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Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015, 159 pp., $25.00 (paperback), ISBN-13: 978-0252081149.
Spatializing Blackness is a penetrating work that examines the relationship between people and place and about how racialized and gendered identities interact in Chicago. In this work, Rashad Shabazz combines historiography, geography, and social science research approaches to unravel and make sense of Black people’s experiences on the city’s South Side during the 20th century. Shabazz argues that “policing, surveillance, and architectures of confinement” (1) were used to ‘spatialize blackness’ in Chicago, which produced racialized and gendered consequences for Blacks in the city. He demonstrates how racialized policies were paramount to creating racial hierarchy and order in Chicago. Even further, the author moves beyond sterile descriptions of space and instead offers a convincing account of how the color line remained intact in the city, how carceral power was distributed unevenly as the city’s bourgeoning Black population explored housing options, and expertly reveals the multiple failures of public housing policies (and operations) in Chicago.
Spatializing Blackness is a significant contribution to urban studies, urban sociology, history, geography, and Africana studies. The work is timely as well given the ongoing history of racial division in the city as evidenced by the residential racial segregation, the lack of racial diversity across K–12 public schools, and the incessantly high rates of violence and death. While much of the public discourse about violence in the city depends on a micro-level analysis of Black youth behaviors, which often reproduces recycled narratives of youth violence and “Black on Black crime” rhetoric, Shabazz focuses his analysis on structure. In effect, he shows how neighborhoods were ghettoized and criminalized by design. He takes readers on a historical journey that starts with the development of the Black belt and weaves through interracial sex districts, cramped apartments, and project housing to help readers better understand the rise and prominence of street gangs, the production of masculine gender identity, and Chicago’s AIDS epidemic. Shabazz’s work forces readers to view geography and its outcomes differently and at the same time demands for us to ask different types of questions. Thus, researchers who seek to comprehend and analyze the experiences and identities of those who dwell in urban cities, especially in cities like Chicago, can learn a great deal from Shabazz’s contribution. In particular, this study compels us to reengage and reanalyze the urban landscape as a space structured with specific goals in mind that are not simply about providing housing but instead intended to confine different groups.
The two threads that Shabazz uses to anchor his argument are carceral power and the continuing significance of race as policy, praxis, and architecture. In chapter 1, Shabazz explores the rise of policing in the Black Belt during the Progressive Era (1890–1920) and reveals the entrée point of carceral power as an intended mechanism to control Black male–white female sex and socializing in the vice district on the South Side. The Black/white sex districts helped to modernize the city’s police force and offered opportunities for new methods of policing. Shabazz notes that Black mobility, in moving and migrating from Southern states, was conflated with sexual agency through the myth of the Black rapist. As a result, Black mobility and opportunities for their sexual relations to not be controlled by whites (as was the case in enslavement) created white hysteria, which was translated as a threat to whites. As a response to the perceived threat of Black sexual agency, “whites put in place a geographic system of control…” which “sought to negate physical interaction across racial lines by instituting lines of demarcation that created separate spheres for Blacks and whites” (p. 20). These lines were reinforced through physical punishment such as lynching, policing, and sexual regulation. In effect, the expanded policing in Chicago during the early 1900s was functioned as a way to control Black movement and interracial relationships and supported by the Black middle class as a way to expunge vice and reinforce respectable sexuality.
Shabazz extends this argument into chapter 2 by detailing the scope by which Blacks were policed in the city, moving from public spaces into the homes of Black migrants. The housing options available to Black migrants, which were primarily kitchenettes, reveal how structures such as housing played a role in Black relationships and identity formation. Shabazz argues that the kitchenettes were themselves prisons as the size of these units confined Black life and the space was “grossly inadequate” (p. 39). Importantly, he leans on the work of author Richard Wright to show that the color line was manifest in both de facto and de jure segregation within the city. He notes that Wright “made segregation visible through that closed, cramped space of the kitchenette, used it to show the location and scale on which segregation functioned” (45). Thus, in effect, Blacks were imprisoned in and by urban geography. Additionally, Shabazz shows that the physical organization of urban spaces, such as housing, contributed to the well being of the people living in them. Indeed, housing and its organization were forms of containment. He argues, convincingly, that prison power was part of Black housing; kitchenettes made privacy nearly impossible, put all actions under the forced gaze of others, and brought surveillance into the domestic space, making it inescapable. According to Shabazz, the kitchenette transformed the performance of Black masculinity as it “encouraged tension and violence, encouraged some men to run away, and created a context where some men exploited women, children, and other men” (p. 54).
Chapter 3 examines how the form of housing shifted, from kitchenettes to public housing projects, and reaffirmed the controlling mechanisms of the state. Shabazz asserts that carceral power informed the construction, location, architecture, and planning of the Robert Taylor homes, one of the most notorious housing projects in the state—and possibly the nation. He details how the Robert Taylor homes helped to orchestrate a “marriage” between home and prison. Shabazz argues that housing projects are sites that have been infused with carceral power for decades, which links them intimately with the prison industrial complex. However, the author contends that these forms of housing, especially the Robert Taylor homes, were planned for failure. In particular, housing projects established in Chicago after World War II were built in the heart of the Black Belt, constructed over existing ghettoes in Black neighborhoods, and continued economic and spatial disenfranchisement of Black residents. Additionally, the architecture of public housing relied almost exclusively on high-rise models, which isolated residents from the rest of the city and concentrated Black people into racially zoned sectors of the city. Each of these factors reveal how policing informed high-rise housing projects on Chicago’s South Side through planning, architecture, and security measures became the outward expressions of carceral power. For instance, the Robert Taylor homes were a tangle of numerous relationships such that the presence of drugs and high levels of crime brought police and surveillance to the project; the state paid for law enforcement units to monitor the complex; city police worked with foot patrol or “beat” cops; “special” municipal law enforcement worked on specific projects like “gang intelligence”; and the state issued identification cards to residents, purchased video surveillance equipment, installed Plexiglas and security cameras, and erected fences to enclose the buildings (p. 73). Finally, the high incarceration rates of people in the neighborhood increased the number of men in and around the project who had experienced official incarceration, which reinforced the belief that the Robert Taylor Homes was a de facto prison (p. 74).
The final two chapters focus on Black life in Chicago in the period between 1960s to the end of the 20th century. Chapter 4 explores the rise of the Black P. Stone Rangers as a latent function of carceral power and documents how policing in Black Chicago and the growing prison industrial complex led to the incarceration of many gang members and Black men in Chicago. Shabazz explores how the rise of street gangs, in membership and influence, and prison culture profoundly impacted Black masculine identities. Black men’s connections and interactions with street life, gangs, and the prison system constrained some of their gender identity options and how they related with and to one another. In mapping HIV/AIDS in Black Chicago in chapter 5, Shabazz shows how the spread of this disease was amplified by the war on drugs and high rates of incarceration for Black males in state prisons. In effect, the high rates of Black incarceration created a “geography of risk” for prisoners and the communities they returned to.
Shabazz’s work makes three important contributions to the literature. First, the massive upswing in carceral forms and carceral power have great implications on where people live, how people live, and how they interact with each other. Second, the expansive conceptions and utilization of policing across both time and space are critical to understanding how people experience space at different historical moments and in different structures. Based on his analysis, Black life on Chicago’s South Side was confronted with daily forms of prison (or carceral power) that effectively prisonized the landscape—that is, prison-like punishment such as policing, surveillance, and establishing territory in non-prison spaces. Finally, he unravels how carceral power impacted Black men’s masculine identities, which sheds new light on how gendered identity can be impacted by external forces and geography simultaneously. Shabazz’s use of archival research, literature, prison letters, and street organizations, and the revelations they provide help show the author’s skill of architecting a new understanding of Black life and identity formation in Chicago.
