The Street: A Photographic Field Guide to American Inequality

By Naa Oyo A. Kwate, Camilo José Vergara, Darnell L Moore and 15 more

Vacant lots. Historic buildings overgrown with weeds. Walls and alleyways covered with graffiti. These are sights associated with countless inner-city neighborhoods in America, and yet many viewers have trouble getting beyond the surface of such images, whether they are denigrating them as signs of a dangerous ghetto or romanticizing them as traits of a beautiful ruined landscape. The Street: A Field Guide to Inequality provides readers with the critical tools they need to go beyond such superficial interpretations of urban decay. 
 
Using MacArthur fellow Camilo José Vergara’s intimate street photographs of Camden, New Jersey as reference points, the essays in this collection analyze these images within the context of troubled histories and misguided policies that have exacerbated racial and economic inequalities. Rather than blaming Camden’s residents for the blighted urban landscape, the multidisciplinary array of scholars contributing to this guide reveal the oppressive structures and institutional failures that have led the city to this condition. Tackling topics such as race and law enforcement, gentrification, food deserts, urban aesthetics, credit markets, health care, childcare, and schooling, the contributors challenge conventional thinking about what we should observe when looking at neighborhoods.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: May 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781978814226

Book preview

Jersey

INTRODUCTION

NAA OYO A. KWATE

George Swanson Starling fled the oppressive and violent racial climate that characterized Florida in 1945, where life was rigidly segregated by Jim Crow signage and social conventions that denied African Americans societal resources and public regard. One of millions of Black Americans who migrated from southern states to cities in the North and West, Starling settled in New York’s Black Metropolis, Harlem. There, he thought himself free of the overt and legally codified racial exclusion that contoured life in Florida. It was to his dismay, then, that one evening in 1950, after he and a friend finished their drinks in a downtown bar, the bartender smashed their glasses under the counter rather than reusing them. This rebuke of the two men’s participation in ordinary social activity stung because it was violent and subtle in equal measure: There were no colored or white signs in New York. That was the unnerving and tricky part of making your way through a place that looked free. You never knew when perfect strangers would remind you that, as far as they were concerned, you weren’t equal and might never be.¹

In a place that looks free, reminders of the many shades of inequality that define American social life are ubiquitous. They come not only from other people but also from the material world. Elizabeth Abel, in her book Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow, asks: What are the undeclared color lines that continue to delimit neighborhoods? What modalities of racism still fracture the social landscape after the dismantling of Jim Crow? Where would the racial signs of our times be situated and what language would they use?² These signs, these reminders that some people are not equal and might never be, are still most acutely displayed and felt on the street, where people busy themselves with daily life: going to the grocery store; lugging laundry bags; waiting for public transit; meeting friends, family, and neighbors. Public policies operate behind the scenes to create one or another kind of lives for people. But the street is where the intent and effects of these polices are laid bare. And so daily life often means enduring the indignity of police stops and searches, or spending extra time obtaining goods and services that are often in scarce supply.

Still, the street is where we find evidence of resistance against and respite from dominant interests and narratives that circulate about Black and Brown communities. As Lutie Johnson, heroine of Ann Petry’s novel The Street (1946) found: She never felt really human until she reached Harlem and thus got away from the hostility in the eyes of the white women who stared at her on the downtown streets and in the subway.… These other folks feel the same way, she thought—that once they are freed from the contempt in the eyes of the downtown world, they instantly become individuals.³ Lutie’s streets were not only risk but also refuge.

But what does a place that merely looks free look like? Where in urban streetscapes should we search for evidence that society has sorted people, communities, and resources unequally? How obvious is that evidence likely to be? And how much will it vary from city to city? Field guides are texts that allow readers to identify a phenomenon quickly and accurately, regardless of their skill level or expertise. For example, a field guide to North American birds comprises primarily photographs of different species in their natural habitats, accompanied by interpretive text, recognition tips, and concise, detailed profiles that are accessible and easy to use. As a visual dictionary, a field guide implicitly asks questions such as Do you know the difference between an American goldfinch and a house finch? or What distinguishes male from female northern flickers? American goldfinches are identifiable by their bright yellow (male, breeding) or olive (female) plumage, a penchant for perching on and eating seeds from slight weeds and flowers, and their tendency to call out during flight. Fairly quickly, an amateur ornithologist will recognize them with little effort.

What tool, then, for students of American inequality, when its instantiations are often subtle, or else so pervasive they look like common sense? A field guide to American inequality would need to ask (and answer) what social hierarchy looks like in urban built environments and would need to grapple with the multiple layers of meaning that imbue the physical infrastructure. Enter this book. Using Camden, New Jersey, as a case study, here is a field guide to visualize the codes, metaphors, policies, and social exchanges that characterize and contest inequality in the United States. Often, field guides are meant to be authoritative and exhaustive, a kind of portable library. An ambitious endeavor for this book, to be sure—it would be a Sisyphean task to catalog exhaustively street-level cues of inequality. We focus instead on a specific set of policies and practices, infrastructure and identities, resources and risks that tell us much about what American inequality looks like, and what it means for social life, health, and a sustainable city.

The notion of field guides for the built environment has been applied to analyses of American sprawl, where manifestations such as category killers (big-box stores that dominate an entire retail sector) and locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) are illustrated.⁴ The arresting language is purposeful. Planners often employ neutral and legal terminology to frame land-use issues, perhaps in an attempt to be less off-putting to decision makers, but that kind of framing is also easier to ignore.⁵ One can imagine that calling a slipshod, poorly designed building a NOPE—Not on Purpose Edifice—might underline more clearly for policy makers how land use reveals neighborhood investment, literal and figurative, and how architecture can mark neighborhoods as less valuable/less valued, their residents as problematic or irrelevant. To that end, field guides are useful because naming is critical to identification and identification is crucial to