholarship fails to fully address the cultural and ideological meanings of the streets.

George Lipsitz’s discussion of racialized space and the spatial imaginary is a useful framework for addressing this issue. In How Racism Takes Place, Lipsitz uses the theoretical framework of cultural geography to link government housing policies to the creation of White and Black space as something more than physical geography. He argues that these spaces are not merely the product of racist government policies, but that it takes places for racism to take place.¹³ The significance of this reality is not only the creation of a new understanding of Black urban space but also the recognition that "American whiteness

[is]

one of the most systematically subsidized identities in the world."¹⁴

Lipsitz’s argument illustrates the connections between geographic segregation and our national understandings of Whiteness and Blackness. From the Homestead Act of 1862 to the Federal Housing Act of 1934, Whiteness and American belonging have been intimately connected to the ownership of land and homes. Unsurprisingly, both of these polices, which radically subsidized ownership for White Americans, were rarely, if ever, applied in the service of Black Americans. Today, the wealth accumulated over generations thanks to these policies has resulted in a nearly insurmountable racialized wealth gap. Black Americans possess approximately 5 percent of the wealth of White Americans.¹⁵ Arguably, the systematic imposition of geographic segregation through these policies has impacted Black Americans in a way that is second only to slavery and mass incarceration.

What Lipsitz’s work helps us understand, however, is that these policies have done more than create vastly different economic realities for White and Black Americans. Along with the physical, social, and economic segregation generated by these government policies, divergent perceptions of Black and White space were created. As Lipsitz explains: The white spatial imaginary portrays the properly gendered prosperous suburban home as the privileged moral geography of the nation. Widespread, costly, and often counterproductive practices of surveillance, regulation, and incarceration become justified as forms of frontier defense against demonized people of color. Works of popular film and fiction often revolve around phobic representations of Black people unfit for freedom. These cultural commitments have political consequences.¹⁶ The delineation of Black and White space has entrenched itself in the American imaginary. The way White space and Black space are imagined in literature, music, and across television and movie screens is evidence of a larger cultural and ideological battle for power and belonging.

The negative racialization of Black space discussed by Lipsitz is far from new. Black geographies have long been framed in such a way as to justify the horrors of slavery and colonization. One of the farthest-reaching philosophical examples of this is Hegel’s claim that Africa is no historical part of the world.¹⁷ In fact, for Hegel, Africa’s nature as the land of childhood … originates, not merely in its tropical nature, but essentially in its geographic conditions.¹⁸ Thus, it is the geography of Africa itself that is responsible for the fact that the Negro … exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state.¹⁹ Despite attempts by intellectuals such as Léopold Senghor to refute these notions, Hegel’s claim that Africa is an uncivilized space continues to be heard in public discourses on the continent today.²⁰

Hegel’s lectures on Africa were first published in 1837, a little less than a hundred years before the federal government instituted nationwide redlining practices through the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Association (FHA). Despite this century-long gap, the origins of segregation and the racialization of American urban space are not far removed from the logic of White supremacy that fueled slavery and colonization. The legacy of these ideologies is an important part of understanding how and why the discourse surrounding cities after the Great Migration not only took on a decidedly anti-Black tone but also began another century-long process of inscribing derogatory meaning onto Blackness.

While on the one hand the history of anti-Blackness in the West is closely tied to geographic belonging, on the other hand antiracist resistance has utilized geographic space in similar ways. Scholars such as Kathleen Kirby, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Katherine McKittrick have long argued for the need to examine the intersections between cultural meaning, dominance, resistance, and geography.²¹ As McKittrick explains, The relationship between black populations and geography—and here I am referring to geography as space, place, and location in their physical materiality and imaginative configurations—allows us to engage with a narrative that locates and draws on black histories and black subjects in order to make visible social lives which are often displaced, rendered ungeographic.²² McKittrick’s understanding of Black geographies is an important counter to the idea that geographic space is somehow neutral, or merely the physical location where social and economic relations take place.

Drawing on her work, as well as that of George Lipsitz, How the Streets Were Made examines the way Black artists and intellectuals use their work to both carve out discursive space and create new imaginative geographic meanings for the streets. Only one who is intimately familiar with the streets can define them as something more than a space of unbelonging. This is because such an individual is aware not only of how the streets are perceived externally but also of what the streets are like experientially. They bear witness to dominant ideologies and external processes of socialization, as well as the ways in which these ideologies and processes are internalized and lived out. This is one of the reasons Ta-Nehisi Coates’s description of the streets resonates so strongly with me.

Coates’s description is not unique, but rather represents a conspicuous concept throughout Black American literature, film, and music. However, a unique facet of Coates’s work is the explicit, albeit cursory, connection between government housing policies and the creation of the streets as a physical, cultural, and ideological entity. Toward the end of Between the World and Me, the narrator tells his son, ‘Black-on-black crime’ is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel.²³ What Coates articulates so well is that the streets are not just a pejorative term for Black space. Rather, they are an engineered product of American policy.

From a Culture of Poverty to Superpredators and Welfare Queens: The Public Discourse on the Streets

In the wake of increased Black urbanization and racialized inequalities, several theories emerged to explain the vast social and economic disparities between Black and Brown urban inhabitants and their White American counterparts. Perhaps the most infamous explanation of urban poverty is Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report The Negro Family (1965). Basing much of his research on sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s work, Moynihan attempted to explain the widening educational and economic disparities between White and Black Americans.²⁴ He argued that at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.²⁵ To support this claim, Moynihan devoted a large part of his report to detailing Black divorce rates, births outside of marriage, and single-mother households. All of this, he argued, was caused by a poor family structure. Relying heavily on psychoanalytic and heteronormative understandings, Moynihan argued that the process of natal alienation irrevocably shaped Black familial structures.²⁶

On the one hand, Moynihan attempted to recognize the lasting impact of slavery on Black life, as well as the more recent history of Jim Crow segregation. Yet, in doing so, he simultaneously relegated Black women to the periphery and blamed them for urban social ills. For instance, when discussing how segregation stripped Black Americans of their personhood, Moynihan states: Keeping the Negro ‘in his place’ can be translated as keeping the Negro male in his place: the female was not a threat to anyone.²⁷ Yet, while Black women were apparently not the target of Jim Crow racism, they were to blame for young men never learning to take up their so-called proper role as the head of the family. This issue, he argued, was particularly linked to Black life in the city.²⁸ For Moynihan, "In every index of family pathology … the contrast between the urban and rural environment for Negro families

[was]

unmistakable."²⁹

Criticisms of the Moynihan Report are plentiful.³⁰ To be fair, Moynihan recommended policies that would have aided urban Black inhabitants,