The Invention of the 'Underclass'. Loic Wacquant
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betters which, together with congestion, was believed to be the main source of their moral condition.35
“The peril of this republic”
“The vices of cities have been the undoing of past empires and civilizations. It has been at the point where the urban population outnumbers the rural people that wrecked republics have gone down . . . The peril of this republic likewise is now clearly seen to be in her cities. There is no greater menace to democratic institutions that the great segment of an element which gathers its ideas of patriotism and citizenship from the low grogshop.”
Anti-Saloon League, Yearbook, 1914.
Importantly, urban reform was henceforth predicated on scientific knowledge and technical expertise. It drew on statistics and sociological inquiry to characterize the negative features of the city environment in need of remediation. Early American sociology arose to satisfy this interest in studying problem populations so as to better manage them.36 The shift from “moral purity” to “social hygiene” marked the secularization and professionalization of sociomoral control in the metropolis. It fostered the birth of city planning as the profession devoted to creating the new environment fit to nourish moral unity and civic pride, and thereby recreate in the metropolis the imagined social and cultural cohesion of the village. For a brief moment in American history, the city appeared capable of producing the remedies to its own ills and elevating the social standards of the teeming masses.
This urban optimism did not extend to the other territory of worry and mystery that mushroomed at the core of the metropolis alongside the European immigrant slums between 1910 and 1930: “the Black Belt and its offshoots [which] were slums, [but] they were something more: ghettos, where confinement was complete and based on color and not class.”37 The material and moral conditions of the coalescing ghetto were appalling, with rates of overcrowding, morbidity, mortality, illegitimacy, and delinquency topping the city charts, but these would have to be tackled by separate settlement houses and service agencies run by middle-class colored women. For the goal of white middle-class reformers, when it came to Bronzeville, prioritized containment over improvement.38 The means to implement rigid ethnoracial enclosure included restrictive covenants, racial steering by real estate agents, pressure by white property-owners associations to prevent the renting or selling of houses to Negros, assaults by white “athletic clubs” on the street and the bombing of African-American homes, climaxing with periodic pogroms, such as the race riots of the “Red Summer” of 1919, when whites attacked the colored districts in three dozen cities to enforce their boundaries.39
Despite modest achievements in reforming schools and courts, work conditions, sanitation and food safety, housing and city administration, the politicians and professionals of the Progressive era failed to convince the citizenry that cities were wholesome places and municipal government a force for public good. During the interwar years, the “decentralists,” such as Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ralph Borsodi, gained the upper hand in advocating for the dispersal of population and industry as the solution to the problems of congestion, poverty, and social mixing in crowded city centers, as well as the means to reign in an intrusive government.40 The New Deal drew on the ideas of the decentralists and trained its transformative power on rural regions and small-town society viewed as a wholesome setting in which to ground civic virtues. Thus, Roosevelt, who was “a child of the country,” was especially enthused by the Civilian Conservation Corps because “it offered urban men that chance not just for a job but also for the restorative effects of being in the country, close to the earth.”41 The Resettlement Administration was similarly tasked with the rehabilitation of rural America and the planning of greenbelt towns bringing to reality Ebenezer Howard’s blueprint of the Garden City, a self-sufficient settlement built in open countryside far from the slums and the smoke of the metropolis.42
Immediately after World War II, unabated anti-urbanism dominated city and regional planning as well as federal policy. The massive public subsidy of suburban development provided homes and transportation for the millions of whites fleeing city centers as black migrants from the South moved in. Top-down schemes of “slum clearance” and “urban renewal” pursuant to the Housing Act of 1949 failed to staunch the exodus of middle-class households and factories, even as they tore through the fabric of black neighborhoods declared “blighted” to try and salvage white ones, boost property values, and rebuild the tax base.43
Then, in the 1960s, a double racial wave hit the American metropolis full force and gave a new color to anti-urbanism: a wave of black migrants streaming in from the South as part of the second Great Black Migration and a wave of riots fueled by the “urbanization” of the Civil Rights Movement and the refusal of African Americans to stay further confined inside the perimeter of the crumbling ghetto. This double wave redirected white middle-class Angst over the metropolis from the multiethnic “wicked city” to the black “inner city,” and it planted the seeds of the loathsome imagery of the “underclass” that would blossom over the ensuing two decades.
The mass exodus of whites to the suburbs and the surging influx of blacks from the South caused alarm at the threat this posed to the established ethnoracial order. Thus, between 1950 and 1960, 678,000 whites moved out of Chicago while 153,000 African Americans moved in; based on this trend blacks could be expected to hold a numerical majority by 2000, not just in the Windy City, but in eight of the country’s ten largest cities, thus establishing “Negro control” over urban America. And there was no stopping this demographic tumble so long as the presence of blacks in the metropolis was “associated in white minds with crime, drug addiction, juvenile delinquency and slums.”44
Alarm turned into outright panic as a wave of racial clashes swept through the country, igniting cities from coast to coast. In the decade from 1963 to 1972, the United States recorded over 750 black riots, affecting more than 525 cities, including nearly every city with an African-American population exceeding 50,000. What the historian Peter Levy calls The Great Uprising marked an unprecedented historical rupture in the arc of caste domination,45 and it inflicted unspeakable symbolic trauma upon the white citizenry of the country. It frontally attacked their sense of ethnoracial preeminence and it activated dormant representations of the “bad nigger” descended from the days of chattel slavery and Jim Crow subjugation – unruly, fierce, violent, the Negro who does not know and keep his “place.” Thus, after 1966, noted a liberal political scientist who worked for presidents Kennedy and Johnson, “the image of the Negro was no longer that of the praying, long-suffering nonviolent victim of southern sheriffs; it was a defiant young hoodlum shouting ‘black power’ and hurling ‘Molotov cocktails’ in an urban slum.”46 Replace violent political threat with an equally violent but nihilistic criminal menace on the streets and you get a first approximation of the “underclass.” Thence the “Urban Crisis” and the “Negro Question” would be indissolubly entwined.
The sprouting of Black Power activists in cities across the country inspired sheer racial terror. With their militant rhetoric of black separatism, strident hostility toward “whitey” and “pigs,” invocations of Marxist revolution and colonial subjugation, and calls for armed struggle “against Ameri-KKK-a,” they seemed to corroborate the worst anxieties about the city as crucible of social violence and hellish dissolution. For many of its participants, especially young black men on the borders of the world of work, the rebellion produced a vivid, if fleeting, collective sentiment of agency, racial pride and unity.47 In the eyes of whites, the meshing of black power slogans and street riots portended a racial apocalypse; for government officials, it threatened a civic cataclysm unseen since the Civil War.
The “spiral to urban apartheid”
“If the Negro population as a whole developed an even stronger feeling of being ‘penned in’ and discriminated against, many of its members might come to support not only riots, but the rebellion now being preached by only a handful. If large-scale violence resulted, white retaliation could follow.