By Mark Naison | with thanks to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Thursday, March 28, 2012.
Little
by little, we have created an apartheid nation—a place where profound
spatial and moral divisions separate the lives of the privileged and the
unfortunate. The boundaries are not strictly racial, though those on
the lower side of the divide are overwhelmingly people of color, nor are
they marked by gates, and walls and fences. Rather, they are enforced
by a complex set of codes followed by law enforcement authorities who
have acquired immense power to assure public safety since the imposition
of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, powers which have
effectively prevented the poor from doing anything to prevent their
marginalization and immiseration, and which have given wealthy elites
virtually immunity from threats to their well being coming either from
political action, mass protest or street crime.
You
can see this in New York City where you can shop in a newly wealthy
neighborhood, like Park Slope, go to an Arts destination in Manhattan,
or go to one of those boroughs great universities, like Columbia, NYU or
Fordham, without seeing groups of young people from one of the outer
boroughs’ poor neighborhoods congregating in a group. Police practices
have made it clear to them that they are not welcome there—that their
very presence constitutes a virtual threat, a "crime waiting to happen."
But
youth of color cleansing, and spatial controls are not just imposed in
already established centers of wealth. In Bedford Stuyvesant and Red
Hook, both gentrifying areas, police practices keep young people penned
into neighborhood housing projects, wary of walking streets, in a group,
where middle class residents have moved or hip cafes have opened. Very
quickly, young people with certain race and class markers learn that
they are subject to being stopped and questioned and frisked in almost
all spaces out of the neighborhoods, and in a growing number of spaces
where they actually live.
But
worse yet, what is daily life for young people of color who are poor,
is quite literally out of sight and out of mind, and thereby
unimaginable, not only for middle class and wealthy residents of cities,
but for the Mayors of those cities. Because they never talk to young
people who are on the receiving end of these spatial controls, and ever
see them in action; they can pretend these young folk don't exist.
Their conscience has atrophied when it comes to the fundamental
realities of life for the young and the poor.
Two
recent events dramatize this for me—the police murder of Kimani Gray in
East Flatbush Brooklyn, and the school closing order given by Mayor
Rahm Emmanuel in Chicago. Never has New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg
reached out to the grieving mother of a 16-year-old boy who was killed
for doing nothing more than walking home from a neighborhood party.
Instead, he hides behind a "narrative of criminality" used to hide the
ugly facts of Kimani Gray’s death, which is that this was an outgrowth
of a "stop and frisk" procedure initiated by plainclothes police that
will NEVER happen to young people in the Mayor's family or social
circle. Kimani Gray was one of New York City's legion of "disposable
youth" that must be policed and contained in every aspect of their lives
to make the city's engines of economic growth secure. He could be
snuffed out without anyone in power losing a moment of sleep
Similarly,
the lives of tens of thousands of young people of color to be
disrupted by the school closings ordered by Mayor Rahm Emmanuel in
Chicago could be conveniently erased from his thoughts by a ski trip
because his own children, safely enrolled in Chicago Lab School, would
never experience the disruptions, nor would their friends. The impact of
these policies would be felt by "Other People's Children"—the same
people who live in fear of gun violence, gang violence, and police
containment, who feel alternately penned into poor neighborhoods or
pushed out of the city altogether
A
leadership which can inflict this kind of containment and moral erasure
on a large portion of their city's population can only be described as
profoundly corrupt- but we are all complicit insofar as we have allowed
our own security to be built on an edifice of other people's suffering.
***
Mark Naison
is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham
University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the
author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.