1919 7/15/21 1919 7/15/21

Digitizing Blackness with Dr. Brian Jefferson

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 fourth and final episode of our Black Geographies Podcast Series, our host Mohamed Nuur sits down with Dr. Brian Jefferson, an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and author of Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age. The conversation starts off with Dr. Jefferson walking us through the main arguments of his book and moves into a more wide-ranged discussion on racial capitalism, the relationship between computing technology & mass incarceration, surveillance & biometrics, Foucaultian biopolitics, and the meaning of necropolitics. The conversation ends off with a discussion surrounding abolition as the only solution to digitized criminalization.

Title sequence credits:

Introduction clip: Angela Davis on Democracy Now!
Second clip: Sister Souljah response to Bill Clinton
Third clip: Kwame Ture on Organization 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 don’t want popularity we want power, power. And power comes only from the organized masses.

MN [00:00:48]:

Welcome to another episode of 1919 Radio and the fourth and final episode of our Black Geographies podcast series. My name is Mohammed and I'm your host. In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Brian Jefferson, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and author of Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age. Dr. Jefferson starts us off by walking me through the main arguments of his book, and we get into a wide ranging discussion on racial capitalism, the relationship between computing technology and mass incarceration, surveillance and biometrics for Koshin, biopolitics and the meaning of macro politics. We end off on a discussion of abolition as the only solution to digitized criminalization. I hope you enjoy the show.

MN [00:01:32]:

Can you start us off by walking us through the central arguments within your book?

BJ [00:01:37]:

Yeah, yeah. The overarching argument is that like all sort of government services, criminal justice is becoming computerized and as a result, the ways that mass criminalization and the ways that people are excluded from mainstream society for having things like criminal records, like the game is changing because the technology is changing. And one of the things that I'm really looking at is sort of in the US, of course, we look at mass incarceration starting in the 80s up until recently, and as many people now over two, I think three million people are incarcerated, over one over disproportionately Black and Latinx. And what I'm looking at is the way that that same game is adapting to the digital revolution and it's able to bring sort of different methods of punishing people, detaining people more out into the public, into the public space, into public housing, into streets, into communities, into educational facilities like high schools and specific, but not only so through technology. So for me, the book is looking at sort of how that's the sort of where the wedding of digital technology and mass criminalization in this country is transforming the ways in which we sort of penalize or surveil or sanction people of color, poor people of color, to such a disproportionate extent. And one of the main arguments is that this sort of shifts the game when it comes to abolition, activism, decarceration, decriminalization, immigrant rights, et cetera. You know, the different sort of activist movements that are looking at people, groups of people who are punished and penalized disproportionately. So what I was trying to say is this is the marriage of technology and these policies change the game. So they change sort of how we have to approach fighting it and looking for it. So that would be the basic argument.

MN [00:04:05]:

My next question is, how do the racist logics of the past continue to persist?

BJ [00:04:13]:

Yeah, so a lot of the work I was reading about algorithmic governance and about control society, which looks at how computers are changing the way that power operates, a lot of that work, especially from Western scholars and Western White Scholars. Western scholars argue that a lot of the sort of old categories by which people were organized or by which people were separated are starting to break down. And the basic argument is this: it's that, OK, power doesn't just look at you because of your race. It could be a race or gender, your credit score, your educational attainment. And it creates these profiles. And then and then it operates on this on an individual basis. So when I said that that line is trying to push back against the trend and say no, like, first of all, all of those different categories are proxies of race, at least in the United States. They all share correlations, positive correlations or negative correlations with racial identification. So that was sort of first the part of the argument. The second part of the argument is that if we think about it individualistically, then we sort of lose the ability to talk about our group disparities. And in my opinion, politics is about group disparities. It's not about individuals, it's about groups. And I think a lot of the sort of the algorithmic governance stuff. And even if you look at some arguments, say there are no more individuals, they're just individuals. Right. There are different data packets. And in my view, that's going too far, especially in the case that I'm looking at all categories race, gender, nationality. These things still weigh heavily upon the way people are treated, what opportunities they get and their relation to the state. So I just, at the time, I felt there is a trend of a lot of more of the digital studies and algorithmic governance studies, people in surveillance, capitalism. And Zuma spoke, she says quite bluntly that race is no longer a major factor in the way that power operates. And so that was really the line where I was like, oh, wait a second, that's clearly not the case. Right. So that line is sort of trying to push back against the idea that race is becoming less important or any like religion is not becoming less important. If you look around the world, so a lot of those categories that come from colonialism, like Indigenous People, they didn't call themselves indigenous. The Europeans call them indigenous Black people. We didn't call ourselves Black because black, et cetera, et cetera. Those categories are still alive and well. And what I was trying to do in the book is to not only say that the technology are used to reinforce those identities and the divisions between those groups, but also to show empirically, look, I can crack open the algorithm and show you that it actually does have race in it. So I think it's not even just having to say a racial logic race is literally programmed into the software I was looking at.

MN [00:07:48]:

What role does computer technology play in the rise of mass incarceration, given that the development of early computer systems coincided with the beginning of the war on drugs in the 1970s?

BJ [00:08:01]:

So mass incarceration. This might seem obvious, but but then it just became more obvious than doing the research, it would not have been possible without, well, telecommunications infrastructures first, but then secondly, computer systems, because one of the things that happened during especially in the 80s, you start to see towards the mid to late 80s in the US, is so many people are being incarcerated that the paper systems, file cabinet systems are being overloaded. And you're getting these bottlenecks in courts as pretrial, but also in prisons, trying to keep inmates all of their paperwork together. There's an overload because they're incarcerating so many people. So computer technology enabled coordination on such a mass scale of something like mass incarceration. First of all, that sort of the first argument that I don't know that well, if there was a. Digital technology did not exist, mass incarceration would have looked different, they kind of turned to it to save the system from collapsing because it was just it was becoming too big to make it more efficient, make it more cost effective, et cetera. So that's the first thing with the computer technology. And then as we saw. So that's like eighties. Then as we shift more into the 90s, this is one big tech really starts rising as one of the biggest sectors in the economy. And from there, the tech companies are, of course, coming to the authorities. Hey, we got this piece of technology. We got this piece of technology. And one of the things I talk about in the book that a lot of the technologies that the companies were making, were the research and development was funded by taxpayer money. So, you know, it's not only that the technology enabled mass incarceration and mass criminalization, but also there is an economic incentive from the IT companies to perpetuate these systems because they have to buy cameras, they have to buy offender databases and all the like.

MN [00:10:15]:

One fascinating element you describe within your book is the way in which smart city infrastructure is designed to allow cities to administer communities as carceral spaces. Can you--?

BJ [00:10:28]:

Yeah, yeah, so and this is you know, there's a lot of great work on this, but as a sociologist, I think there's some good sociology and they talk about the how the prisonization of communities, mostly Low-Income Black and Latino Communities in the US. And there's been a sense that in many different ways, the communities are becoming more like prisons. And a lot of the work that previously that I was reading, they were talking about the bars or the gates in public housing. They were talking about a little mini stations, police stations by poor public housing and these types of things. So what I was hoping to contribute was to show the infrastructure, the technical infrastructure, the cables, the cameras, the satellites, et cetera. The, of course, the ankle bracelets, the data centers, the real time crime centers. And what I really wanted to do was trace in a very sort of, you know, trace the actual infrastructure that was being and continues to be built up in these communities to sort of build off of this idea that they're becoming more like prisons. So, for instance, you know, a big thing, of course, is privacy when it comes to digital technology. And we get our personal data stolen and they sell it to others. But if you're in a low income public housing unit in the communities I was looking at, they have cameras inside the houses, inside their living spaces, inside the public housing units, right in the hallways. They have ankle bracelets. And these technologies are oftentimes becoming more and more automated. And what they do oftentimes is they can trigger an alert to the nearest squad car or something like that. And my argument is it makes it more like living in a prison. So it, I'm looking at an application of digital technology that I think is different than mainstream,a lot of mainstream concerns. And at least in the US, I'm looking at specifically how it impacts criminalized groups. And one of the ways that it does is it puts more of it enables the authorities to have a tighter grip of for people's living spaces over public spaces, particularly poor people, and then also in financial sectors.

MN [00:13:07]:

What are the material impacts of digitization of records on former offenders and those in communities with them?

BJ [00:13:14]:

Yeah, and so that's connected to the previous question as well, because now if you apply for a job, employers often times will do background checks. And, you know, I learned a little bit about the background check industry, which is another sort of tech industry that that's a player in this story. And what it does is if we go back to the 60s or the 70s, having a prison record was not as much as a scarlet letter as it is now. You could still possibly get work and you wouldn't be as ostracized as you might be now because that mark is available for everybody to see. So one of the things that the prison records does is it makes that person it makes your identity as an ex offender inescapable to a degree that I think that it has never been. And so again, so making one mistake, getting one prison record, I think can be much more detrimental because it's publicly about is becoming increasingly publicly available. And not only just prison records. I mean, a lot of I don't know if it's the same in Canada, but I would imagine that for us is usually the worst in these things. But like, you don't even have to be, you could be arrested and not convicted and the newspapers will put your mugshots online so you don't even have to be convicted of a crime. But you can have a mugshot going online. And then there are these other sort of parasitic companies that say, OK, pay me twenty, three thousand whatever dollars and we'll scrape that information. So the records and sort of the publicization of the records, it just I think it deepens the stigma of having a criminal record and deepens the stigma of having just been arrested, even if you didn't do anything. And these are sort of the things and now the punishment may be you can't get a job in some states like Illinois, you might lose your eligibility for publicly funded housing. You might not be able to go to universities. So the public's perception of the record and making them accessible through just a click of a couple of buttons, I think it deepens the stigmatization and closes off more life opportunities, you know, in a very alarming way. And so that's definitely something that I wanted to emphasize.

MN [00:15:51]:

In your book, you describe the Obama administration's response to the Ferguson uprising as a “technophile black version of Lyndon B. Johnson's response to the urban uprisings half a century prior”. Can you compare the--.

BJ [00:16:07]:

Yeah, so one of the things in the book that I tried to emphasize, and especially, obviously most of the people I interact with will be, of course leftists and activists. And most people know this but the story of the rise of mass incarceration is not just a story of evil, conservative white supremacists. Liberals have played a huge part in building it up. But Naomi M’s book talks about it really brilliantly, but so one of the things I wanted to emphasize was that liberals and liberal technocratic solutions to social problems is an old story in the US and that even goes back to the early nineteen hundreds using science and technology and thinking that if you that can solve a social problem like urban unrest, like poverty, etc, etc.. So the point with that line was Lyndon B. Johnson was the president in the 60s. He was a Democrat. By modern standards, he would have been relatively easy, was he was not a centrist. He would have been seen a little bit more to the left, to his social programs at least. And one of the things that he wanted to do was to use the emerging technologies at the time. So he opened this huge national agency, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and it was the first time in the US history that local police departments got equipment and were trained by a national agency. And a lot of technologies like, for instance, the dispatch, automated dispatch comes through during that period. A lot of the sort of stuff with community policing and mobilizing the community to be the ears and eyes of the streets and to extend the police division that really starts to kick up in the 60s. And so looking at Obama, the thing is, he's a big Silicon Valley president, as the Democrats are, and a very, I think, very stereotypical liberal in the sense that thinking that in perhaps over relying on technology and and introducing technology, whether it's very well intentioned or not, but oftentimes has the effect of extending the government's reach when you when you introduce these technologies into people's private space. Yeah, so with that in mind, when I was really just trying to say was that this is a bipartisan monster that we built, so let's at least be accurate about it.

MN [00:19:02]:

Digitizing punishment makes clear the extent to which digital technologies have transformed, intensified the nature of carceral power. Can you highlight how the intersection of policing and data technology is impacting Black and Indigenous youth every day through unsuspecting means, like social media and surveillance and web technologies?

BJ [00:19:22]:

Yeah, it's extending it. And so this is an interesting thing. At several times at conferences I've had well, they've always been white dudes and they say, why? Why are you only talking about people of color? Why aren't you talking about anybody? Because technology and the surveillance is spreading throughout all of society. And I understand that. But my point is that the way the technology is being used and the way that the digital surveillance is being used with respect to crime control policy, immigration policy, students doing that as well, is used in a very different way. Because it's being used by police who are essentially a quasi military institution. I've never heard of like a wealthy suburban area being surrounded by a quasi military institution and putting cameras in people's living spaces with or without their consent. So when I'm looking at the sort of digital policing, it's in many ways it's moving the frontier, in my view of carceral governance, more and more into your private space rather than just a jail or prison or a court. It allows police to stop you on the street and punch your information into a mobile phone, which puts you in the system. And so the technology, it's an extension of criminal justice in the criminal justice system into people's homes. And that's the major thing. And I've learned not to predict anything after 2016 especially. But so I'm not saying that the that the mass imprisonment is just going to that it's inevitably going to crumble. But looking at trends and tendencies, it seems that it's a it's a much cheaper, cost effective and perhaps even more efficient way to control people, control their mobility is to use technology rather than to put them in jail, because putting someone in jail in the US or its equivalent every year, you could send them to college for cheaper. So it's an uneconomical system. And I think that's not out of morality or ethnic or ethical principles. But I think because of money, I'm sort of anticipating more and more of a shift of mass incarceration from these traditional institutions into technology via these various technologies.

MN [00:22:09]:

During last summer's rebellions, we saw a huge influx of police departments using surveillance cameras and cell phone data pings to track and capture protesters days and weeks after a protest. What impact do you see the rebellions of last summer having on the future of AI and racial digitization in--

BJ [00:22:29]:

Now, that's a great question. I think there will be multiple I think it affects. one effect, I think on a positive note is seeing the power of social networking and seeing the ability of, you know, a an organization which is BLM, which has exploded into a globally recognizable symbol that people with other struggles are able to identify with and making their struggles, making our struggles visible to one another, creating the conditions in which we can build bridges across our struggles. That's what I think the major upshot of this last round of rebellions is you had people, you know, Hong Kong people, you protesters were waving BLM, right. And then we got to see what they were doing right on through the technology. And so I would say if there's any sort, the hopeful part of me would like to think that that creates a new sort of playing field for us to cooperate to try to create more just and democratic and equitable institutions. The bad part is the surveillance will continue to extend and privacy will continue, I think, to be sacrificed. And what you post on social media and what you post on an abso--. Perhaps what you email when you text. These things more and more. Well, they already are accessible by the state. So I think when we think of activism, and especially if you're an activist, a radical left wing or even liberal activist, I think you're always positioned against the status quo. I think that's sort of part of that comes with the territory. So as the surveillance expands, I think that there's this cat and mouse game of activists are going to have to come up with new ways of skirting the dragnet, new ways of getting around their surveillance. But I think that's all. I am a firm believer that politics is never over. As long as you're a human and you're alive, there's going to be politics and there's going to be power and there are going to be unequal relations. And those relations are maintained by different tools. And I mean, this is sort of, I guess, the bigger part of the bigger argument of the book, which is not groundbreaking or anything, but the tools are changing. So the strategies of, I think, trying to circumvent them have to change as well.

MN [00:25:06]:

Is there anything we could do to mitigate our vulnerability?

BJ [00:25:11]:

I don't use social media. I mean, you could do that, but it's the surveillance state is affecting, let's say, in the US or in Canada, I would imagine it's affecting everyone. Rich, poor, Indigenous, White. So I think of all our privacy is being sacrificed. So, you know, I think one of the ways that to try to push back is to link these struggles against the extension of surveillance. And for some people, it's about personal data and Facebook. For others that might be forced to wear an ankle bracelet. These are very different circumstances, very different histories. But I'm just a firm believer in the way that you fight against power through numbers and just through finding common ground with different people. And I think, at least in academia, there's such an emphasis on difference, difference, difference that it becomes almost difficult for us to come up with a vocabulary to talk about equivalent and what we have in common. What do what does a poor black kid in Chicago have in common with with a peasant worker in India, a Muslim peasant worker in India? Of course, they're completely different histories and we can't use the same terminology. But what we can do is we can look at their struggles and the ways in which technology is being used. You know, I read a little bit about how the technology is being used essentially on marginalized people and perhaps to think of ways that we can build and obviously. We can't use class anymore as a single category that didn't work. So it has to be something different. But I don't think we should give up on the efforts to try to link ourselves across our differences because differences are important. But if we only see differences, then there's no incentive to link with one another. And if we don't link with one another, then divide and conquer, I think wins.

MN [00:27:29]:

What is the relationship between information or IT capital and racial capitalism broadly? And probably how do you use a racial capitalism framework in your work?

BJ [00:27:39]:

So I'll start by saying for me again, its W.E.B. DuBois, Ruth Gilmore and Cedric Robinson, Clyde Woods, Angela Davis, to me, these are the thinkers that created the framework for what we call racial capitalism, when in many ways among other people. But for me, these are the influential people, given the demographic groups that I'm looking at. And what they do is they look at the relation between different sectors of the economy and how they benefit from racism. Indigenous scholar, settler, colonial theorist do similar things right in there. It's anti Indigenous policies and practices and how people make money from them, to put it in the simplest terms. So it's in the US, it's obvious how the agricultural industry made money from racism during slavery. Gilmore does a great job, of course, probably the best at looking at how the industrial sector benefited from racism in the US. So for me, I just wanted to take their model and the agriculture industry. There's a lot of great work on real estate and housing and racism. So I just wanted to look at the IT sector and essentially Silicon Valley and how does it benefits from racism and racist policies. And the argument in the book is that it benefits. They want to sell cameras. They want to sell whoever makes the ankle bracelets, Taser International, or they make cameras like whatever makes this equipment, they want to sell it because they make money. So there's a policy that we should flood a certain community with patrol officers or segregate a certain community. That's an opportunity for them to make money. So for me, the question of racial capitalism and information capitalism, my question is just how has the IT sector made money from off of racism? And I can look at it primarily through black people and cities.

But you can look at indigenous people, you could look, of course, immigrants, etc. You can look at Islamophobia, all of these different expressions of discrimination and just look how have they made money off it. And so one of the interesting things was a lot of well, not a lot of but a handful of people have been going back and forth. Well, when I was first doing my work and they were saying, oh, we don't cause racism, we don't cause and my response was, I never say you are causing it. I'm just saying you're making money off. Got all these equations that you try to come. I don't care what the equations that I'm saying. I have studied the history of criminal justice in this country and I have the data to show that you don't even need to make an argument to show it’s racist. I mean, Chicago. Eighty-eight percent of all people arrested for marijuana were Black or Latinx. When you're black, it looks like I don't need you have to be a huge theorist to come to the conclusion that there's that that it's a racist policy. So my whole point was, well, if you gave them the equipment to enact those policies, then you maybe you should take self-responsibility. To some extent, and so racial capitalism and IT capitalism or information capitalism, to me, in the simplest terms, is how has the IT sector and IT companies benefited,iIn my case from the war crime, the war on drugs.

MN [00:31:25]:

Digitize and Punish is an obvious wordplay on the book, Discipline and Punish by French philosopher Michel Foucault. Can you talk about a bit about his--?.

BJ [00:31:36]:

It's funny, when I was writing it, I refused to read it because I don't want it to influence me, but I already read it in grad school and I was rereading it as I have. And it's like completely like I just sort of like but Foucalt's is super important in many ways in terms of his insights, but also his shortcomings for me. So, of course, you know, Foucault is one of the early people to talk about discipline seeping out into the public space. And he talked about discipline not only being in the prison, but also being in the educational system. And then he looked in the medical industry, you know, and he looked at all different types of the barracks, the military barracks, and the ways that these sort of disciplinary techniques spread out into society and to not only focus on the institutions, the prison. So he really gives this powerful vision, OK, don't just focus on the prison. So in terms of my work, that's what I'm looking at, how the sort of the functions that the prison performs from a political economy standpoint, from a social standpoint, are being sort of exported via technology. So that's in terms of Foucault’s sort of giving the paradigm the model for the main argument. But his shortcomings, in my view, are, well, he's Eurocentric. So is that, of course. And in Discipline and Punish, one of the key arguments was that power rely on violence as much because it's able to these micro political techniques that shape your subjectivity. And it's and it does it through knowledge production, which so many people write about. And so for me, the argument was by the group I'm looking at, these practices are seeping out into society more and more, like he said. But I definitely wouldn't say they're becoming less violent one thing. And so I'm trying to show how, like the discipline seeping out , itnot only sort of creates all these practices that people are constantly subjected to, to be a good citizen, a law abiding citizen or something like that. But how it's connected, in the case of my work, to like, again, a quasi military apparatus. So those shortcomings and that was really if you read Joy James, she's oh, my God, this book, it's called The Amazing The Spectacle of Racialized Violence always is her essay. And I really that gave me-- she makes this argument that I just actually said. So I'm taking from Joy James and of course, is a huge thinker, hugely influential in American and US academia. Even if you haven't read Foucault, I hear like oftentimes people are repeating Focauldian arguments. I've heard people say we can't we can't read white male theory, white male totalizing theory because power knowledge is everywhere. You're just repeating Foucault’s life the last time I checked. But like, he's had, of course, a huge impact. And one of the things I think that his legacy is we look at knowledge production, power away more, and we look at these insidious everyday micro techniques of discipline more. But here comes Joy James. And she says, wait a second, this is applicable to, you know, your white male or perhaps female citizen in mainstream society. She says this while Foucault is writing Discipline and Punish, you know, Attica prison is a prison, a prisoner uprising or resulting in, I forget the exact numbers, but the state essentially coming in and mowing down some of the uprisings like this is happening at the same time that Foucault is writing this book. And he was blind to it. And there's a great anecdote of him meeting, I want to say, Angela Davis in California and going to a prison and him realizing in the eighties and early eighties and he realized in the eighties, in the early eighties, oh, maybe powers haven’t become less violent. So, you know, the digitizer, I figure you sort of get where I'm going with it from the title that it's about power seeping out into society. But then also looking, I think, at a lot of black US scholars who have engaged with Foucault and trying to build on their work as well.

MN [00:36:33]:

You touch on nacro politics in your work briefly, can you explain what that is?

BJ [00:36:40]:

Yeah, so this brings us back to Foucault, of course, comes up with the idea of bio politics. And what he's looking at is the way Western governments have taken on what we would call in the US more some quality of life policies, but not only quality of life policies, but things that are necessary for us as biological organisms, the government being administering our access to food, health, medicine and all of these things that are necessary to us as biological organisms. And so his argument is that it's not just the old king who says if you defy me, I'll kill you, right. Which is essentially a negative power. The power to subtract someone's life by politics is more of a positive power to shape life through reproduction policies like abortion, right. The government takes our biological existences as a field of politics to intervene in. Nacro politics comes from Akem Membey who's looking at colonialism. And again, just like Joy James, it's sort of the same thing. It's like all of those things that definitely are true. But I understand his essay well in his book now, it's a book that was originally an essay to say the power to kill is still very central to Western governance, especially he's looking in colonies during a similar time period. So that's who Foucault is looking at. So the nacro politics is the idea that from the way I'm using it is to say, look, these technologies are just another way of ensuring that poor Black, Brown, Indigenous people are exposed to police officers, border patrol more than your ordinary White citizen. And if these are quasi military institutions, if the agents in Border Patrol or the police departments have guns and have the ability to kill you, the technology sort of maintains their exposed differential exposure to these institutions. So in that way, it creates the context or creates the conditions in which George Floyd is murdered to some extent or reinforces that is not deterministic, but it maintains those conditions. It does its part, the technology. So we don't buy the argument in the book was like this Technology is not like a lot of the European and Anglo, I think on the theorists are saying making power necessarily less violent, more knowledge based more insidious. It's also used to track and target people and then to send out patrol units near them. And that puts their life at greater risk rather than another technique. So, for instance, if there was another way of trying to address poverty and violent crime in the communes that I'm looking at, because there are other ways of doing it right, education, having educational policies, housing policies, job training policies. there are also grassroots ways of doing it, creating alternative ways of living and caring for one another. But the way we do it in the state, is we punish them and we put the the the sort of militant very or the violent branch of the state. We send them into the communities to fix the problem. And so when I say nacro politics, what I'm saying is the technology aids, that policy of punishing, surrounding and using violence or the threat of violence to try to try to remedy these social problems.

MN [00:40:52]:

Your book ends with the statement that to quote, If opposition to digitized modes of criminalization is to gain momentum, it must be abolitionist, unquote. What do you mean by this? And how can we put up an effective front against the digitized criminalization of Blackness, Black people and Black communities?

BJ [00:41:09]:

So, of course, abolitionism has become sort of a big a big word. When I use it, I'm using it howAngela Davis and Gilmore. I'm using it straight out of their books. And if we start with Angela Davis and she's looking at the prison industrial complex, and one of the things that she talks about is don't only look at the prison, you also have to look at, you know, she goes into all the industries who who what companies supply prisons with toilet paper or with bed sheets or with all the stuff, food, you know. And then she goes out beyond the prison and she says, OK, how is the medical institution of hospitals or how is the educational system such as the school to prison pipeline? How are they also linking to the prison? And what she does is she creates this sort of web of all of the different institutions and stakeholders who prop up mass incarceration. And for her, it's about not only just thinking about crime and punishment, but also medicine, health care, mental health, the domestic abuse, domestic violence. Like all of these things, how do they connect and how do we create an alternative vision to deal with violent individuals, many of whom are mentally ill or suffer some mental illness? Like how do we find a non-punitive way to deal with a domestic, a violent domestic partner without throwing them in a cage? Right. So abolitionism is first. I, as I understand it, and released from the Davis perspective, is looking at the web of institutions and actors that prop up the carceral state. And so for me, there's a small, powerful contribution was to show the IT sector in more detail, but also it's important with abolitionism. And this is where I think the word sort of can be misleading. She also says it's about creating alternative means, right? Because we still do need to protect battered spouses or partners. Yeah, yeah. We still need to ensure that there is a violent person that they're not able to harm their brothers and sisters. So it's but it's abolishing the way that we deal with those problems and trying to institute more life affirming ways. So, I mean, it's, of course, an open ended question. I would I would say or my answer like, you know, what does that mean for us? One thing I also believe, you know, it's very understandably common for academics, it was something you write an academic book. They say, OK, what's the solution to all of this terrible stuff you're talking about? And it's completely and I think that's a very good impulse. I would sort of say that I wouldn't only look to academics for that answer. I would look to communities, different communities are different. They have different local cultures, different local institutions, and maybe dealing with spousal abuse in one community. There's one policy or, or way of doing it in a less punitive or damaging way than it is in another community. But I just would say with the abolitionist framework, it's like going back to Davis. Do we have to punish these people? Do we have to put them in cages? Are there ways that we can help, especially people with mental health issues or people, of course, who are in deep poverty who might resort to, for instance, gangs or drug markets without putting them in cages and without punishing them? So abolitionist thinking, in my view, is doing away in this context of criminal justice with the idea that punishment is the first and perhaps only tool that you use to remedy these issues. I don't think that any academic can give an answer to what will replace it, but I don't think that we just as people in general, Black people at or otherwise, should have an expectation that that one book can tell you what to do. I think to find the answer, we're going to have to live the answer, and it has to be trial and error. And some things will fail horribly. And some unintended things that work out will happen. But I think there will be instances if we do tear down and abolish the punitive system where things go horribly wrong and we might and things might even be worse.

But the point is still pushing and still pushing through trial and error to find a more humane way of dealing with a lot of the problems that are connected to poverty and violence at least, and drug use, which are not, of course, which are not limited to Black, Brown, Indigenous, poor communities. Because in the US we see it now in rural white communities with the opioid epidemic and, you know, with militias who, well, are their gangs as well. They've got some function as gangs like the mobs that we saw, of course, on January six. So. But they're not. We don't deal with their problems by putting a military in Iowa trying to crack down on, you know, on the left, of course, there are authorities and they are getting higher incarceration rates. But another thing you actually see in the US is a lot of the opioid epidemic. There are a lot of stories of how police are trained, giving a little bit to give the right to medical treatment to opiate addicts, right? Yeah. So it seemed like, and we know like Portugal, for instance, there are other ways to deal with drug abuse or drug addiction than punishment. And maybe for that question, how should we think about, you know, alternatives? Maybe we should look at how white people treat white people with the same problems to some extent because they might have some good ideas, too.

MN [00:48:07]:

That's all for this episode. Thank you so much for listening along to the Black Geographies podcast series. It was a joy and an honor to speak to each of the authors we welcomed to our radio. I hope that you learn from the conversations just as much as I did. In other news, the 1919 Collective just put out our Abolitionist Arts and Writing Program, which is a fund for Black and Indigenous writers, artists, and cultural workers to create a series of work around abolition. Check out our website for more details and stay tuned for more radical and community-based content to be released all summer long.

1919 7/1/21 1919 7/1/21

Surveilling Blackness With Dr. Simone Browne

In the third episode of the Black Geographies podcast series, Mohamed sits with scholar, researcher, and author Dr. Simone Brown to discuss her book Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.

In the third episode of the Black Geographies podcast series, Mohamed sits with scholar, researcher, and author Dr. Simone Brown. Dr. Brown is the Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also a Research Director of critical surveillance inquiry with Good Systems, a research collaborative at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as the author of the 2015 book ‘Dark Matters. Listen as these two discuss life under surveillance, Black ways of knowing and surviving, and the governable worlds we live in. Dr. Brown invites us to think about how biometric technologies, regimes of surveillance, illegibility, and the politics of recognition shape and govern Black life in a post 9/11 era. Toward the end of the episode, Dr. Brown gestures to the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba & grassroots organizers on how to live and dream abolition as practices of liberation.

Title sequence credits:

Introduction clip: Angela Davis on Democracy Now!
Second clip: Sister Souljah response to Bill Clinton
Third clip: Kwame Ture on Organization 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 don’t want popularity we want power, power. And power comes only from the organized masses.

MN 0:48

Welcome to another episode of 1919 radio, and the third episode in our black geographies podcast series. My name is Mohammed and I'm your host. In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Simone Brown, Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also a Research Director of critical surveillance inquiry with Good Systems, our research collaborative at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as author of the 2015 book ‘Dark Matters,’ on the surveillance of blackness. In this conversation, we discussed the historical origins of surveillance and biometrics and its relationship to Black Studies, for non-ideas of prototypical whiteness and blackness in the post 911 surveillance state, and its implication for black people. I hope you enjoy the show.

MN: 1:36

My first question is, what do you mean by sous-veillance and how does it relate to surveillance?

SB: 1:44

And this is a great question. And for definitions, you know, often when I'm teaching, we get to the definition of surveillance probably by the end of the class, as opposed to at the beginning because I see it as basically the operating system of the you know, how we're governed of the world that we're living in, is around us surveillance. And so, I wanted to put this work into conversation with surveillance studies, and to think about my own citational practices there. And so, sousveillance comes from a researcher, Steve Mann, at the University of Toronto. He had this eight-point compass or mapping of the way various forms of veillance operated. And what struck me was this concept of sousveillance, but he saw it as, you know, the counterpoint or contrapuntal to surveillance, like the idea of under-sight.

But when he was describing it, he mentioned, you know, this one time, when basically everybody had a camera, around the 17-1800s. And I was thinking about the absenting of slavery and basically its afterlife when we think about surveillance And so I wanted to, you know, really think of it as, as the ways, the black ways of knowing and surviving, and around questions, not questions, but life under surveillance. But I also wanted to say that black ways of understanding can't be so easily mapped onto these Cartesian logics. Like one camera, plus two cameras, no camera, you know, these kinds of things are not, it's basically, you know, the Rastafari idea of ‘over-standing’. Like, how do you understand survival in systems of incarceration, of systems of enslavement, of systems of racial capitalism?

And so that's how I wanted to think about it. That we can't be, you know, there’s a quote, that we have been branded by Cartesian logic or something like that. And to think about how to disabuse us of that understanding of surveillance is to really think about how, in my book, looking at the archive of slavery, but contemporarily about how people contend and challenge and really demand different from the system that we have now, of exploitation.

M: 4:30

What were lantern laws, and what are their legacy and modern surveillance systems and studies today?

S: 4:36

So, lantern laws were these… New York is where I was looking in the 1700s, early 1700s. There are records of a law that regulated the movement of they said Negro or Indian slaves in the nighttime. So basically, this was a law that was put into practice, put into place that if any, black or Indigenous person was walking after dark in New York City and they weren't in the company of some white person, then they were mandated to carry with them a lit lantern. You can think of the lantern as a kind of prosthetic, a supervisory device, but something that, you know, was mandated that it had to be carried. And if someone was found, not accompanied by a white person, and without a lantern, they can then be subjected to being, you know, arrested, taken to the gull or to the jail. And so, that is what the lantern law is.

And this continued in spaces like Boston, continuing into the 1800s. And, you know, we can think about the kind of modern ways in which, you know, light functions as a supervisory device. Or, similarly, you can think about, like, how stop and frisk operate. And so, the idea that without, you know, kind of governing black mobility, governing walking while black, existing while black, breathing while Black has long histories, and I think lantern laws, you know, points to that. And, you know, a simple kind of…not simple, because these are all complex.

But, you know, especially now, when people are learning online or working from home, you have systems like Proctorio, which are this kind of algorithmic monitoring software to make sure people aren't cheating and cheating looks like looking away from the camera, right? So, there's a camera that monitors you while you're taking your LSAT, or your exam, or whatever it is. And there have been so many cases that arose within the past year of, you know, black folks that they were, you know, they had to shine the light in their face so that their face could be registered by this kind of automation, facial recognition. And that's, and that not showing up basically criminalizes you. Like they say you're cheating when it's like, who are they developing these technologies to serve best? What kinds of bodies become like a prototype for these things? And what bodies get produced as innocent? And what bodies get produced as guilty? Because of, you know, the lighting infrastructure.

M: 7:25

Your book dedicated a chapter to analyzing and interpreting the Big Book of Negroes. Can you tell us what it was? What significance does it hold in American history at large? And how did it play a role in the development of modern biometric systems?

SB: 7:39

So, the Book of Negroes, this is a late 18th century documents with the end of the war of independence, when the United States became the United States, there was a time in which a call was put up by the British that, you know, input, enslaved folks could self-liberate themselves, by with the caveat fighting for the British. And in doing so, they would then gain passage to places like, you know, what would become Canada, England, and what would become Germany. And so, the Book of Negroes is a document of about 3000 names of people who had registered and had travelled on ships, to these various ports. So not only did they, you know, not only like soldiers, but people that did various types of support, work, spies, cooks, these types of things. And so, this is a historical document. I think that this is digitized now, but you know, at the time, there's one in England, Washington, Nova Scotia, Canada, these spaces.

And what happens in it, they would have people's names, they would have the name of the claimant, the person who might make a claim that I own this black person who was free, and then they would also have various, you know, descriptors. Descriptors around race, around gender, around the damage that was done to people's bodies around labor, they could say something like, you know, a hand or a scar, or these various types of ways of, you know, how the body was recorded there. And so, you asked, like, what significance does that play in contemporary biometrics, and you can think about the ‘Book of Negroes’ as basically the first state regulated and state mandated document for border crossing across the Canada and US border that particularly linked biometrics to, to the rites of passage, and you could think of biometrics simply as bio the body or having to do with the body and metrics a type of measurement and biometric would be here, the, as I mentioned, like descriptions of somebody's body.

And so, we talked about having national ID cards, fingerprints, facial recognition, all of these, perhaps even DNA in these passports, to think about those claims, those demands that you need a body to prove your identity. So not who you say you are, but that your body will reveal the truth about you, despite what you say, that has like a long history in, in the surveillance of blackness, when you think about the Canada-US border.

MN: 10:43

How does Fanon’s work broadly influence your analysis?

S: 10:43

When I was starting to write this book, I wanted to tell a different story of surveillance and one that was not, you know, so much indebted to the work of Michel Foucault. And I wanted to think about, you know, Fanon’s biography. I read, you know, so many of them. And, you know, one thing that struck me was that he died on, you know, in the, in the United States. He had come to the US for treatment just outside of Maryland. And it was the CIA that was able to pass him there. I wrote to the CIA, and the FBI. I did a Freedom of Information Act, and I had, you know, the name of his CIA handler, Oli Islynn, and I got basically, you know, nothing from the documents, that was a thin file. Because, you know, they gave me that basically, we can't confirm or deny, and if we were to confirm, we still must deny—what they call, like the Glomar response. And so, I was left with, you know, the idea that Fanon was still an important, you know, source and methods when it comes to surveillance, like the FBI or the CIA. But I found that you know, Fanon would be and then epidermalization would be an important way of thinking about the ways that race gets, or blackness gets inscripted. Stereotypes of blackness— he says that I'm like, battered down by tom toms, by slavery, by shore good eating, and the way that this kind of distorted white gaze, the look of Negro distorts blackness and black people and makes blackness a distortion.

I wanted to think about how that applies to contemporary biometric technologies that distort, like the Proctorio surveillance system. And so, that is the kinds of, you know, the questions that I want to think about— the way that you know, if we have a prototypical whiteness, like the kind of body… and prototypical maleness, prototypical able-bodiedness—like what kinds of bodies are these technologies designed for? So the idea that in some earlier biometric technologies, you know, people who are elderly, so thinking of fingerprint technology, people who work with, you know, heavy hand washing, like in the medical profession or that work with chemicals, like, you know, mechanics, artists, nail techs, people that come use their hands for labor, massage therapist, their fingerprints, you know, might be illegible.

So like, what does that say around, you know, questions of labor and who can, you know, enter into these categories to be enrolled in biometric technologies. When you look at some of the earlier research and development of biometrics, they, they use, like some really messed up, you know, languages that we have naming practices like Negroid, Mongoloid, I mean, this is like contemporary research from the 21st century, using these types of terms. And so, if these are the terms and the forms, and the kinds of ideologies that are shaping biometric technology, facial recognition technology, then it's like, it's not a surprise, when we see that there's, you know, so many problems into how they get put into use to criminalize and dehumanize you know, various populations that have historically been the category that has been dehumanized criminalized.

MN: 14:51

Your book was released in 2015, and the surveillance state has continued to expand unabated. How has surveillance technology and opposition evolved since then? How does the uprising of last summer factor into the future directions of surveillance technology and studies?

SB: 15:07

Yeah. When I was, this is a great question, because the book came out in 2015, I was writing it in, you know, I think I started in about 2008 or so. Right when it was coming out, you were seeing the movement for Black Lives had been, you know, recently formed, we have, you know, the uprisings and the black insurgencies and demands for abolition, that was took place in the summer of 2020, along with, you know, the pandemic. And so, the technology, you know, has evolved, but it's also like the ‘changing same’. I remember seeing videos like a chopper being flown, you know, quite low at the time of the protests last summer, as a form of threat of violence, of intimidation, and, you know, and as a form of crowd dispersal. And so, you know, that is not a new technology that has been used in various fields of warfare, in the US and outside of it. So, you know, some things that have changed is that we have, you know, so many more people that are on the ground, recording, so many more demands that are happening, but also, you know, so for example, I, there was a time around, maybe around 2016 in the US, and also, you know, in Canada as well too, where the response was, you know, give a cop a camera, and the idea of like, let's have like, you know, body worn cameras, for police, which really gives, which really is a kind of police reform, that really puts more money into those that produce those products, like the company that was formerly a taser and into policing budgets.

But I'll tell you something that I saw recently has been happening— so people, okay, we're going film the police, we're going have records, we're going have this kind of viral Black Death, that is, you know, basically like lynching photography, that has been circulated. It was about last month I saw a video of this person recording the cop. The cop was playing music, like, the Beatles, or country music, they've been doing this a lot around the country. And what it shows is, like, the kind of calculated knowledge of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They know that people are going to record them, and it's going to go on YouTube, on Instagram, on whatever, but they know that the content moderators are really the algorithms that say you can't put copyright music on YouTube, on Instagram will then flag those videos and it would be removed. So like, record me all you want, you know, but you’re not going to make this go viral, you're not going to be able to put it online. And so it's kind of like whack a mole, with the way that people you know, one up and challenge these surveillance practices when it comes to policing, in particular. I guess, when you talk about, you know, the future directions, I really like the work that is being done by abolitionists, by the movement for Black Lives, that continues to do that work, that has to be the demand, right? For abolition, and that must be the future, knowing that, you know, it's not like, oh, we need to get more technology, we got to just stay one step ahead of the cops or the state, or I.C.E or whoever it is about. Let’s make demands for something outside of this system. Imagine something different. And that's why I think the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, of Marian Kaaba and so many others really continue to teach me about, you know, how to live and to dream abolition.

M: 19:35

My question is, what kind of impact has the post 911 War on Terror had on the material conditions of black people and blackness at large? And how about specifically black women in this context?

SB: 19:47

It was right in 2001 in the summer in Atlanta, a whistleblower who was working with what would be become the TSA, it wasn't called the TSA until after this omnibus bill that the US put through called the Patriot Act, but she was a whistleblower to show how black people were being, you know, criminalized at the airport, even though they weren’t the ones that were trafficking in contraband and other types of things, in from her experience. And so how has that changed? It's the ‘changing same’. One example, and, you know, even though I am Canadian, I think a lot of my references are from the U.S., because I've been living in the US for quite some time. But it was about, I think it was 2016, that some documents were leaked to the press. These were FBI and Department of Homeland Security training documents, but they came up with this new category. Well, not so new, because, you know, black people have been criminalized, you know, at least we have details from Cointelpro and earlier, but this new category called the black identity extremists, and I'm sure you've, you know, you've heard about it, and it really demonstrates the state's continued ability to index black resistance as criminal. It’s part and parcel of a whole slew of other types of practices that have happened, that particularly focused on Muslims, black Muslims, like the idea of, the kind of build-a-terrorist that the FBI did. They called it create and capture where they would basically have the making of an informant and so you have, you know, people that would be informants, but also agents that would be in mosques, basically trying to inveigle people to criminalize themselves. And so that was called create and capture. And so that is, the kind of parcels of the methods and sources that have been used prior to 911 and even continually. We know that the kinds of films that have been coming out, the documents that have been coming out about, you know, Fred Hampton, but also the FBI foyer releases of the various ways that movements have been, and continue to be, infiltrated with disinformation as well, too. And you're seeing that, of course, more and more now, especially when we have things like social media, and various types of like bots and other types of ways that there's disruption, disinformation, and ways that black freedom struggles continue to be a problem for a white supremacist state.

MN: 23:19

My next question is, what is prototypical whiteness? And how does it play a role in the development and accuracy of surveillance technology? What do you mean when you say it is, to quote, ‘reliance on dark matter for its own meaning’?

SB: 23:32

That’s a great question. I was using that to think about biometric technology. I guess a short primer on biometrics, basically, can be used for three purposes. Identification— who are you in the face in the crowd? It can be used for verification—are you who you say you are? Are you the person whose unique biometric is held in this ID card, or this passport? Or automation—is anybody there? Automation is like, you know, when you go to a public washroom and use a touchless faucet, and you run your hand, you know, over the capacitive sensor to kind of get the water to run. And sometimes it's a structural design that the water doesn't run from my hand when I wave it in front of it. This happened to me in Toronto this summer going into the stores where they had those automated hand disinfectants and I had on like, I tried to be fashionable and I had on like black gloves like black plastic gloves, you know, whatever latex gloves and it wouldn't work at all right? And because it's like how it's being reflected or again, it's like the you know, the need that you say you have to use a ring light so that your face can be read by this software to answer the question, is anybody there? Of course, you're there, my hand is there, but what kind of hand was it designed to expect? And that is the prototype of whiteness, right?

That's what I mean about white prototypicality to exist, it has to have that counterpoint. And that counterpoint is, like, this is invasive, kind of more intimate kind of biometric technology, is iris recognition. But there were times when the technology was designed that it could not register, brown irises, just blue. I mean, who designed something just for white faces, just for blue eyes? Well, we know who designed something—people who have white faces and blue eyes. Sometimes people want to blame it on the training data, oh, we only use these colour eyes or these people. Well, it's who’s designing that data set that didn't even like, or rather absented other people from making this technology something that could be they could be legible in. When I say that, its reliance on dark matter for its own meaning, I think we could extend that to think about the category of whiteness, relying on the dark of blackness, what gets categorized and then we go back to your question about Finon. He says, I'm splattered by black blood, they rendered my body back to me, in triplicate. So this is like the stereotypes, all of these things that have long histories in literature, in film, in the killing of Philando Castile, a few years ago, where his partner, Diamond Phillips, was recording it for Facebook.

And the cop said it was because of his wide-set nose. He was looking for somebody with a wide set nose. All of these, stereotypes I guess, is the shorthand, but you know, a lot of work, what goes into producing and reproducing and continuing these stereotypes. And so that is one way in which biometric technology does that. And the idea, it's like, I forgot the name of the person here. Meredith Broussard, and she talks about techno-chauvinism. Like, you know, it's a technology that's going to save us. This is her critique, right. The critique is of people saying that the technology is always right, it's true. It's what's going to liberate us. And it's so steeped in all of these histories, in its own formation. It's the formation of these technologies that, you know, we can't discount colonialism, we can't discount us slavery, we can't discount genocide. When we think about, you know, the states in which these technologies are created.

MN: 28:37

What is one thing, one concept that came up was white gaze and the black gaze? Can you compare the two?

SB: 28:47

I'm just thinking of an answer that might be somehow interesting, or relevant. And it reads basically, I feel like it's some of the same. I don't want to always rely on phenomics because there's so many things about that. It's not like white people and black people looking but all these things, all these histories, that shape the white gaze. Right now, this week in Minneapolis, we have the case of the cop who killed George Floyd. We have the 20 year old Daunte Wright, who was killed, murdered by a cop. And the reason for the stop was—it's illegal to have, this is not the reason—this is like the alibi given afterwards.

But the excuse is that it's illegal to have an air freshener on your rear-view mirror, which is also illegal in Ontario, Canada as well too, but that becomes the justification for the stop. So it's not about literal seeing, but like, how is this kind of oversight when you think about surveillance guards, all of these things, how are these ways of seeing blackness of reading blackness as always and already criminalized or some type of negative racialization a product of the white gaze. I mean, that could be one way of seeing it.

I think maybe another example, which I used at the end of the book was, you know, these two workers were testing out a camera at a store, this was a HP camera that also had automation. And you might use this for a conversation that so many of us are having now on zoom or whatever. And so the camera would be able to pan and move as the person was using it, making for a good user experience, supposedly. One worker, Desi, called himself Desi, and the other worker, black Desi, and white Wanda, they would both use it, and the camera would like, you know, move and work perfectly for Wanda, but for Desi, it was not able to like pan shift or tilt or anything. And so those are two separate ways in which one design for the computer was only made useful for one body. That is the white gaze or white way knowing, or like placing whiteness or white bodies or lightness, as, like, the prototype is one way. Another thing is like, you know, we've been seeing so much of Permit Patty, or Karen with the calling on the barbecue, or, you know, something, and the way that, you know, Karen is a cop and the way that the policing, that becomes another way of using 911 as like, you know, a policing customer service, as a right, as a demand. I think I'm kind of just getting that, like, the white gaze is about governing and policing who is in and out of place, it's policing categories of race. It cannot be sustained. We need to demand a whole new world.

MN: 33:01

Yeah, absolutely. My next question is—how can we, as black people, mitigate our vulnerability to the surveillance state, and they're also now proliferating, privatized, surveillance regimes.

S: 33:15

It’s an uphill battle, you know, when we think about mass incarceration, it is really an uphill battle. But the models, I think, must come from mutual aid. And knowing that the state is not going to save you. I think the example for that is what happened in a space like Texas, and so many other spaces as well too, just earlier this year, when you know, when we see that, that climate change could look like people dying. Well-resourced people even have to break down their fences and burn their furniture, to survive. And what people relied on in those time are the networks that were already in place of mutual aid to get unhoused people who are outside living into hotels, into shelters, to get people food, all of these ways that surveillance state will just—what Ruth Gilmore calls organized abandonment—it will just continue to abandon. The way to challenge that I think is collective. It's about abolition, and it's about mutual aid. On the flip side, you know, we don't have to have everything. Like the Super Bowl commercial with Michael B. Jordan? He was basically voicing the stalker state, what Hamid Khan calls the stalker state, of basically voicing one of these home digital assistants like, Alexa or an Amazon Echo or something.

And sometimes it's really cheap, or easy to use our fingerprints or our face to secure our devices, but we have to continually ask like, what happens to our data? Who is it being sold to? And if it's not being sold, like, who is it being shared or traded or rented to, when we surrender these things, you know, for convenience, for so called security. So, you know, sometimes it's good to take a pause on the new or the hot new thing and think about, you know, what are the potential harms of these things? And, you know, for me, you know, sometimes it's just like, oh, there's just so much stuff to, how am I going to manage all of these passwords, or like you'd like, rather than writing them down on a piece of paper? Or, you know, what's the big deal if I just use, IMessage rather than, you know, some type of secure messaging system, and you know, that there's, a lot of times people say things like, well, if you've got nothing to hide, then what's the problem? And those types of answers are so individualized and require a really involved, deep investment that you're like, you're on your own here, you just have to concern yourself with yourself.

And what got me to, you know, to think about really being mindful about my own kinds of security, when it comes to communication is like, what happens to the students that I speak to that are at risk, that could be, you know, without state documents, what happens when I put them at risk, because of the way that I might be sloppy or not concerned with secure digital communications? So to think about, like, the larger kind of community concerns, not just with using something like Signal or, you know, end-to-end encryption with WhatsApp or whatever, but to think about not yourself only, but like other people that you are in community with that you might not even know. I'm in community with the person that could see outside my window right now.

MN: 37:30

For my final question, I would like to flip the question you posed in your conclusions back on to you. What happens when blackness re-enters the frame? What is the frame and how is it necessarily reframed by censoring the conditions of blackness when we theorize surveillance?

SB: 37:48

Yeah, the thing is like, did the blackness ever leave? It’s a good question. And that question came from Desi, who was like, using the HP computer, and he says, watch what happens when my blackness enters the frame. And what happened is that the technology did not work for him, it wasn't able to capture him. And what's like revealing about that is like, you know, to get us to think about what it means to be uncaptured or illegible, like, there might be something liberatory about opting out or not, not calling for demands for, you know, we must make facial recognition, like work for everybody. Tech equity is not about all of us being able to be managed and governed by Google, or, you know, whoever it is.

And so, that question about what happens when we enter the frame was, in that case, for this, like little book was like to put black studies in conversation with surveillance studies, because I found that at the time, and this has, like, changed so much in the last, you know, few years or so, is that there was a real absenting into, like, how the conditions that the black folks, of black people globally in the diaspora, we're not being factored in to how we think about, you know, surveillance as a post-9/11 formation. Without thinking about how, like, the Panthers and other groups and other people were, you know, surveilled by the FBI. Long before, you know, something like the Patriot Act. So you're thinking about, like, C. L. R. James, you know, having a huge FBI having a huge file on him, and, you know, various other writers, the duration of theorists and other people. I just think it's, there's so much to learn about, and to think through and to move with when we think about, you know, you know, what happens when we centre the conditions of black people, when we when we think towards, you know, liberation?

MN: 40:20

On that note, do you have any suggestions for books or media that our listeners would be able to get more involved into learning more about surveillance studies and the work that you do?

SB: 40:34

Yeah, so this week I taught Nicole Fleetwood’s ‘Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration’ and it was like, ‘care full’. She talks about the methodology of care work, of the way that carceral aesthetics and people who are incarcerated mark things like penal time, time in prison, using what she calls penal matter—what kinds of ways are people creating art in clandestine ways to critique, to survive and to get through being incarcerated. People making art in solitary confinement. And I thought that was a fantastic book. There’s a film that came out a few years ago called Nas and Malik. And, maybe it’s not like, the greatest film, but I thought it really got to what we talked about in the ways that the FBI has and continues to surveille Muslims in New York City. Not only the FBI but the NYPD at the time, through acts of infiltration and other types of surveillance. There are also some great documentaries. I like Bee Street, which is a movement for Black lives activists. There's a really old documentary called Life and Death by Stephanie Black, that looks at structural adjustment policies and how they affect life in Jamaica. And I think that, you think about structural adjustments, whether it’s the World Trade Organization or IMF, is about surveillance, and governance, and management, and neo-colonial relations. So, I think those are a few texts that I would suggest.

1919 6/17/21 1919 6/17/21

Gentrifying Blackness With Dr Brandi Summers

In the second episode of our Black Geographies podcast series, Brandi Summers discusses her 2019 book Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post Chocolate City.

In the second episode of our Black Geographies podcast series, Mohamed Nuur sits down with guest Dr. Brandi Summers to discuss her 2019 book Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post Chocolate City. In this wide-ranging conversation she defines concepts such as gentrification and neoliberalism and analyzes how they relate to Blackness and Black people living across urban contexts from Washington DC to Toronto and beyond. We begin by exploring the history of the H-Street corridor in the post-civil rights era and the resulting impacts of gentrification. Near the end of the episode Dr. Summers discusses diversity and multiculturalism as tools used for the commodification and erasure of Blackness.

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 don’t want popularity we want power, power. And power comes only from the organized masses.

MN 0:48

Welcome to another episode of 1919 radio, and the second episode in our block geographies podcast series. My name is Mohammed and I'm your host. In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Brandi Summers, Assistant Professor of geography and global Metropolitan studies at UC Berkeley, and author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post Chocolate City. Her book examines how aesthetics and race converge to map Blackness in Washington DC, with a focus on the H Street Corridor. In this conversation, we define and explore gentrification, and neoliberalism, critiques of diversity, and the commodification of Blackness. I hope you enjoy the show.

MN 1:28

Let's begin by setting the scene for our listeners. What is H Street? And what is its significance to Washington DC at large? How has gentrification changed the H Street?

BS 1:38

So, H Street was or is a popular commercial district in Washington, DC. And so in 1968, April 4, after the April 4 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, there were uprisings that took place in DC. And H Street was one of the locations where there was some damage, and just really like frustrations had come to a point at which people were really angry, saddened, of course, about his assassination. But in particular, there was this focus on the conditions and ways that Black people in Washington DC, were encountering, you know, various forms of systemic racism in relationship to not only, you know, commercial elements, or at least commercial districts, but also, you know, interactions with police, and, you know, substandard housing and substandard education. So, there are these ways that places like H Street became really foundational to understanding Black life in DC.

BS 2:49

And so I came to the area, it was accidental. I didn't intend on doing research on H Street, it was just that I moved to DC planning to do work on a political organization. And I put my clothes at a dry cleaner on H Street, and I'm walking around and I'm like, "What is this place?". It was, it just you had to feel it. Like, you just had to kind of sense it. There was just, you could tell it was in transition. Right, so I am, like I said, I put my clothes in the dry cleaning. And I'm looking around. And H Street was one of those places where you started to see certain types of businesses that were catering to a wealthier population, I saw more than one dog spa, I saw lots of you know, cupcake bakeries, or expensive coffee shops, next to an Ethiopian restaurant that had been there for years, next to a ramen shop, right. And so you saw this eclectic mix. And so I started to read up on it, because I was like, I don't understand this place. And that's when I found out about its history after Dr. King's assassination. But then also, that's when I found out that it was a primary location for Black people to shop, especially when segregation was being enforced. It was the most populous commercial district outside of downtown and Black people couldn't shop downtown. So it was really simple to getting a lot of service needs met, whether it's, you know, getting your, your vacuum cleaner repaired or getting basic items from a drugstore. But it was a really important corridor for Black life. And so I wanted to kind of see what had happened for it to have a beer garden and a coffee shop, but then also a rundown grocery store that wasn't getting a lot of love and attention. So it's gentrification. And I know we're going to get into that a bit. But for me, I wanted to understand why it felt so strange. I'm seeing the changes happen. I'm seeing changes

BS 5:00

To the built environment, but there was a feeling there was an affective, kind of, there was a feeling I was getting about transition and wondering where this particular story of this, of this corridor was placed in DC's larger history.

MN 5:15

What is the chocolate city? And how does it become post chocolate?

BS 5:18

Ooh.

BS 5:20

So, you know, in the 70s, and especially this was after a long decade of the 1960s, where there are various uprisings all over the country, Parliament Funkadelic, produced a song called Chocolate Cities, and the first chocolate city was Washington, DC. And so in thinking about what a chocolate city is, it is this place that basically Black folks run. So, whether that's through politics, culture, music, art, sound, everything, right. And so there, it's the celebratory space. But it's also very much place driven, in terms of where Black people can be free. And, and again, imagine, so in the song, several cities remained. And a lot of those cities were those that had had experienced uprisings. But, But Washington was especially important because it had the largest Black population of a metropolitan area in the country, or at least the first, right. And there were these ways that the political establishment having them Black, again, this large Black population, generally, but also large, mid Black middle-class population existed, it seemed as though there was, opportunities for prosperity in Washington, DC, but at the same time, there were extreme forms of poverty.

BS 6:42

We saw various instances of segregation rearing its ugly head, still years later, in the ways, that there was Black poverty that was, you know, exponentially greater than that of white poverty. And so, you know, we start to see a shift in the US Census in 2010, when the Black population dipped below 50% of the overall population. And that's when, you know, people, scholars, started writing about Washington, DC's declining Black population. But identifying as like, latte, or cappuccino or swirl or something like, there was some food metaphor that was always used to talk about the infusion of white into this chocolate mix, right? And so, you know, I thought about it, and I was like, Yeah, I could, you get another food, a cookie or something to include, but to be honest with you, I chose post chocolate because it's still, chocolate is still associated. So I don't think that the Black has been fully extracted from DC. In fact, I think it's been attached in these really effective ways. So whether it's positive or negative, of course, is up for interpretation. But there are ways in which the Black population is leaving DC or being forced out, displaced from DC. But Blackness still remains and is very much central to its identity. And so it's that combination that there's, there's friction, but then there's also this contestation over space, that I think more so it's best explained as post chocolate where we don't know what's going to come next, I'm not going to presume that DC becomes white, just because Black folks are leaving. And so I wanted to have a different temporal relationship with the concept rather than going for, for a food, a desert or something.

MN 8:43

One interesting element from your book is when you state that a new dog spa, or a craft brewery doesn't necessarily generate more capital than a beauty salon or a local drugstore. Yet, the replacements of the former for the latter is still representative of gentrification in the age of neoliberalism. Can you define the neoliberalism for us? And what it is? What is its relationship to gentrification?

BS 9:06

Yeah, so you know, for me, I'm really more focused on neoliberalism working with gentrification and commodification and how those together shape urban landscapes, right. And so, you know, my focus in particular is how Blackness plays a part in these processes and the practices that are associated with them. So neoliberalism is this theory of political and economic practices that promote the deregulation of markets. Also the reduction of international trade barriers, the privatization of state companies and also thinking about the growth of private investment, but also, the with, the overall withdrawal of the state. And so that involves laws and policies that expand private markets and spaces that, that end up also shrinking public services. And so thinking about the, the neoliberal imaginary, it organizes not just like political, economic questions, but also the social, cultural and spatial practices that end up being mapped on to the laws of the market and the logic of capital. Right. And so if we think about gentrification, which, you know, it's a term that's thrown around constantly. And it's one that I, you know, people talk about the gentrification of something, right. But, but really, you know, as it relates, specifically in the, in the urban context and thinking about cities, it's best understood as the series of processes in which there's a variety of actors, institutions, and again, practices and top down policies of financial decisions that end up controlling the amount, the price and the quality of, let's say, housing and real estate. But also, it's this set of processes that's propelled by the state policies of like housing financialization, infrastructural investment, deregulation, and also privatization. So that's when you start to see, you know, this emphasis on, on mortgage securities and various media portrayals, but also where I focus real estate development, right, and these kind of commercial corridors.

BS 11:21

So it's not just about residential, real estate. And so that's when you also involve financial actors, like banks and landlords, venture capitalists, hedge funds, you know, renters, etc. So, so scholars really are at least as I was doing research, for first my dissertation, and then my book, they were talking about urban gentrification as this inevitable economic phenomenon, right. That, that gentrification is about exclusion, it's about the invisible hand of the market coming in and taking things that were previously you know, accessible, and making them too expensive for folks who were working class, not only residents but also consumers. So they really focus a lot on the unregulated market, as I mentioned earlier, and also displacement, right, and how there's this push pushing out of current residents, and renters, and landowners. So I, though, instead of emphasizing the devaluation and the revaluation of physical assets and communities within the context of gentrification through various public policies. And so, you know, if we think about urban renewal, for example, historically, or what James Baldwin called Negro removal, if we think about redlining, in the United States, and also various forms of uneven development, it congealed this, this seemingly natural link between Blackness, under development place and poverty, because in the United States, specifically, urban almost always signifies Black. So in that way, neoliberalism and gentrification really go hand in hand. But I'm saying that it's really important for us to also consider race, but specifically Blackness and how it plays a part in the, you know, leveraging of certainly capital, but also how various markets are able to operate seamlessly by commodifying Blackness.

MN 13:19

How does neoliberalism make Blackness, but not necessarily Black people cool?

BS 13:25

I mean, it's that commodification question, right. So one other point that's important from the book is that I'm not just talking about Black people and what Black people are doing but I'm actually talking about Blackness and the fluidity of Blackness and ways that Blackness can be extracted from Black people's bodies, in order to be used to raise capital and really to develop land. And so in that way, if there's this emphasis on this unregulated market, then that means you can take the Blackness of, again, some someone's actual body. You can take the Blackness of sound, different sounds, you can take the Blackness as it relates to art, you know, public art, etc and you can just smash it on something, and then you can make it hot and popular and cool. But you don't actually want lack people to consume that thing. Right. And so as it related to H Street, that was kind of the weirdness I was seeing. I was seeing Black people on the street walking down the street and stuff, but I wasn't necessarily seeing them engage actual businesses. I didn't see them really inside the restaurants. I didn't see them inside the businesses. Instead, it was as if there was this kind of mixture that looked right. It looked multicultural. It looked at diverse, but it wasn't fully saturated as it related to the actual corridor itself.

MN 14:43

What do you mean by neoliberal urbanism, and how does neoliberalism shape urban spatial processes in general?

BS 14:50

Yeah, so neoliberal urbanism is this form of urbanism, that subordinated to the dictates of capital. So, I've pulled from geographers, or actually, you know, it's funny urbanists, I'll say because they all kind of fit in different categories. But Neil Brenner and Nick, Theodore, and others who talk about this actually existing neoliberalism, which ends up involving interventions by the state, first to destroy institutional arrangement, but then also to create these new infrastructures for capital accumulation. And so what's happened with neoliberal urbanism is that cities have become kind of like these, these labs, for neoliberal policy experiments in urban entrepreneurship or, or marketization and also various forms of competition. And so there's this way that, you know, neoliberal urban restructuring produces these new spatial, social and power relations. And you see this through history and, and this kind of push for a global city and ways that cities all over the world are trying to be that, you know, global city, right. And so what it ends up doing is it redefines, and also rescales, what we understand as urban or what we understand as global, but then also targets the unwanted bodies, right? That includes Black people or other people of color, it involves, you know, getting rid of the homeless, right homelessness and the look of it. And so it's in that way, the targeting means you have to actually get rid of them in this kind of environment. So you see, ultimately, what happens with neoliberal economic and social processes in the city, is that you see this concentration of wealth, you know, in a few hands, that ends up reshaping these cities, globally.

MN 16:50

Your point about the experimentation on cities is, hits home with Toronto. We had Google propose a whole sidewalk labs, where they were going to take over an entire, like quadrants of the city and basically take data from everything, the sidewalks, from who's going where, and what's doing what, which, thankfully, was, ended up being canceled in Toronto after like a lot of pushback.

BS 17:13

Oh Great!

MN 17:13

Thank God.

MN 17:15

It is great. Yeah. My next question is, how do discourses of diversity and multiculturalism, which are very big in Canada, work to erase structural and systemic inequalities in urban settings, as well as displace and erase Black people, working people, immigrants in urban settings across North America?

BS 17:34

Okay, so you're asking how do the discourses actually work to erase them? In terms of them being successful? Or? Because I don't think they are.

MN 17:45

How do they, how do they try to erase Black people, working-class people, and immigrants?

BS 17:51

Oh, yes. Okay. So they do right. So there are ways that discourses on multiculturalism and diversity claim to make everything equal and make everyone equal and make it so that everyone has opportunities, right. And so the presumption is, there are benefits to having diversity. So what it does is it allows, especially in the context of cities, it allows the city essentially to forget historical, you know, forms of inequities that have existed, and so say instead, okay, let's start now, let's, again, let's just throw in a whole bunch of different colors. And then everyone, we can turn out these results that again, enable people to have equal access. But if you don't actually address historical wrongs, then you're not going to achieve those kinds of results. And that I imagine is certainly the case with that several indigenous populations in Canada, especially where this is a question over land and rights and acknowledging settler colonial kind of ties that still exist in the present. So as it relates specifically to Black people, there's a way that Blackness is embraced, but still, Black people can be pushed aside. And you'll see that and that's why these aesthetics end up being really important to my formulation, as I'm thinking about it because it's with this emphasis on neoliberal capital. It's just more important to find something that's profitable. And if Blackness is profitable, then that's all you need. Why do you need a Black person if you can just use their Blackness instead? And so it's that kind of work, and at least claims of multiculturalism and diversity that end up being usurped and kind of taken from Black people where it might have been based on some kind of political you know, organizing and ways to find pride and especially in a particular, leaving an era where Blackness was always already negative, you know, debased, devalued to find value in Blackness now, but again, not being managed by Black people is more so a slap in the face. Even if there's this, you know, desire to be given equitable, not more equal and diverse.

MN 20:18

Can you define your term Black aesthetic and placements for our listeners? How is Blackness aestheticized in urban spaces? And how does this dynamic play out in cities across North America?

BS 20:29

Yeah, um, so I define Black aesthetic and placement as really this mode of representing the realities of Blackness with representations of Blackness, right. So it's the, it's the shortest means to get a Black face, or get a Black body, a Black limb incorporated to indemnify someone from criticism. So it's kind of like, hey, I'm showing a Black face so I'm not racist, right. And so I introduced this as a way to think about how Blackness is aestheticized, but then also deployed to increase the desirability of a particular urban location. And so I'm really saying that it's the strategic incorporation of Blackness as this aesthetic that ends up being essential to gentrification as an urbanizing process. And you can see this clearly in, in various institutions that provide daily services. So I talked about this in the book related to like an experience that I had at Whole Foods. But there are also other ways that, you know, you think of food establishments, generally lots of restaurants, but ways that certain types of Black businesses or at least those that are attributed to Black people, in some cases, you just kind of have the city decide how Black at wants to be.

BS 21:51

So you can have only a certain number, but then if you get too many, it becomes excessive. And so just earlier to your, your question, where you mentioned, how I discussed, like, you know, barbershops and beauty shops, which have been traditionally owned by Black people, especially in Washington, DC versus these beer gardens and cupcake, places that they don't necessarily generate, generate more revenue. So, the logic doesn't meet out where I thought the whole point was profit. If that's the case, then you should keep barbershops and beauty shops. But the reality is that that's not the only logic that determines the direction, that's when you start to see this emphasis on creative, creative placemaking, or innovative businesses that aren't necessarily attributed to Black business. So you see it in multiple ways. And really, it's, it's the market determining what to do with the excesses of Blackness. Interesting.

MN 22:44

My next question is, in your book, you quote George Lipsitz, who says, to quote, "the lived experience of race has a spatial dimension, and the lived experience of space has a racial dimension". Can you elaborate on what that means for our listeners?

BS 22:59

Yeah, so what Lipsitz is talking, or at least how he discusses it is, is the spatialization of race and the racialization of space. Right. And so, in terms of the, the specialization of race, you know, it's, it's really this process by which racial inequalities have essentially been, been spatialized or, or implanted and maintained through geography. So just thinking again of the example of, of segregation, right, especially that which was federally mandated, where you have the actual people having to be located in particular areas, or at least a process by which the land has these implications by whom is there or forced to be there. So again, segregation is the best example of thinking about the spatialization of race, but also practices of redlining, etc. In terms of the racialization of space, it ends up being this process, in which racialized groups are identified, and then also given, you know, stereotypical characterizations. And they're coerced into the, into specific living conditions, where you see the social and spatial segregation, right. And so that's when you see the ghettoization of certain areas or even see this as it relates to ethnic themes, neighborhoods, that not the trendy ones now, but the ones previously were, let's say, a Chinatown was a location where Chinese and Chinese Americans were expected to remain right. And so again, it's before this commodified form of, of placemaking, occurred. But instead of this way, that, that geographies inherently have racial connotations, or at least meanings in terms of how people are able to, be able to or not able to come in and come out, but then also the ways that there's always geography mapped upon the bodies of actual individuals around the world honestly, not just in the United States.

MN 25:01

My next question touches back on what you are mentioned about the urban riots of the 1960s. And I wanted to draw a parallel to today. How do you see, how do you foresee the last summer's uprisings impacting and shaping gentrification and urban development's at large?

BS 25:19

Yeah.

BS 25:21

You know, I've been thinking about that a lot lately, and, and hopeful that there is some change. However, I've also written about ways that cities in particular, and city leaders, as well, as you know, national figures and state leaders are still leveraging these Black aesthetics to show they're I guess, that they're allies, or that they're, or if it's the case of African American leaders to show that they are down for the cause. The problem, of course, is that the rhetoric doesn't match the practice. And so they're saying a lot just in terms of Black Lives mattering, which ends up really being, you know, pretty low bar. Like to say that, I mean, I think it's important, absolutely that especially because Black Lives Matter has been really central and calling attention to various forms of state violence. However, it's really basic to say Black Lives Matter, it's like, or that Black Lives should matter. So beyond that, the expectation is that those who are in power really should be taking extra steps to demonstrate how Black lives matter and not just say that Black lives matter. And so I have used the example of Washington DC, and I've written about DC's mayor, mayor Bowser and ways that, you know, certainly she was the first to put a Black lives matter street mural..

MN 27:00

I was just about to mention, about that's like that. Basically, what you were saying about Blackness being aestheticized and Black people, Black movements being erased,

BS 27:09

That's right.

MN 27:10

At the same time.

BS 27:12

And, both literally and figuratively. So in this case, where she incurred, like there's, you know, she essentially got people to paint Black Lives Matter on the street. And this was in contestation with the former president, but then activists added defund the police after it, and lo and behold, that was erased, right. And so in this way, so, so not only was that portion of the updated mural, erased, but also there, she put in a request to increase the city's police budget by $45 million.

MN 27:46

Wow.

BS 27:47

And so, if you actually pay attention to what people want and need, or you consider the conditions under which Black people are leaving DC at ridiculous rates, then you address those problems, rather than, you know, hanging on to particular slogans. And so I think there is real potential in terms of the visibility of the protests and recognition in some ways, but I just don't think that's necessarily enough. So they, I do think that there's been important movement as it relates to the defund movement and in thinking about abolition seriously, where it's not just kind of like this radical rhetoric that people cast aside. But instead, people are now starting to figure out ways to do it. So I'm seeing this here, my hometown, Oakland, where the Oakland Unified School District was able to get rid of the police department that was essentially, you know, operating in their schools. And so that's a huge step um..

MN 28:45

It is.

BS 28:46

To, right. If even if it's incremental in one location, it's certainly with, with Oakland having such a fractured and horrible history and relationship to specifically the Oakland Police Department. And it's a really wonderful thing to experience. But it also shows the potential that it can be small steps, but they really have a lasting impact. So I'm hopeful about these, these uprisings. But I'm concerned, that once I saw like all these corporations start blacking out their things on social media and again, saying Black Lives Matter, or going to wealthy neighborhoods and seeing the Black Lives Matter signs when they know they don't have any Black neighbors. Like I, that doesn't do anything for me. And the ones that really get me are the ones they have their kids paint and stuff. And so it's just wild. And I'd love to see some traction instead of kind of these aesthetic, these gestures. basically.

MN 29:41

Facts, we need to take BLM from Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation Movements.

BS 29:45

Yes!

MN 29:51

My next question has to do with, I guess, resistance. So how can Black people, poor people, working class, and immigrant people resist the forces of gentrification in their own, like local contexts? Do you have any pointers or suggestions?

BS 30:09

Well, you know, I think part of it, you know, I've been talking to my students a lot about this and, and some of my colleagues, that oftentimes we rush to solutions before we have a good grasp of the problem or at least the conditions that we're living in. And so lately, I think there's been a ton of people who want to push through legislation or, you know, support certain policies that we think are going to make a difference. But I don't actually think we've really reckoned with how class matters significantly, as it relates specifically to Black people. But then also ways that certain folks are shielded from against state violence and other forms of violence that occur on a daily basis, and that are also structural. And so I think we need to account for that. And not to say, I'm not one who says, oh, race is more I mean, on class is more important than race, or I'm not actually making that claim. But I do want us to reckon with the ways that class has this fundamental impact on how we not only see ourselves, but we'll be able to come up with solutions.

BS: 31:16

As I've been reading, actually lately, newsletters from the 1960s in Oakland, and one in particular, is focused on West Oakland, which was the Blackest region of Oakland, and especially during the war, the First and Second World War. It became a Black space and essentially, was segregated as such. And so in reading about West Oakland, and understanding activists who are in West Oakland, they were really fed up with the Black middle class, because they were saying you all aren't living this life. We don't have running water, we don't have, you know, adequate, we have terrible relationships with the cops. We don't have, you know, adequate spaces for our children to play, we live in overcrowded and, neighborhoods and blocks. And so, to not, and at the same time, it was the Black middle class who were instrumental in bringing the model cities programs and other urban redevelop, urban redevelopment renewal programs that essentially negatively impacted the Black poor. So if we're going to move forward, I think it's really important, again, that we reckon with that, and decide that we're going to essentially elevate and put poverty, and think about homelessness and the crises that occur because of those, and how that feeds into the criminal justice system, how that feeds into incarceration, how that feeds into prisonized landscapes before we start doing this, you know, wide scale, you know, we need policies that can help. Just basically get Juneteenth as a holiday or policies that, you know, instituted affirmative action alone or policies that, you know, try to reform police departments when we know they can't be reformed, and that they're still going to target the Black poor.

BS: 33:06

So I think it's important for us to really kind of understand the conditions first, before we can actually leverage important policies or answers to the, to the questions.

MN 33:17

What is the practice of placemaking? And how can Black people as well as poor immigrant and working class people use placemaking to reclaim urban settings?

BS 33:27

Yeah, so I'm, in the book, I'm critical of placemaking but a certain kind. I'm critical of like, the urban planning, creative placemaking strategies, which are supposed to be used to make people feel, feel more connected to their neighborhoods, or feel like they have more power in determining how they live and where they live, right. So what ends up happening is, you know, if the neighborhood that, if the land value has gone up, and the price of homes has gone up, and you know, people are being evicted, because they can't pay the rent that's just been, you know, elevated. Then all you're getting are upper middle class folks determining how the place should look. So the placemaking is made for people that look like them or have the same amount of money as them. And so it doesn't end up dismantling anything, it doesn't end up helping anyone who, who was there previously, or who might have issues as it relates to mobility in that space. And so I do think, though, there are forms of placemaking that disrupt that. That it's not just about landscape, in terms of like, like landscape architecture, it's not about making sure there's pretty flowers everywhere, or making sure there's space for farmers market. But instead, it's creating an opportunity, honestly, as I see it for Black people to just be and be in place.

BS 34:54

And so I'm really supportive of just that basic notion of Black folks just being able to hang out like, and not have it be called loitering. Where Black folks can or just hang in or just be out, right?

MN 35:08

Reclaim the corner...

BS 35:09

Right? Seriously! And so in this way where you're not presumed, where you're not criminalized or you're not presumed to be this violent figure or that your drug dealers or something like that. I, I've written about and also kind of teach my students about kind of sightlines right, and ways that in parks, they will plant trees in certain neighborhoods so that there are sightlines, so you can see if there's any criminal activity taking place, right. And so to think that you are shaping the environment, you're planting trees to make sure there aren't bad apples out there selling drugs and doing all kinds of nefarious things. It's kind of ridiculous. But they're able to use it as a way to say, well, we're beautifying this space. Oh, but yes, we do want to make sure it's safe. So, I, the placemaking component, I think it needs to be more basic than that. It is just, yes, reclaim the corner, just being able to hang out and really establish place by just being there. That is literally the basic thing that I want. I don't need it to be, you know, stone this and like a waterfall and all the other ways that I think creative placemaking kind of calls on or, you know, happy colors and stuff like that.

MN 36:22

Yeah. No, that's so crucial. We want to reclaim the corner and hang out on the block.

BS 36:28

Right, reclaim the block,

MN 36:29

How have the work of Black geographers such as Catherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods influenced your analysis? And how have you used the Black geographic lens in your book?

BS 36:39

Well, greatly. So, you know, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, part of this project started off as my dissertation. And you know, I, my PhD is in sociology. And so I was really trying to understand neoliberalism and Blackness. And I was looking at it, as it related to spaces and bodies. And so the body component was looking at high fashion imagery. But in terms of spaces, I was looking at gentrification, specifically in Washington, DC. So that was kind of the nexus of the project, the book project. So once I started writing the book and adding on to, to make a full book, that was when I dipped into geography, and really discovered the work of both Clyde Woods and, and Catherine McKittrick, and to be honest with you, it blew my mind. I didn't know I could think like that. I didn't know how much I was dancing around these spatial questions but couldn't find a way in through sociology.

BS: 37:48

So certainly, there's been a spatial turn in a variety of disciplines history, you know, even in English and other areas. But as it relates to geography, there was a different relationship that geographers and specifically Black geographers have to understanding various landscapes. And so why that mattered to me was, I could explicate what I saw, right. And so, when I know but I see Black people, but I feel differently in a particular space. It was, it was Catherine McKittrick talking about Black geographies that really helped me, specifically in demonic ground, that helped me articulate kind of what I was seeing and how to describe it. And so, their volume, their edited volume, especially the their introduction that they wrote together, was really again, what blew my mind, is they're talking about on Hurricane Katrina, and they were talking about elements of the unknown. So, Black geographies generally, I mean, I think people are still talking about it as if it's new. But I think what's been wonderful about Black geographic imaginaries is that we can look to the past and see where this work was already being done. It just may not have been named as such. And so, as I think about Black geographies with, with my students a lot, especially my grad students, I asked them to not necessarily see Black geographies as disciplinary, like as a discipline, but this, as a metric, or as a method through which we understand various, not only circumstances but disciplines. So what if you took Black geographies to I mean, we're seeing this in Black Studies. But what if you took it to anthropology? What if you took it to, you know, the classics, philosophy? What could Black geographies do to an analysis within those disciplinary boundaries? And I think it really could illuminate how important the spatial context is, and understanding spatial reproduction and understanding various practices that have so much to do with racialization but specifically, our concern of Blackness. So I still, you know, it's hard to pinpoint all the time. What is Black geographies? I think a lot of people struggle with, with coming up with a definition.

MN: 40:09

So do I.

BS: 40:10

Right? Yeah. I mean, I mean, I still kind of go back and forth in terms of how I'm not only thinking about it, but I'm certainly care about how I'm thinking with it, right, where it's always with me in terms of how I'm looking at different cities, or even, you know, rural contexts or understanding still urban sprawl. You know, even looking historically, if I still, you know, look at, use a Black geographic lens to think about, you know, suburbanization or economic restructuring in various ways. It's important to me, I'm still in my teaching, and it's still in my writing that's going on currently.

MN 40:46

My last question is do you have any books, or readings that you would suggest for our listeners?

BS 40: 53

So, you've already, I mean as I'm looking at my bookshelf. So, I already mentioned Catherine McKittrick in Demonic Grounds, but then also Clyde Woods Developed Arrested. If people, you know, I think, I’m also a fan of Saidiya Hartman in Lose Your Mother. But my favorite is Scenes of Subjection. I would also say Savannah Shange’s Progressive Dystopia. I will also, I mean, there’s so many. You already probably, Simone Brown’s book I’m sure you’ve mentioned before. Ruth Gilmore’s Golden Gulag, like there’s, you know there’s so many, I’m like, you see I’m looking. I’m a big Bell Hooks fan too so Black Looks. I think that I mean Bell Hooks is not a geographer, but I think she really is a geographer. Yeah, that’s a good start, right?

1919 6/3/21 1919 6/3/21

Spatializing Blackness With Dr Rashad Shabazz

In the first episode of our Black Geographies podcast series, Dr Rashad Shabazz discusses 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.

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.