Spatializing Blackness With Dr Rashad Shabazz

Welcome to 1919Radio’s Black Geographies podcast series! This 4-part Black Geographies podcast series brings together four authors in the emerging field of Black geographies to explore the conditions of Blackness across multiple spatial dimensions. The goal of this series is to bring radical ideas of race, space, and the politics of place out of academia and into our community and streets through an engaging and open access medium.

In the first episode of our Black Geographies podcast series, Mohamed Nuur sits down with guest Dr Rashad Shabazz to discuss his 2015 book “Spatializing Blackness'' and the technologies of violence that continue to carefully contain, isolate, and restrict the free movement of Black people everywhere. They discuss urban geographies and public infrastructure as an extension of carceral power, the histories of antiblack space-making from slavery to mass incarceration, the hyper surveillance of racialized cities, and the need to reimagine and recreate public spaces to reflect the basic needs of Black communities

Title sequence credits:

Introduction clip: Angela Davis on Democracy Now!
Second clip: Sister Souljah response to Bill Clinton
Third clip: Kwame Ture on Organizaiton and mobilization Song: The Pharcyde - Runnin'

Transcript

1919Radio Intro audio clip 0:00

I never experienced anything like the conditions we are currently experiencing.

I am mentally spiritually physically, emotionally, intellectually and academically developed and acutely aware of the condition of African people throughout the entire world.

We don't want fortune, we dont want popularity we want power, power. And power comes only from the organized masses.

MN 0:48

Welcome to 1919Radio's Black Geographies Podcast Series. My name is Mohammed and I'm your host. This four part Black Geographies podcast series brings together four authors in the emerging field of black geographies to explore the conditions of blackness across multiple spatial dimensions. Born out of the intersections of Black Studies and geography, Black Geographies are defined by Katherine McKittrick as "the subaltern and alternative geographic patterns alongside or beyond traditional geographies and amongst the terrain of struggle." The goal of this series is to bring radical ideas of race, space and the politics of place out of academia and into our community and streets through an engaging and open access medium. Grounded in a politics of Pan-Africanism and Black struggle, as is everything 1919 does, the questions we ask seek to link the text of these books to real world material implications for Black people and all African people around the world. The series begins with Dr. Rashad Shabazz introducing what it means to spatialize blackness and the links between carceral power and urban geography through a conversation on his 2015 book, "Spatializing Blackness. " In the second episode, Dr. Brandi Summers joins us to discuss gentrification, neoliberalism, and the ways in which blackness is commodified and aestheticized through discussion on her book, "Black In Place." In the third episode, Dr Simone Brown joins us to discuss her book, "Dark Matters," which explores the origins of biometrics and the surveillance of blackness across time and place. And finally, Dr. Brian Jefferson closes off this series with a discussion on his book, "Digitize and Punish," in which we examine the relationships between blackness, mass incarceration and digital technologies.

MN 2:29

In this episode I speak with Dr Rashad Shabazz, professor at Arizona State University and author of "Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago." We have a wide ranging discussion on his book, the relationship between mass incarceration and black urban geographies, carceral power and its origins, and what it means to spatialize blackness. Now, let's begin by welcoming Dr. Rashad Shabazz to the program.

MN 2:54

Can you begin by explaining what you mean by our term spatializing blackness? What do you mean when you say the ways in which we as black people move through the cities is racialized and gendered?

RS 3:05

So spatializing blackness is a term that examines the social and historical and to a certain degree cultural production that goes into situating black people in the place of that they're located. And the reason for the term was to make it clear that black people didn't simply have autonomy and where they had been, and where they are located in in many cases, that has been determined for them by public policy, by violence, for example. And so to spatialize blackness is to recognize that blackness as a racial category, blackness as a kind of historical phenomenon, blackness, as a kind of cultural and ontological form has been situated geographically in various locations in the Western world, for reasons that are beyond black people's determination. You know, transatlantic slavery, for example, moved black people all over the Western world, you know, the Americas, the Caribbean, places like Brazil, for example. And that spatialization process was created by colonialism and the slave trade. So, as a geographer, what I wanted to do was to create a term to capture phenomenon such as that. And in terms of, you know, how black people move around cities. And you know, why black people are located in cities in the Western world, particularly in places like the US and Canada, has everything to do with that process of spatialization. And where black people are located in the cities as an extension of that, and the way in which they move around cities is very much based on issues of race and gender to the degree that for example, when black men move in public space, being seen as the signifiers of danger and anxiety, and violence by the broader white world means that black men can't just move around public space in ways that white men can't – who are not seen as signifiers of violence, who are not seen as the sort of progenitors of fear. And so when black men move around public space, they do it highly conscious of their race, and of their gender. And it means that they don't, you know, physically bump up against certain people because of certain reasons. It means there's certain place that they simply just don't go because of what it could mean toward their safety. And so that kind of highly conscious consciousness of one's race and gender shapes how people move around physically: their mobility, where they go, how long they stay, the routes that they take, to get there, whether it be you know, public transportation, walking, a car. And it's that kind of highly conscious reality that shapes the way in which black people in general, and black men specifically, move around cities.

MN 6:50

What are the historical origins of carceral power? And can you provide a trajectory of how it shapes their urban landscape?

RS 6:56

So power, it's sort of modern formation. Because, you know, we can look at, for example, the Greeks – they had forms of containment and isolation where they were able to imprison people. But it's modern formation really grows out of transatlantic slavery and the plantation system. Those two mechanisms created a kind of historical and racialized attachment of blackness to containment. So whether we're talking about the belly of a slave ship, whether we're talking about the auction block, or the plantation system, techniques and tactics, technologies, mechanisms of isolation and containment and immobilisation were developed in and through transatlantic slavery, the auction block, plantation, Jim Crow systems, and so on and so forth. And so, carceral power has a very deep connection with blackness. And as black people became rooted in the places they did because of this sort of spatializing blackness phenomena, you know, the Caribbean, in various parts of the Americas, towns like, outside of Atlanta, and in various places, where the plantation system was established, carceral power reemerged in a different kind of format to isolate contain, surveil black people as enslaved people in various parts of America and Caribbean. And then in the 20th century, in the aftermath of enslavement when black people in the early part of the 20th century fled the South because of its virulent racism and because of its economic exploitation and they moved to cities like Chicago. The logic of black as the signifier of criminality, black as the signifier of dangerous and the specific way in which those things were attached to black men, follow them. So when black men, or when black people went to Philadelphia, when they went to Paterson, New Jersey, or when they went to Harlem, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, those ways of seeing blackness, as something that needs to be spatialized, isolated, contained, surveilled, followed them and those carceral mechanisms crept into the innocent spaces of their lives. And they emerged as things like highway construction that ran through black communities that created barriers between black and white communities. They emerged as intensive policing mechanisms that were situated in the heart of black communities. They emerge as segregation techniques that were built into housing, things like restrictive covenants, or not getting access to lending. And so all of those mechanisms began to really congeal in the everyday places that black people live. And then when mass incarceration begins, and a lot in the 60s, early 70s. Those mechanisms had already in many ways been present in black communities throughout the country, and have been present in many ways in black life for generations and generations over historical periods from, you know, transatlantic slave trade to plantation, to migration and ghettoization. Those things had already been there, and they were sort of congealed or reformatted in prisons, really in the 1970s as what we start to see the explosion.

MN 11:15

What is the relationship between mass incarceration and the forms of architecture and urban planning that arose and took shape under its context.

RS 11:22

So, you know, as mass incarceration emerges in the 1970s, black people have spent the 400 years They've been in this country up to that point totally spatialized. They were here, they were kept there, they were isolated, they weren't allowed the kind of mobility that that white Americans had access to. And in organising and containing them in places like the black belt on the south side of Chicago, that the evacuation of an industrial labour force, right, that all of a sudden the economy changes from being an economy that is kind of built on like working class ethics and working class skill set to build iron ore or to lay roads or to build bridges, those kinds of skills, and it shifts from being an industrial manufacturing labour force, to one that is really based on a different set of skills, and a different level of education becomes more of a kind of service sector labour force. And that switch between industrial to service sector threw millions of people out of the labour market, just sort of switched one day. And one day all these people worked in factories, worked in Goodyear or worked at Caterpillar or whatever. And even when the switch happens, those people are just thrown out of work. And they didn't really have a skill set that made them amenable to service sector labour. They didn't have education background. And so they became superfluous, they became extra. Some of those people found new work in a new economy that started to emerge. And that was sort of punishment economy, or what we call today, the prison industrial complex. Some of them became judges and others became police officers, others became PO's (parole officers), some of them worked in prisons, and many of them began to work in new economies that were emerging as the economy de-industrialised. And the rest of them, many of them poor and a significant number of them black and brown, became the raw material for the building of those prisons. So they became the people who went into them, who were contained, isolated, and punished. And then states just simply started to throw more money into building prisons because it became a kind of economic sector. But it also held this important political cachet because most of the country, particularly white Americans could get behind punishing black people and punishing poor people and punishing immigrants. They could get behind that as a kind of political project. And both people on the right and the left figured that out – that, "Oh, this has some political cachet." So, Democrat and Republican legislatures all over the nation threw their money into prisons at the expense of schools and public health, roads, and parks and rec, and you know, all of the other things that make life sustainable and make life worth living. They threw it into the punishment industry, and it just grew for 30 years. From about 1971 until, really, we're talking about 2010, so 40 years and it only grew and grew and grew. And because black people have been located in certain places, and because drugs became enemy number one and the nation launched this large decade's long useless drug war. And communities of colour, particularly black and brown communities use drugs like all other communities, those communities became the place where the drug war was fought. So it meant that the Southside of Chicago, certain places in Harlem and Brooklyn, certain places in Philadelphia, Paterson, New Jersey, South Central Los Angeles, East and West Oakland, you know, all of these black and brown communities. That was where the war was fought. And it wasn't as if White people aren't using drugs, they were using drugs just as much, if not more. But black people, poor people and people of colour in general was seen as a signifiers of drug use. And because they were seen as less valuable, punishing them and destroying their communities and lives became something the vast majority of people in the nation could get behind. So, that spatialization project mixed with the changing economy against the backdrop of this sort of long history of seeing black people as signifiers of danger and the sort of domestic Boogie men and women, if you will, ignited this multi-decade long punishment industry that place black lives really in the crosshairs.

MN 17:26

In your book, you describe the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated as having a second sight enabling them to bear witness to the quote unquote, prison ideation of non prison spaces. How is the work of prison intellectuals like George Jackson influenced your analysis?

RS 17:47

Oh, significantly. I do what I do today as a geographer because of their insights, and it was really reading people like George Jackson, and Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu-Jamal in the US context, and also people in South African context, like Govan Mbeki, Ruth First and Nelson Mandela. It was really their insights that created this entire research trajectory, that idea. And even though you know, people like Michel Foucault, the French thinker, was really one of the first to write about this in the 70s. He wrote about it in the way in which he writes about everything – it's this kind of genealogy, the moment in which things emerge. And so he provided a really useful kind of conceptual framework and he really helped me to recognise it, you know that something like this had been done before. But it was those largely black imprisoned intellectuals, that helped me to see what this meant for black people and how racism and white supremacy as a kind of political reality, as a social reality, and also as a historical reality. How it was deeply spatialized – meaning that they helped me to see that how racism worked was a geographic phenomenon. And at the core of it was always about developing tools, mechanisms, technologies to isolate, contain, restrict and immobilise black people. And that's just a thread that runs through black people's relationship with Western colonialism. It's at the base of it, you know of course, there's this sort of economic extraction. There's also this sort of ideological work that goes into it to cast black people as non human or subhuman therefore, subsequently justifying the the exploitation that they face. But you'd sort of strip all of that away. It's always a spatial phenomenon. It's always a spatial phenomenon. Slavery, plantation, servitude, segregation, mass incarceration, the kind of big four expressions of racism and white supremacy over the last 500 years have had been geographic at the core. It's simply geographic and the way in which historians, novelists, painters, filmmakers, sociologists, whatever, talk about racism, at the core of all of it whether consciously acknowledging or not, is this spatial phenomenon. And so what the book does, in general what my work really tries to illustrate is that race makes place and place makes race and racism is always in need of a spatial element to exercise its power. That's how it does. That's bad. It's simply how it does what it does. In looking at something like mass incarceration, it's a spatial phenomenon. But the way in which black people became the centre of that, that racist public policy was also based on a spatial phenomenon. And so what I'm really trying to do is sort of connect these histories, and really demonstrate how geography is crucial to the exercise of race, power, to the exercise of anti blackness, and as a result begin to develop strategies that are in and of themselves spatial. To push back against those histories of racism and anti blackness.

MN 22:20

My next question is, uh, how have the rebellions of last summer influenced your ideas of carceral power and spatializing blackness, broadly?

RS 22:31

Yeah I mean, I think I would say it's an affirmation of the work that I've been doing for for so many years, and you know, what all of the analysis from Black Lives Matter. What they all recognise is something that's at the core of my work: that black people are heavily policed, that we are heavily policed, in part, because we live under forms of segregation, where we are either forced to choose to live together. And that black people in confronting the realities of police violence means that we just don't have the same kind of mobility and bodily autonomy that white Americans do, you know, "walking while black," "driving while black", "sleeping, while black." These are geographic realities. So it's about simply being black (in a place – your bed or on the street) becomes an opportunity for the state to deploy violence on on black people, oftentimes, without any accountability. So I think what Black Lives Matter is saying when they say defund the police, one of the things that they're saying is that policing doesn't work, we need new strategies to address issues like public safety. And that the institution is racist, and it responds to black people in public as threats. As something that needs to be surveilled, contain isolated, policed or punish. And so I really applaud and support what BLM is doing. And if I had my sort of [inaudible], I would just sort of ask them to, you know, in thinking about policing, for example – and I think it's correct that they focus on policing. By looking at policing, it allows them to kind of scale things up and to recognise that the problems embedded in policing, vis-a-vis black people, extend to things like housing and education and access to health care, because it's simply about where black people are located. Adequate housing, adequate health care, and adequate education are evacuated from those places, wherever black people are, those things are evacuated. And if we want black people to be healthy, if we want black people to live quality long lives, then the places that black people occupy need to be invested with quality health care, quality education, and quality housing, and again, that is a geographic question because it's simply about where black people are located. And the logic is that where black people are located, those kinds of productive elements are evacuated from that life and what is invested is policing. And so you know, we have to flip that on its head. So what BLM is demonstrating is that where black people are located, policing is a problem and by attacking that and asking for that problem to be transformed or solved, it provides them a way of seeing what else is happening in the places that black people are located that they can begin to address, to affirm that Black Lives Matter and to provide material resources to make sure that they matter, and that they're able to live long, healthy and meaningful lives.

MN 26:59

One striking moment from the urban rebellions of last year was when Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot ordered the bridges to be raised so protesters couldn't access the downtown. What does incidences like these were the public architecture is effectively being deployed against its citizens tell us about spatialized blackness? And I guess how do we contend with carceral power on the scale if we demand to live in a society organised around people instead of profit?

RS 27:26

Let me take the first part. Yeah, it was really disappointing that Lori Lightfoot did that. And I think one of the things that she was thinking was to make sure that there was no contestation between protesters and police. But it also is a sort of extension of what I've been talking about, which is that public infrastructure gets used as a way to bracket to contain, to isolate, in this case, black protest. And we've seen public infrastructure in the forms of expressways and highways being used to isolate and contain black people for generations. And so that's a really sort of troubling element that she is engaging with. So if we are really interested in dealing with carceral power, we have to recognise that, and I think Foucault had it right... When you create something like this, you can't simply deploy it in –you know it's kind of like the genie's out of the bottle. Once you create something like this –there's this movie from the 90s. I think it's about a prison in San Francisco... The Rock, it's called The Rock. And part of it had to do with this chemical weapon that the federal government created and one of the characters said, "look, when you create something like this, you can't wrestle control of it. It's in the world." Now, when you create a chemical weapon, you can't be sort of strategic with it, it's out there. Carceral power and recognizing that you can use architecture and other tools to render people immobile, to punish them, to discipline them to get them to behave in certain ways. You just can't undo that. You just can't sanction in one place. And that's been the lie that prisons tell us, that that kind of stuff only happens there. No, it's ubiquitous. It's all over Western societies. You're in Toronto, right? You know, when you walk down the street, and specifically in downtown Toronto, you're being recorded 400 times every step you take. And the kind of ubiquity of that surveillance that we in, you totalitarian governments like China, or even sort of liberal cities like Toronto. That is an extent, that is an outgrowth of this sort of carceral power. So I think in general, we have to recognise that that this sort of behemoth has been created, the genie is out of the bottle and if we are really interested in racial justice, or if we're just sort of really interested in pluralist democratic societies then we have to really re evaluate our use of these technologies. That's the first thing we have to do. And then we also have to recognise that if we're really interested in anti racism and racial justice, we have to understand how these tools have been used against people of colour, and how they're continuing to be used against people of colour. And from there, we have to develop strategies to decouple ourselves from the ubiquity of these kinds of techniques and technologies, and to re-think what public safety means because public safety is not recording the public when they're outside all the time. That's just not public safety, it's a profound breach of privacy. It is a sort of big brother period, 1984 totalitarian kind of framework, and it doesn't produce safety. It doesn't produce safety. But what we do know, that produces safety is things like health care, education, public transportation, access to meaningful wage labour. Those things really help in terms of public safety. And so, I think really throughout the West, but particularly in places that have large communities of colour, you know, I'm thinking obviously all throughout the United States, but Toronto, Paris, London –London has one of the largest camera systems in the world, I think, second to China, I think China is the biggest, but I think that UK that system they have is the second. We have to really ask ourselves, is this stuff working? If it is, then why are we still having these sort of issues around public safety? And what does public safety really mean? And how do we achieve that? Because the sort of large scale carceral approach is a waste of economic resources. It's a waste of human resources, and it lulls us into believing that somehow the problem of public safety has been achieved. And I think people like George Jackson and Assata Shakur, they know that doing this doesn't help, right? You stick a person in a cage, you surveil them for hours upon end. And they know that that doesn't approach, and so this is another reason why the voices of people who have been incarcerated should really be at the table and needs to be part of our public conversation about things like public safety, because they have the second site. They've experienced it and they know the negative implications that come from it, and they can offer us ways to address public safety in ways that are not totalitarian, invasive, and racist.

MN 34:35

We're recording this just as the news breaks that incarcerated Black Panther Party member, Mumia Abu-Jamal, has now contracted COVID-19. What relationships do you see between prisons and public health, given this context? I know you touched on Mumia Abu-Jamal as an inspiration earlier. So I wanted to have a comment on what's going on right now.

RS 34:57

That is...that is really troubling to hear. That is really horrible news. You know, this is another reason why prisons don't work because they have been, especially since the explosion of mass incarceration, but even in earlier periods, they've been incubators for disease. They're designed to isolate and contain as many people as possible. They are designed to move people in very particular ways and to sort of force them to walk this way as opposed to that way. They're not designed for things like airflow. They're not designed for what happens to all human beings, which is that we get sick. They're not designed to accommodate the reality of our lives. They're simply designed for punishment. And so if you create a place that is designed to punish, part of that punishment becomes something like disease. And American politicians know this. They've been conscious of this, since the explosion of HIV AIDS 30 years ago. They knew it then and they didn't care. They took no efforts to stem the tide. And now we have something like an airborne disease that can easily travel amongst people who are in close quarters. And so it's not at all surprising. But it's deeply unfortunate that Mumia Abu-Jamal has contracted COVID-19. I really hope for a speedy recovery for him, and really for all of the prisoners across the nation who contracted, we've had an epidemic, we're back here in Arizona where there's been numerous breakouts, and numerous prisoners have died as a result of it. And so this is, again, why Black Lives Matter is so important because they recognise that racist policing not only enables for black people to confront the violence of police officers, but in many cases, actually in most cases, they have to confront jails and prisons, and those become incubators for violence. They stagnate people's lives. They are opportunities for trauma. And they're also incubators for disease. And so if we are if we're really interested in anti-racism, if we really believe that Black Lives Matter, we have to fundamentally reevaluate our criminal justice system, and really move away from prisons because they simply wastes resources and lives.

MN 38:14

Yeah, we need to move all the way to full abolition. Your book ends on a generative note where you discuss the forms of urban agriculture that's begun to appear in abandoned lots across the city. So my question is, how can urban agriculture contribute towards building an architecture of life in Chicago, but also in any city?

RS 38:36

So that ending, I wanted to do two things. I wanted to show first that despite the way in which blackness was spatialized (so Chicago), and despite the history of isolation and containment that continues to mark the city to this day, that Chicagoans and Black Chicago, we're taking steps to transform that landscape into a kind of fertile ground into a landscape that could produce productive, healthy subjects. And that the south side just wasn't an island of containment, but that in and through that history that black people were reconstituting themselves, they were transforming their landscape, they were becoming architects of their own. They become architect's creating a kind of self determination for themselves. And so that was one of the reasons. And second is that places like Chicago are just epicentres for food insecurity. You know, whether we're talking about access to grocery stores, or whether we're talking about high concentrations of high cholesterol, high fat, sugary foods, that this is another problem that spacialization has created. And so in trying to illuminate that other problem that comes from spatializing blackness, I wanted to also show that, at least in this context, that black people were creating ways of resisting that have transformed the landscape. And I think there's evidence of this kind of thing happening all over the nation. Whether it be from an agricultural standpoint, that's one of actually the popular ones. Since I was doing the research writing that book, this kind of stuff just like exploded all over like in south Phoenix, which is historically black and brown here. There's a huge like 20 acre lot in south Phoenix that cultivates agriculture for the community. And volunteers come out, we work the land and you know get the produce going, so it's really, really taken off like I'm seeing it everywhere now and I got graduate students who are working on that kind of stuff. But in addition to sort of pushing back against the kind of food desert reality, it also shows that poor people, immigrants, black folks, can be geographers and that they can be architects have a new kind of community. And they don't need to rub elbows with people at City Hall, they don't they don't need to go to some wealthy developer like, "Can you do this?" They can get some shovels and some dirt and couple hoes and some some seeds and some water, it starts to really re-create their communities on their own terms. And so that to me is an important element of some re-spatializing blackness. And it's a way in which black people recognise like, we've been here, we've been put here and kept here. But we're going to make this place ours. We're going to make this place ours. So we're going to have this cultural life in the streets, we're going to have black businesses, we're going to have a kind of black life in this place, and we're going to do things in this place that are good for us. And that is a vital element of creating healthy and sustainable black communities.

MN 43:06

Thank you, thank you. I have one final question and it's touching on something you brought up a bit earlier about the ubiquitousness of surveillance nowadays. Do you see that as going to be a new terrain of contestation for us as black people, like having to manage and deal with this idea of always being publicly surveilled –also not just publicly surveilled, also our own skin colours not being perfectly calibrated to these surveillance machines in the first place, creating all this insecurity and fear. So I wanted to ask, is this going to be a new terrain of spatializing blackness?

RS 43:49

Yes, so a geographer at the University of Illinois recently published a book about the technological reach of carceral power. I think it's called "Digitize and Punish", that's what it's called. And he is sort of picking up where I leave off. And you know, whereas for me, the kind of cage if you will is about the sort of construction, it's about architecture, it about urban planning, all of these mechanisms to isolate, contain in a physical way. His work looks at the way in which digital phenomena that emerges in the 1970s as mass incarceration is growing, gang databases for example, and these sort of digital models that look at where crime [inaudible]. That for him is the sort of new cage. And so to answer your question, yes. I think looking at black life is important because black people's lives reflect coming problems for the nation, for the hemisphere, and for the globe. And that's one of the reasons that black lives matter. Because we're the kind of... our lives are the kind of racial canaries in the mine. And whatever happens to us, happens to everybody else. You know, in this country right now white people are dealing with mass incarceration and ways they never really had to deal with before because of the opioid crisis. And now, not surprisingly, white people in general and white politicians are starting to rethink, "do we really need all these prisons? Do we really need to start sticking people in prison because they have substance issue?" Well you know we've been saying that for like 50 years and nobody gave a shit because we were black people. But now that white people are getting caught up now it's like oh, "maybe we need to do something about this." And so, the same extends to technology. The same extends to the sort of broad scale surveillance that whatever happens to black people today vis-a-vis surveillance, vis-a-vis data accumulation or technologically will be the case for everyone else in the society. So, it behoves us all to listen to black people to, recognise that black lives are valuable and important and should be treated as such. And to also understand how black people are experiencing whatever it is –poverty, economic instability, health inequalities, because those very things are going to reach up and grab other people. And it's certainly not about if, but instead it's just about when.